[AI translation] Let me say in advance that I want to talk only about the last two words of the Bible verse that I have taken as my starting point. This is "the greatest is love". Mother's Day is celebrated today in our country all over the country. There is a lot of talk about motherly love everywhere today. Everyone's heart is full of precious memories, experiences from the past and present, everyone can tell something touching and beautiful about how they experienced the warmth of their mother's love in their life... Let me tell you one such story that I read somewhere.One morning a little boy put a small piece of paper next to his mother's plate. His mother could hardly believe her eyes when she read on it: "Mama owes me 1 cent for running errands, 1.50 cent for good behaviour, 2 cents for the last arithmetic five, 2 cents for other errands, total: 6.50 cents." His mother smiled but said nothing, and at lunch she put the bill with the 6.50 next to the boy's plate. The little boy's eyes lit up. But there was another bill, which read. A tear welled up in the little boy's eyes, he hugged his mother, put his little hand with the 6.50 in his mother's and said, "Take this money back mama, let me love you and let me do everything for you for free." Yes, this is how love should be somehow. And it would be good if love, which is always demanding, would be silent and ashamed sometimes before this love, which is always giving, giving, and giving everything - for free!
Love is the greatest! Let me put it this way: the greatest thing that a man can give to another man, whether parent to child, child to parent, or anyone else: love! Love is the lifeblood of healthy life. Just as anger and hatred are real killers, love is real life! It has even been tested on animals. Such an experiment was done on a pair of little goat twins. One of the goats went out with the mother goat in the field and the other was kept in a pen, given everything it needed and only let out when it was time for the mother goat to feed it. One goat grew beautifully, healthy, happy and joyful, while the other was stunted, stunted and eventually died. She was examined: no organic lesions could be found. The experiment was repeated with two other small goats. Again, the result was the same. The goat that was kept in the pen died again, even though it had received all the vitamins, just like the other one. It was not sick, but it died.
Now they are making an interesting film in the Netherlands. It is about a child of rich parents. The little boy gets a model upbringing. He dresses impeccably, gets all his vitamins A to D and vaccines as prescribed by his doctor. He has all the toys he could ever want. At home, everything is on a precise schedule. The parents are absolutely correct people, they are only home a little. One afternoon, when the child comes home from school, he finds a little note on the table: your snack is on the kitchen table, as usual. He eats it, picks it up, his toys. After a little while, he falls asleep among all the toys. He dreams of an umbrella. When his parents come home, you wake up from your dream and say: oh, what do they think of this mess on the floor?! He sneaks out into the hall, opens the door, runs out through it, wanders the streets, sees an umbrella in a shop window, goes in, steals it at a careless moment and walks happily with the umbrella. Then the case goes to the police. He is a well looked after child and yet he feels fatally unlucky.
Why did that one goat die? Because he didn't get a mother's love! Why did that well-behaved child steal the umbrella? Because he was given everything but love! Love is the number one vitamin that human nature cannot do without. According to experts, the work of criminal judges would be reduced by about one fifth if all people were given real love. Most criminals lack the most important life-giving force in their lives: love. No love! And then, for all the other things he has received - a good education, a degree, power, love - he has been deprived of the greatest of all. Because "the greatest is love"!
If this is true, that the greatest thing one man can give to another is love, then it follows that the greatest thing one man can do to another is not to give love. For we, good and decent people, commit the greatest and greatest sin by failing to love one another. This is the most painful accusation against us in the parable of the Good Samaritan. That priest and Levite did not commit any active evil against their neighbour when they hurried on, obviously to church, to worship. They just failed to love their neighbour as well as they did not and that is the horror! And what we daily fail to do in this way at home among family, or among colleagues, or here in the church, is downright horrible. It is this neglect that makes the world cold, that makes married life miserable, that makes parents and children estranged, that makes life a miserable and difficult place. And yet, in fact, no active evil has yet been done, only the greatest of all has been missing: love.
