Daily DevotionalCultivate love and compassion each day this week.
January 27: The Greatest Commandment
- Scripture: John 15:12 –– This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
- Reflection: Jesus set the standard for love. Loving others, as well as love for self, becomes the reciprocal equation we are called to embody and enact.
- Spiritual Discipline: Perform an act of kindness or service for someone in your community this week.
- Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell: https://youtu.be/IC5PL0XImjw?si=80YXW_dYuEazKEWw
- I’ll Stand by You by The Pretenders: https://youtu.be/nobHZ3nOp38?si=FWM4x-bIp6IUPXxb
- Lean on Me by Bill Withers: https://youtu.be/fOZ-MySzAac?si=gNASzjLEUPlp8H_t
Perhaps we don’t want to hear this commandment because we can never live up to it through our own efforts. We’d like to whittle it down to a little commandment, like “Come to church on Sunday.” But who of us can say we have really loved yet? We’re all beginners. We’re all starting anew every day, and we’re failing anew every day. Loving as imperfect, egoic human beings keeps us in utter reliance upon the mercy, compassion, and grace of God. We can never fully succeed by ourselves.
It seems God gave us a commandment that we could not obey. Perhaps this is so we would have to depend upon the Holy Spirit. This is the greatness, the goodness, the wonder, the impossibility of the Gospel, that it asks of all of us something we—alone, apart, separate—cannot do! Only by living in love, in communion—God in us and we in God (see John 17:20-26)—do we find, every once in a while, a love flowing through us and toward us and from us that is bigger than our own. And we surely know it’s not “we” who are doing it!. — Richard Rohr