A scribe once asked Jesus which commandment is the most important of all. And Jesus answered, “‘[Y]ou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’” But then he continued: “31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Jesus’ answer to the scribe seems to make clear that there is more to the virtue of charity than simply possessing love. Specifically, there is a hierarchy, a proper order to our loves. Augustine put it this way:
“[A just and good person] is also a person who has [rightly] ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more).”
Now, in some cases, knowing the proper order is pretty easy: We should love our friends more than we love our food; we should love our parents more than our pets…although that may be difficult sometimes; we should love our neighbor more than an athlete or a movie star we’ve never met; and we should love God more than we love money. Pretty much everybody agrees with all that.
But not everyone is a fan of the idea that we should love God even more than we love our neighbor. Some prefer to imagine that the virtue of charity can exist on the terms expressed by John Lennon: Just a “brotherhood of man” with “all the people sharing all the world…” It is the dream of communism. Thinking that loving God is unnecessary, if we’d just love our neighbors instead.
C.S. Lewis explains why that’s all wrong: “When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. Insofar as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”
Loving God first helps me love my neighbor the most.
Have a wonderful day.