If the priest or the Levite had said, "I have not hurt him, I have not laid a finger on him...", Jesus might have said to him, "That is the problem! That is your sin, that is your negative attitude. It is precisely this "no" that would have been the cause of the death of a man who had been unfortunate, if someone had not had mercy on him. Yes, there is not only a rude form of inhumanity, but also a decent form. Not only were the robbers in the parable inhuman who touched their fellow man, but so were the priest and the Levite who did not lay a finger on him. Because our highest human dignity is to love the other person. A negative person who does not hate anyone, but who does not love anyone because he is indifferent to others: an inhuman person! A person can not only beat another person to death, but also silence him, neglect him, let him freeze in his own abandonment, sadness, and trouble. Love is so "greatest" that without it, life is not life, the world becomes hell, because hell is nothing but a form of existence without love, an existence that is completely devoid of love.
So the greatest is love! But not just any love! Because even this great word: love, has been devalued. It is used for so many things that one is almost confused: what is love? Because it is obviously one thing to say that I love my cream puff, or I love my mother, or I love my enemy. There are so many different feelings in human beings, all expressed with this word: love. Under this umbrella term we have sexuality, parental love, friendship, love of neighbour, collegiality, love of culture, love of science, love of God... What does it mean to be the greatest love? I think it refers to the deepest basis of everything we call love, the deepest root of all so-called love. So the deepest root of parental love, and of spousal love, and of friendship, and of love for God.
The problem is that we still only understand the word love in Greek philosophical terms. For Plato, the essence of love is admiration and desire. So, for example, a young man admires the beauty of a girl and desires her, and so he loves her. So, of course, one cannot love, for example, an enemy. But Jesus goes deeper to the root of love. For him, love is not a desire and admiration, but a willingness to serve and sacrifice. The root of all love, then, goes much deeper than the ebb and flow of our emotional life or our moods, and that root is a willingness to serve and sacrifice! This is why, with Jesus, love can become a commandment: love your neighbour... and even your enemy! This does not mean that we should admire our enemy, or delight in him like our own little child, or long for him like lovers for one another, but that we should be ready to serve and sacrifice even for our enemy.
This is vitamin number one. This love is the greatest! It is the foundation, the root of all that we use the word love to denote: parental love, friendship, also love, also collegiality, also love for God. Without love, the world becomes unbearable, even if one is sailing in an ocean of love. But if we know ourselves even a little, we must realise that it is precisely this love, this vitamin, that we are completely lacking. Because it is not the 'cheap' love that we produce as love. We have reduced love to the fact that I like it, I find it nice. We have reduced the concept of neighbour to those we know to be our friends, our soul mates, our like-minded brethren. We love someone if we consider him worthy of our love or if he pays us back in return. That is cheap love! It costs nothing. No sacrifice, no self-denial. That's the only kind of love we can afford.
The other one, that "expensive" love, and what Jesus exhorts us to do, is not an earthly product, it does not grow here. That vitamin number one has to be imported from another world, that love is an import on this earth. Because that is the love of God! But the consolation is that this importation has already taken place. For when Mary and Joseph laid the child in the manger, it was love that was made flesh there. Jesus' whole life was one of great service and sacrifice. He embodied the very love that is all service and sacrifice for the unworthy, for sinners, for enemies. Every drop of blood that dripped there on the cross into the dust of Calvary was filled with the infinite weight of that love. Jesus imported into the world the greatest, the most important thing without which one cannot live, without which one can only freeze and perish: divine LOVE!
If anyone can now truly rejoice in the fact that God loved him in Jesus even to the death of the cross - in spite of his unworthiness to be loved - so whoever lets God's love in, will no longer find it strange and impossible to hear Jesus' command: "Love even your enemies!" and "Love one another as I have loved you." He who lives by this "precious" love of God will learn to love "dearly" himself! He rejoices when he can give to others something of that infinite precious love which he himself has received in such abundance!
Come, then, let us pray:
O love, shower your warmth upon us,
Let us taste your sweetness;
Let us all love with all our hearts,
Let us live in unity and peace.
Have mercy.
(Canto 234, verse 3)
Amen
Date: 10 May 1959.
Lesson
Lk 10,25-37