Reconciliation and the Prime Directive

By Peter L. DeGroote

When we lose sight of Jesus’ prime directive, we lose sight of reconciliation. The prime directive is to love God and others. Its goal is our reconciliation with others and with all of God’s creation.  (Loving others requires honoring and respecting the creation into which all of us have been placed).

The prime directive can be easily overlooked for two major reasons.

First, Jesus inextricably tied the love of God and others together; we can’t have one without the other. We cannot claim to love God if we do not love others. Further, to love others is to love God, even if we are not even thinking about God and--perhaps--even if we are unaware of the idea of God. 

• In contrast, we commonly claim God as a personal or group possession rather than the common Creator of all humanity, indeed, of all creation. Sometimes we go so far as to say that God is on our side as we do battle with the rest of God’s creation.

The second major reason we can easily overlook the prime directive is that our definition of love is so hopelessly jumbled that it can be used to describe emotional infatuation, a pious devotion to prayer, and much in between.

• In contrast, the very idea that love can mean honor and respect for God and God’s creation is regarded as an irrelevant, if not adolescent, idealism in the practical working of our world and its institutions.

Jesus’ teachings are not definitions but behavioral guides that set us on paths of discovery towards living in harmony with God and others. So often mistaken for something called a Kingdom of God, Jesus left us with a vision of a domain of God built into creation—a location for becoming who we are and are meant to be.

From our earliest primal memories we have sensed a great gap between us and other species. Early Genesis stories describe us as the culmination of God’s creation and/or beings that are given the gift of power over the earth and its other inhabitants. Today, science is steadily increasing our knowledge of how we are a part of the fabric of all life. Having emerged and evolved from other forms, we remain inextricably connected and dependent on other species and the physical structure we all share. We are also learning of the choices we face of either living in harmony with the rest of creation or damaging it, in some ways irreparably. 

In a time and place that knew nothing of our science, Jesus' prime directive refocused the Genesis lessons by asserting that we are meant to live in harmony with our Creator and all that God has created. In order to do that, he taught that we need to love, honor, and respect both God and all of God’s creation—the prime directive.

When we lose sight of Jesus’ prime directive we lose sight of reconciliation.