All Christians can recite the two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. But my guess is most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about the very real possibility that we don't love God.
If I call myself Christian, if I go to church, then I guess I love God. At least I love God enough.
In a single verse at the beginning of today's gospel Jesus gives us a very simple way that each of us can find a definite answer to the question: do I love God.
Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.
Notice he says "my commandments." He does not say "the 10 commandments given to Moses interpreted in the narrowest possible way." Jesus's commandments includes everything that he commanded us to do or not to do, not simply our narrow reading of the 10.
One of the great things about the Catechism of the Catholic Church is that you can go to Part Three/ Section 2 and you will see the combination of the 10 commandments and those things which Jesus taught which expanded and deepened our understanding of each of those commandments.
To the extent that I know and strive to keep these commandments, I can rightly say that I love Jesus, I love God. To the extent that I choose to remain ignorant, or chose to ignore certain commandments, I am forced to admit that I don't really love God. I chose love of self over love of God. I do my will and not His.
Perhaps it would be good over a period of day to take the commandments one by one in the Catechism. Read through each one. Meditate on each one. Ask the hard question. Am I really ready to embrace all that this commandment entails?
Only when we do our best each day to keep all of the commandments can we truly say that we love God.
