"Love the Lord your God" -- making it accessible

When Jesus was asked what was the single greatest commandment, he said it was first to love the Lord our God, and that the second was like it: to love our neighbors as ourselves. And I am grateful that he followed up, because by myself I have no idea how to love God. The idea of loving God is not accessible to me, unless there is some help given. I have never seen God.

Jesus was only asked for one greatest commandment; he responded as though two are inseparable. His disciple John also spoke similarly: "If a man says, 'I love God' and hates his brother, he is a liar. For someone who does not love his brother that he has seen, how can he love God, who is unseen?" (1 John 4:20)

He was asked about commandments: ethics, morality, religion, law. These are things that we tend to imagine in the abstract. In Luke's account of such a conversation, the follow-up question was, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus' answer is what we now call the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus' answer shows that we don't get to evade loving our neighbor based on any of the usual excuses that we want to use to justify our divisions. But it shows it by re-contextualizing the whole conversation. The conversation is not about what looks good in a law book, or sounds good in a sermon or a philosophy text. The conversation is about what happens when we are going about our daily business and see someone in need. That's where we find a meaningful answer to loving our neighbor.

According to John, that's the first step in finding a meaningful answer to loving God, too.