2 great commandments

A story was told that In 1945, Rabbi Eliezer Silver was sent to Europe to help reclaim Jewish children who had been hidden during the Holocaust with non-Jewish families. How was he able to distinguish the Jewish children from the rest? He would go to gatherings of children and loudly proclaim Shema Yisrael Adonai Eleheno, Adonai Elhat: 

 "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

Then he would look at the faces of the children for those with tears in their eyes – those children whose distant memory of being Jewish was their mothers putting them to bed each night and saying the Shema with them.

Shema Yisrael – "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" – is perhaps the most famous of all Jewish prayers.  

That prayer is echoed in the Gospel of Mark from the mouth of The Lord when he was asked what are the two greatest commandments.  Hear O Israel, The Lord our God, The Lord is one.  You shall love The Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  

But for a Jewish person who prays the Shema twice daily, it would be most difficult to reconcile the Monotheist belief, the belief in one God with the belief in the mystery of the Trinity.  St Paul was a good example of that when he first persecuted Christians.  That is before he met the risen Christ on the way to Damascus.

In 1 Corinthians 8:6, Paul rewords Shema: "But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him."  It is not that we come to know God through reasons but it is God's revelation, God's self disclosure in the fullness of time as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  

St Anthony of Padua, who is a Franciscan and Doctor of the Church in the 13th century wrote a good reflection upon this passage.  

He writes: and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. "All". You may not keep any part of yourself for yourself. God desires and offering of the whole of yourself. He wholly bought you with all of himself, but he alone may possess you, the whole of you. Therefore you will love the Lord with all your heart. Don't, like Ananias and Sapphira, keep part of yourself for yourself, for then you will perish as they did. Acts 5

Love, wholly, is not in parts. Because God has no parts but exist wholly in every part. God wants no share in your being who is wholly in his own being. If you keep back a part of yourself, then you belong to yourself, and not to God. Do you want to possess everything? Give him what you are, and he will give you what he is. You will have nothing more of yourself, but you will have all of him together with all of yourself.

You shall love The Lord your God with all your heart.  Amen.