Understanding the Eleventh Commandment
One man went to St. Augustine, one of the fathers of the Christian church and asks, ‘Just in short, give me the very essence of religion. I am not a learned man; don’t make it very complicated and don’t give me many commandments, because I will get confused. You simply say one thing to me, just a key word.’ St. Augustine said, ‘Then that word is ‘love’. You love and don’t be bothered by anything else.’
I call this commandment the Eleventh Commandment. This is the only commandment we need to follow absolutely. Unconditional love is what God is all about. But many of us get lost concerning the real message of Jesus in arguments like the disciples did over who will be the greatest when Jesus left the earth. We, too, argue over what religious laws to obey and who is worthy to be saved. There are 1001 discussions, debates, theologies, dogmas, creeds, and conflicting philosophies on these subjects. Many of them leading to wars in the name of Christ and love.
If we don’t learn the eleventh commandment and practice it, we will live a miserable life and may miss heaven. I think there is a way to avoid this. We avoid the most miserable state of life not being able to love unconditionally by understanding the essential message of Christ Jesus. That message is Christ came, lived and died for the eleventh commandment of unconditional Love. This point is explained by a short story. One day a little boy asked his parents ‘how do wars break out? He was reading a book on history. Much of history is about wars, ugly wars. The boy became worried and anxious. How do wars start?’ he asked his parents. So the father, who was very learned in political and economic affairs, started talking about the economic causes of wars. But the mother thought that the little boy was too small to understand such complicated things and she said, ‘Let me explain it.’ The mother began to explain and the father became angry. He grew very annoyed and hostile, because he was going to teach the child and the mother jumped in. A great argument developed. The little boy became very frightened, and held up his hands and cried loudly, ‘Stop, stop! Now I know how wars start.” No one wants to be wrong! Everyone wants to be right and when we form an opinion about something, anything, we have to be right; and if anyone says we are wrong, we immediately go on the “warpath.” If there is dogma attached to what we believe, there is going to be a fight. There are people, who want the world to be without war, but they have ideologies and their beliefs create war. As Americans, we know what’s good for everyone in the world. So anyone who opposes us, our competitive nature is to fight. We have to be right and we got the guns and world ending weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to back us up!
During the Olympics we watch to see who wins the most gold medals or leads in the medal count. That seems to be what the Olympics is all about for us? Our weekends are full with competitive sports. To us winning is everything! And we love a winner and hate a loser. There are communists who go on arranging peace conferences because they say they know how the society should be. There are Catholics and Protestants talking about peace while hating each other. There are thousands of churches, hundreds of denominations and scores of religious beliefs. They all have a point of view about God and if you don’t like it they are ready to fight. A world without war is a world without ideologies. A world without war is based on unconditional love. Love is not an ideology, it is not a theology, and it is not a philosophy. This, Jesus says, “is my new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. This love is the eleventh commandment.
