“Lord, what is the greatest commandment?” comes the question. What is the bottom line in following God? How are we to search for the meaning of love, how are we to put it together? “Thou shall LOVE the Lord your God with all your soul, mind and heart and thou shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

It is not an original response. Jesus was not the first to connect Deuteronomy and Leviticus, other teachers of the law had done so. What is new is that Jesus presents them as dependent on each other. According to Jesus they are inseparable one from the other. Like my GOOGLE search, Jesus kept adding to his search about love. Love is the starting point; add God, add neighbor, add self – and now you have the bottom line for following God.
But, unlike a web search, at this point Jesus’ search begins not to narrow but to widen. Once those three essential components are in place, he adds one more twist to the search. He widens the definition of neighbor. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44). When neighbor means the people next door and my own family and all the people with whom I am acquainted, that’s not too difficult to cope with.
But Christ’s definition of neighbor includes, as we have seen, our enemies, our opponents, and our rivals. This is much more difficult.

Then Christ’s definition extends even wider: he includes those we have not met and do not know. He includes people at the furthest corner of the globe, people from our inner cities, people whose culture and way of life are quite alien to us. He includes the prisoner, the drug addict, the homosexual, the homeless, the criminal, the disabled, and the mentally ill. Among our neighbors are the unborn, the elderly in care homes and those with severe learning difficulties. He includes those who are very hard to love.

It’s too hard, Lord, to have all that included in what we must do to obey God. Can’t we limit the search? Can’t love just be about warm feelings with God? “No”, comes the answer.

Well, Lord, I take care of the poor, I reach out to the needy, but I don’t have much time for you, and I’m not sure even if you exist. Can’t I just love people without bothering about the pleasing of you part? “Wrong answer, please try again”.

Lord, I’ve got the praying down and the spending time in church down. And I’ve gotten the helping of the poor people down as well. But I abuse my body with drugs and alcohol, disregard the gift of sexuality, don’t get enough sleep and am always on the go. Doesn’t that count? “No, you need all three…”

This week, I invite you to keep track of the times that you honor all three +’s of Jesus’ search for love. Three columns: God, Neighbor, Self. Every time you do something in one of the categories, put an “X” there. And at the end of the week, check it out? How is the balance? Have you kept all three in mind?

Let me speak a final tale that sums it up for me. The story is told of a young sister in Mother Theresa's order. She was gently washing the gangrenous leg of a man dying of AIDS. A woman passing by said, "I wouldn't do that for all the money in the world." The nun replied good-naturedly, "Neither would I."