+ 25 October AD 2020 +

Self-Love a Pre-condition for Neighbor-Love! 
Reflection for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

One of the Latin expressions I learnt in the Seminary that has stuck with me is “nemo dat quod non habet,” which means, “you cannot give what you do not have!” This is true in so many ways, even within the arena of love. How can one possibly love others if he or she does not love himself or herself? Indeed, we can safely conclude that the measure of the love you have determines the measure of the love that you give. A dead battery cannot recharge another dead battery! Again, you can only love in the way you understand the reality of love. Put differently, the kind of love you express is the kind of love you know. This has huge implications for human interactions. In order to love others, we must first love ourselves. Again, our understanding of love shapes our way of loving. Those who have genuine understanding of love, are able to love genuinely, and those who have skewed understanding of love, are most likely to love in skewed ways. 

The word LOVE is one of the most uttered words in human history. It is a word that is constantly on the lips of the young as well as the old. Writers are daily spilling gallons of inks writing about love, musicians are singing about it, preachers are preaching about it, theologians are theologizing about it even as philosophers are philosophizing about it. Yet, the word Love remains one of the most misused word in human history. For the sake of love, people have been killed; for the sake of love, people have been deceived; for the sake of love people have cried not only tears but blood; for the sake of love hearts have not only been broken but shattered! Again, while the expression “I love you,” can be the sweetest sound on earth, that expression has come to mean a lot of things for different people. There are those for whom the expression “I love you” actually means, “I love your wallet.” There are those for whom the expression means “I would like to have carnal knowledge of you.” And there are others for whom the expression “I love you,” means, I want to be there for you, to sacrifice all for you, to bring you peace, to empower you, to enrich and uplift you and to share with you the joy and love that comes from knowing and loving God. 

I believe that the last understanding is what Jesus means when he speaks about the second commandment in today’s Gospel where he says: “you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.” Here, Jesus makes us the standard and measure of love: we can only love our neighbors to the extent that we love ourselves. However, Jesus is aware that we cannot always be the true measure of love, and so before his ascension, he upgraded the commandment “love your neighbor as you love yourself” to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). While in the first, we are the measure of the love we give to others, in the second, Jesus is the measure of the love we should give to others. Jesus loved us by scarifying everything for us including his life. Therefore, to love our neighbors we must be ready to sacrifice ourselves, our time, our talents, our resources, and in fact sometimes, our comfort for the person we love. St. Paul captures quite aptly the two dimensions of love – what love is, and what love is not: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Let us then go forth and love others as Jesus has loved us!

    Fr. Lazarus Onuh