And when Jesus is asked what is the core of the Torah, he replies with the excerpt of the Shamir which you have just heard. Hear, oh, Israel the Lord alone is our Lord. You shall love him with all of your heart, your soul, your mind and your strength. And the other one comes from the Holiness Code, Leviticus 19. Both of these sources began with a focus on the justice and the holiness of the Lord. And then they apply it to the human relationships. You shall be holy for the Lord the God is holy. Jesus keeps this priority, since love of neighbor flows from and is made possible by love and loyalty to God.

And I think we need to recall this context, since nothing is more muddled for me than the idea of love. How can I hear what Jesus really intends by the two core commandments when I do not know what love is?

And I think every so often it is very good that we Christians do go back to our basics, our Bible, of course, as scriptural readings and to realize some of the more important things of our lives, of course, what is the context of forgiveness? What is the element of true love? What are the elements of being kind and caring for those in need? And with many other virtues that we have to be reminded about from a  Christian perspective.

Because I think what happens sometimes is that we are so bombarded and inundated with advertisement, technology, the TV, of course, is a big part of our life, and advertisement, and movies from Hollywood. And we tend to get maybe sometimes our way of loving, and caring and forgiving from Hollywood, or from the TV, or from the advertisement. And it's not where it comes from for us Christians.

We Christians have to look at it in a different perspective about what is forgiveness. And is it only for this person and not this person? Is it forgiveness for this or not for that?

We have to go back to, once again, those arm bands that some of our children, some of our young adults or people wear: What would Jesus do? What was Jesus's reaction to a situation? And it is very valid to go back and say, well, what would the Lord do? And we know this, we hear this over and over again. And we may not always like it, because our nature sometimes is not always to be that forgiving.

Jesus calls us to unconditional forgiving. Remember that. And we cannot put in any exceptions to it or any kind of rule or regulation and say, oh, yeah, I can forgive, but I don't have to forgive here. Or, I can forgive here, but I don't have to forgive here. I'm sorry, there are no exceptions. 

And so you go through the hole myriad of tragedies, or difficult things or terrible things that man and woman do to each other in our relationships and you say, I have to forgive in that situation? Well, according to Jesus -- not to me -- according to what we know of this man Jesus, yes.

And this is where the hard and the difficult part of Christianity comes to, where the rubber hits the road and you say, this is what it means to be a Christian. That it stretches us, that it stretches us in these important avenues of our relationships with one another, that it stretches us, and reminds us and challenges once again, yeah, this is what it means to be a follower of this man Jesus.

And the same with a very important thing: Love. And once again, we have to get out of our mind all of this idea maybe of romantic love. Yes, it's there. Or I love my car, or I love my house, or I love inanimate objects. These things that are not important to us, should not be. Material things should not be important to us. It doesn't speak so much about, obviously, the love of that. Yes, we use those terms. But, once again, this word love should be reserved, once again, for our brothers and sisters, our relationship, and of course our relationship with God.

What I love about this Matthew's gospel is that it brings down those ten commandments. It doesn't take them away, but it brings down those ten commandments that we might know some  of them. We might not know all of them, but we know some of them. And it brings them down to the two commandments.

And the first one is very, very beautiful. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you were to sort of ruminate those two commandments in your mind all throughout the day, you would get a little sense of what deep love God calls us to. And, of course, then forgiveness would be a little more easier if not completely easy to forgive.

To love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength will take my entire lifetime. I will never, never know God completely and never love Him completely. And so it's not a point of here, or point here or point here. It is an ongoing relationship throughout our life. It is like Christ married to the Church -- all of you. The Church. The people are the Church. Not the building, the people. Not the structure, not the hierarchy, not the bureaucracy, the people are the Church. Christ married to the Church.

With all of our misgivings, and our foibles, and our fumbles, and our mistakes, and our dark sides and everything, Christ has said I have put my lot with you and I'm married to you, I made a vow, a covenant with you to be always there and in love with you, no matter what. 

It mirrors for those of you who have received the sacrament of marriage in your own life. Of course it's not perfect. We know that divorce is there. We know that there's times that it doesn't always work out. It's not perfect. But it is that the image of the ideal has been there. It is once again a reminiscence of a married couple. It's the vows you made 10 years, 1 year, or 25, 50 or 75 years ago with their beloved: I will love you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will honor and care for you forever until death. And even in death I think we believe that people are still together. That's what that covenant, that vow, that love, that love is.

And we know that the love when the first day of marriage as life goes on in years is not always the same. It's transforming, it's changing, it's different. It has gone deeper. And once you get to know some of the misgivings and the blessings of your beloved, it's different. But it's still there. And all your married life will you love and discover more and more about your beloved, as Christ calls us to when He says to love Him with all our heart. Love the Lord with all the heart, soul, mind and strength each day.

And this love is so powerful and so encompassing and immense that it spills over to those other two commandments to love yourself and then to love your neighbor. We have to love our self. And once again, of course, this impinges upon  mothers and fathers as the first teachers of the faith to teach and to show their children how much they are loved as children of God. Not in the narcissistic way to say I'm the only one and a selfish one. This is the dark side or the bad side of love. It's always a love that is positive, a love that looks after the other person's care. It's always a love that is always searching how I can help another person in their time of need no matter what it may be.

That's what this love speaks about in this gospel here. It doesn't say anything about romance. It doesn't say anything about all of those other elements we hear in advertisement. It calls us to a commitment. It calls us to a work. It's an art. It's an art.

I love St. Paul. And I think most of you have heard this before in St. Paul's readings of Paul to the Corinthians. We always hear it when people are going to contemplate marriage. They choose this reading as their second reading. And once again, St. Paul gives us that insight into love.

He says love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interest, it is not quick tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoings, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. 

And I think St. Paul has it right, that it never fails. It is not always so emotional. It is always, once again, seeking the good of the other person, and my good, my spiritual growth.

And so we are called today on this reading back to, once again, our basics about what love is and what forgiveness is also. We are called back to look back to our scriptures and to Jesus Himself, His love that took Him to the cross, His choice to encompass that tremendous love for all of people. And He knew in His very heart and in His very being that this is what He had to do. So that love that He gave up His life for us, that is probably the most honored extreme love we speak about. Not all of us -- and hopefully we will not be put to that trial or that test. But once again, may our movement, our attitude, our pathway, always be in the love that Christ has shown us in this gospel.

I'm not saying we're going to complete it or accomplish it completely, but maybe we can live in the movement towards that love, that love that is unconditional forgiveness.