Them That Love Me: The Love Commanded at Sinai and Christ's If You Love Me
Old Testament: Deuteronomy 6:4-5
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole strength.
Old Testament, also: Exodus 20:6
And shewing mercy unto thousands to them that love me, and keep my commandments.
New Testament: Matthew 22:37-38; John 14:15, 21
Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. ... If you love me, keep my commandments. ... He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them; he it is that loveth me. And he that loveth me, shall be loved of my Father: and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.
The connection
Israel's confession begins with the one love Israel may never share. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole strength." Whole heart, whole soul, whole strength: a love that leaves nothing over. At Sinai God had already described His faithful in the same terms, "them that love me, and keep my commandments." Asked which commandment is greatest, Christ answers with the Shema, and calls it "the greatest and the first commandment." Nothing surprising there. Any teacher in Israel could have said it. Then, on the night before He dies, He says something no teacher in Israel could say. "If you love me, keep my commandments." And again: "He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them; he it is that loveth me." It is the sentence from Sinai, love and keep, but the "me" is now a man at a supper table, and the commandments are His own. Moses said, love the Lord. Christ says, love me, and promises that whoever does "shall be loved of my Father." So love for Christ is not a devotion added alongside the first commandment. Either it is the first commandment, or it is the one thing the first commandment forbids. There is no middle place for it, and the Gospel does not leave one. After the Resurrection He asks for it by name, of one man, three times, beside a charcoal fire, as Peter had denied Him three times beside a charcoal fire (John 18:18): "Simon, son of John, lovest thou me?" The whole-hearted love of the Shema, asked for face to face (John 21:15-17).
Moral sense
The Shema asks for the whole heart, and it is easy to hear that as a demand for a feeling. Christ defines it otherwise, twice in one breath: to love Him is to keep His commandments. It is what you do on the days the feeling is absent. And it is the love Peter was finally asked for, not on the night he swore he would die for Him, but on a beach after he had failed, when all he had left to say was: "Lord, thou knowest all things: thou knowest that I love thee."
Anagogical sense
"He that loveth me, shall be loved of my Father: and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him." The Shema begins "Hear, O Israel", addressed to a people who could only listen. The promise to those who love Christ ends in sight: He will show Himself. The face Moses was not permitted to see is the reward of loving the One who said, love Me.
Warrant
Interpretive, and the badge is chosen deliberately. There is an explicit citation in the entry: Christ quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 at Matthew 22:37 and calls it the greatest commandment. But that citation does not make the entry's claim. The claim, that the love the Shema reserves to the Lord is the love Christ asks for Himself, rests on John 14:15 and 21, which echo Exodus 20:6 and Deuteronomy 5:10 without citing them. The echo is close in the Douay, "them that love me, and keep my commandments" against "If you love me, keep my commandments", and thinner in the Greek, where the verb for love and the pronoun carry across but the Septuagint's words for keeping and for commandments are not John's. No Father in the site's corpora was found joining John 14:15 to Exodus 20:6 or to the Shema; a search for one was made. The inference in the fourth paragraph, that love for Christ is either the first commandment or its breach, is my own. It has the same shape as the argument often drawn from Christ's claims to what belongs to God alone, and it is stated here as an argument, not attributed to anyone. The charcoal fire: John uses the word twice in the New Testament, at 18:18 where Peter denies Him and at 21:9 on the beach, which is why the threefold question is read against the threefold denial. That reading is common and is kept to one sentence.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2083.
The verses
Deuteronomy 6:4 · Deuteronomy 6:5 · Exodus 20:6 · Matthew 22:37 · Matthew 22:38 · John 14:15 · John 14:21
