“If you want to understand the Law of God you must start with love. Not only do we start with love, but everything must be accomplished through the truth of God’s love.
But it’s not just an internal love between you and God – that’s where it begins. But that internal love must also manifest externally. Yes, loving God is first, and yes, loving neighbor is second, but Jesus’ point is that you have to have both. In other words, as James explains in his letter, if your faith doesn’t operate, it’s worthless. The love of God is not love at all if it doesn’t result in action toward others. These two commands are inseparable.
Richard Feynman is famous for Feynman Diagrams. It’s way above my head, but on a simplistic level, instead of using pages of math to describe how subatomic particles behave, he figured out a simple, elegant way to draw the math on a diagram so you can see things like electrons, positrons, and photons moving through time, then you apply Feynman’s rules, and you’re able to work out complex calculations.
Jesus synthesizes all the Law by connecting your heart to God, then your heart and God’s heart to others and applying the rules of love. Even though life is full of deeply complex relationships and situations and problems and considerations, each one with its own issues to think through and work through, the bottom line is that we start with the basis of love for God and love for others.
Now here’s what’s remarkable: this was not some new formula. Jesus doesn’t suddenly invent this idea that day in the Temple. Answering the scribe, He quotes the shema. This was the Scriptural prayer that a faithful Jew would pray every single morning.“
