Collect taken from Twenty-Fifth Week of Ordinary Time.
Collect: O God, who founded all the commands of your sacred Law upon love of you and of our neighbor, grant that, by keeping your precepts, we may merit to attain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…
“O God, who founded all the commands of your sacred Law upon love of you and of our neighbor,”
-Though it my be tempting to think that Love of God and neighbor came after the Ten Commandments because of the order they appear in Scripture, the reality is that Love has always been primary.
“grant that, by keeping your precepts, we may merit to attain eternal life.”
– Having remembered that Love is the foundation, we ask for the grace to keep God’s law, which means we are asking for the ability to Love. The reward of that Love is eternal life.
Questions & Advice: Do you see God’s law as something negative that restricts your freedom? Do you keep these two commands in the proper order?
Read about the commandments and love in the Catechism (2052-55). Spend some of your daily prayer time reflecting on what is really a priority in your life. A common problem today is the tendency to ignore the first commandment and pretend to fulfill the second. Without knowing and loving God, we tend to distort what it means to love our neighbor. Likewise, to claim we love God while failing to love our neighbor reveals a shallow and illusory kind of love. Pray with Mark’s account of this commandment and beg the grace to let it really sink in.
