This Sunday’s readings tell us to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, and strength (Dt. 6:5; Mk. 12:30). The Church has chosen an interesting psalm to shed light on these passages. It begins, “I love you, O Lord, my strength” (Ps. 18:2). The psalmist’s words are more than a nice metaphor—he is not simply calling God “my strength” in the way a man could conceivably use the phrase to describe his wife. There is something deeper going on here.
There is a heresy that has plagued the Church throughout her history in various forms, called Pelagianism. Pelagianism is the (false) doctrine that we earn our salvation, or that we add something to the grace God gives us, relying on our own strength to get us to heaven. The Church has always strongly insisted that everything we are able to do depends ultimately on God’s grace. We could not so much as exist without it, never mind do good! We are more dependent on God than a newborn infant is on their mother. We cannot love God without God first loving us and giving us the grace to turn to Him. We cooperate with God’s grace in the way that someone covered in mud might “cooperate” with a rainstorm to become clean, moving their arms or bending over so that the rain washes away all the mud. Without the rain or some other source of water, the person in this analogy could not do very much by trying to remove the mud with their hands—they would merely spread the mud around more. With the rain, it suddenly becomes possible to wipe the mud off.
God’s grace is like this—but even more profound and necessary. What, then, does it mean to call God our “strength”? It means that everything we do is possible only because God holds us in existence, bestows grace on us through our prayer and the sacraments, and loves us so that we can love Him in return. To love God with all our strength, then, means to love God with His strength; with all the strength He gives us.
Let us then stop resisting our Lord and ask for the grace to respond wholeheartedly to His love.
Andrew Sheedy – St. Joseph Seminary, Edmonton, Alberta
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