The Greatest Commandment

Some time ago, in conversation with a friend, she claimed that in order to have the capacity to love others well one must know one’s self. I argued the opposite. One couldn’t possibly love the self fully without knowing others. Knowing the other makes clear the boundaries that exist, which force us to identify what we are not, thereby imparting what makes us tick. My intent here is not to prove my friend wrong: while our emphases are considerably different we both understand knowing and loving happen in relationships. In Mark 12:30 Jesus summed up God’s commandments as such. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” And “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving self, loving neighbor, comes by way of loving God. The ten commandments are therefore gracious. They seemingly restrict our being by setting boundaries, but these boundaries help us to know what we are (or what we are not) while simultaneously giving us insight into loving and knowing God, self, and others. The law does not rob us of particularity, it protects and honors what makes us particular and offers us a way to care for others.

Jonathan Magonet in A Rabbi Reads the Bible understands God’s commandments in terms of relationships. In Hebrew to have “no other gods before me” uses language similar to an intimate marriage contract. (p. 201) Magonet points out the biblical and Rabbinic terminology for the commandments is the Ten Words. Instead of a list of prohibitions it carries a more relational sense—“you could not possibly wish to do any of these things” because personal relationship promotes “internal, volunteering policing.” (p. 194) When do we break one of the ten commandments? When we are not in true community. We fall into sin when knowledge of God and others becomes an extension of ourselves.

I’ll be married 25 years this April. The roughest points in our marriage have been when my husband becomes an extension of my own desires, fears, and insecurities. Sometimes I can’t hear, believe, or accept his love for me. I also won’t ask him for help (after all I created him in my image therefore he already knows what needs to be done). I take away his personhood by not honoring the choice he made to enter a contract that entailed loving and caring for me. I violate the community of our marriage when I don’t allow myself to depend on or grow through him.

In the same way many artists understand their work as extensions of themselves. Christian artists forget they have entered into a relational contract with God. God in turn set us in community. Our work does not necessarily comes from us or belong to us—they are not solely extensions of who we are but also of the relationships and communities we come from. In his article, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot goes so far as to state that poetry “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” For Elliot the artist forgoes individuality, “surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.”

Our work grows out of community. Not only does the community feed and strengthen our creative disciplines, but ultimately our work is a gift stemming from our relationship with God. Through God’s own being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we are given the ability to live and create in community. Our work is to be a regenerative force that continually bears fruit, not just in us, but also in those around us. This is why when I visit a friend’s studio I am eager to get back home and paint. My friend’s work becomes the best critique of my own, forcing me in new directions or helping incarnate my thoughts and ideas in a fuller sense.

While it is true that God and his commandments help “determine the stability of society,” (Magonet, p. 196) they point to something beyond the ethical. Within the commandments there is disclosure not only of God and his desires but also of clues towards humanity’s wholeness. Our God is a relational God and has made us to be relational beings. Like any creative endeavor relationship building is difficult. We must continually die to self for God to reinforce our particularity—our truer sense of being and our place in community. When we create we must remember how valuable our endeavors are, for they come through, in, and for community. Let us then love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Amen.
-Maria