“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 22.37-40

The greatest Christian virtue, Paul wrote, is love. Today, the greatest form of love observable in our society is self-love. Inordinate self-love used to be regarded as a psychological disorder – narcissism. In 1977 Christopher Lasch shocked the nation by calling attention to the growing presence of narcissism in our society. We were becoming a people so given to self-love that we were increasingly callous to the wellbeing of others.

This year the psychological disorder of narcissism will be officially removed from the lexicon of psychological disorders. So widespread and acceptable has self-love become that we can no longer refer to it as a “disorder.” It’s just the way we are.

But self-love at the expense of love for God and neighbors breeds indifference to the needs and sufferings of others, a merely relativistic view of justice, and forms of violence that are as destructive as any physical harm one might inflict.

The neglect of God’s Law has led to a nation of self-lovers. Even believers think of their faith primarily in terms of what they hope to “get out of it” (How many times has some worshiper expressed the view that he didn’t “get anything” out of that service?”).

This is exactly what Jesus said would happen. When we turn our backs on the Law of God, which teaches us the right ways to love God and our neighbors, we will turn our love inward on ourselves, and all other forms of love will grow cold (Matt. 24.12). The present state of love in our society makes it urgent that Christians rediscover the Law of God, understand it as God intends, and take it as the path of justice and mercy and faithfulness – the path of love – for which God gave it.

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