THE LOVE TRIANGLE

Reflections on the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time: Deuteronomy 6:2-6, Hebrews 7:23-28, Mark 12:28b-34

Love is perhaps the most overused and abused word today. Driven by the cultural currents of narcissism (excessive self-love), commercialisation, and hedonism (excessive pursuit of pleasure), we risk diluting the idea of love to mean anything from infatuation and nostalgia to possessiveness and indulgence. To resist this cultural abuse of love, the liturgy of the day provides a counter-cultural perspective on the meaning of love. Jesus summarises the entirety of the commandments using the Ancient Testament’s two popular verses on love: “You shall love the Lord your God” (first reading: Deuteronomy 6:5) and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). This succinct summary points out the three vertices of the love triangle.

1. Loving oneself:

Let’s begin with the vertex we easily and usually forget. The love commandment involves love for oneself. Just like charity, love too begins at home. One who does not love him/herself cannot love his/her neighbour. Yes, Christian love is not narcissism or egocentrism. Neither is it self-loathing or low self-esteem. Swiss theologian and Cardinal Charles Journet opines that loving oneself means ‘standing in God’s light’ to realise that if I love God, I also love what he loves including myself. To love oneself is to shed layers of guilt, inadequacy, self-depreciation, and lack of self-worth and look at oneself through God’s eyes.

Loving oneself means accepting to be loved with our frailties and strengths, our accomplishments and failures, our contradictions and consistencies, our light and shadow selves. Because Abba/Appa (Rom 8:15) loves us, we are capable of love. As John writes, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The experience of ‘being loved and accepted as we are’ enables us to love as we ought to, inspires us to accept others as they are, and enter into the dynamism of the love triangle. God’s love inspires us not to be satisfied with mediocrity but to embrace the path of conversion to grow in holiness and truth.

2. Loving God: 

The first reading evokes the Shema prayer, which is central to the identity and religiosity of Judaism. It is the Jewish equivalent of our creed or profession of faith and is recited twice a day (dawn and bedtime). The significance of this prayer is best realised when viewed in its literary and historical context. God addresses the Shema prayer to the Hebrews at the crossroads of two significant moments in Israel’s history. 1. Just after God hands over the Decalogue or the Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5) and 2. On the eve of their journey to the promised land (Deuteronomy 6:1 “You may put them into practice in the land where you are going to pass through to take possession of it”).

Between their reception of the Ten Commandments and their entry into the Promised Land, God reveals the core of their identity: that God is one and that he enters into a covenant of love with them. The love commandment therefore becomes a crucial point of not only God’s revelation but the revelation of Israel’s identity. Love constitutes and redefines our identity. Therefore, we are called to love God with all our heart (emotions and desires), soul (personhood and profoundness), mind (intelligence and understanding), and strength (devotion and perseverance).

3. Loving one’s neighbour:

Being loved and loving God cannot but lead us to love our neighbour. Loving oneself as God loves us frees us from self-obsession to realise the fundamental union that binds us with those created in God’s (and therefore also our own) “image and likeness”. It is this principle that becomes the foundation of the ‘Golden Rule’ (to do to others what we would have them do to us: Matthew 7:12) and the criteria of our witness (it is by our love for one another that we witness to our discipleship: John 13:35).

Thus, loving our neighbour becomes not only an automatic ‘outcome or effect’ of loving oneself and loving God but also the ‘condition and requirement’ for love. It is therefore that John categorically states, “Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars” (1 John 4:20). This triangular love is not automatic or easy. It involves a process founded on reconciliation, forgiveness, justice, solidarity, and mercy. Christian love is one and cannot therefore be divided. God’s love enables us to love ourselves and our neighbours as he loves us. May the three vertices of this love triangle help us resist reducing love into a commodity.