If you want to grow up to be a fully socialized human being in America, you need to have been fully immersed in the idea of “love.”

As a kid, I remember watching “Love American Style” and “The Love Boat.” I listened to music extolling love’s virtues: Everybody from Barry Manilow to Bob Dylan weighed in on the subject. Heck, they even devoted a whole summer to it in 1967—a whole season to champion the merits of “free” love.

I remember wanting to be in love. I’d heard so much about it. It seemed to occupy a great deal of the popular consciousness. Erich Segal wrote a novel, and titled it—modestly enough—Love Story. We even had Leo Buscaglia—”Dr. Love.” Remember him?

Love, we were told, meant “never having to say you’re sorry.”

Then we were told that, in reality, love meant ”always having to say you’re sorry.”

Love always wins. Love never fails. “If you love something, set it free; if it comes back to you it’s yours; and if it doesn’t, it never was”—or if you got the other t-shirt at Spencer’s—“If you love something, set it free; if it comes back to you, it’s yours; and if it doesn’t, hunt it down and kill it.”

People get tattoos to tell the world how good love is. Then they get tattoos to tell the world how love has broken their hearts and sucked their souls.

You can give love. You can spurn love. You can embrace love or walk away from it. You can feel love. You can withhold love. You can cry or kill for love—or the lack of it. You can wonder “what’s love got to do with it?” You can even shake your fist and scream to the world that “Love stinks!”

But love will find a way. It is, after all, a many splendored thing.

And…in the end…you know…the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Why?

Because the greatest love of all is easy to achieve…since, according to Whitney Houston, the greatest love is the one inside of me.

All of which suggests, I think, that love is something we possess. It’s something we look for, and if we’re lucky enough, we’ll find—whether in the face of another or in our own heart.

Love, in the popular imagination, is an emotion, a feeling. In fact, according to the Supergroup Boston, it’s “more than a feeling.” Love is, after all, all you need.

So, when Jesus says to Love the Lord your God with everything you’ve got and love your neighbor as yourself, it feels like he’s talking about something we already know.

Love. Oh yeah, I know what that is.

Love. I’m all over that.

But before we get too far into any self-congratulations, let’s take just a moment to see how we got to the point.

We’re in the last couple of days of Jesus’ life. He’s already entered Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, being welcomed with adoring cheers by those who think he’s about to start an armed insurrection against the Roman occupiers. The crowd believes he’s about to smash and break things like the Incredible Hulk.

Then, almost as if he’s ready to confirm their hopes for bloodlust against authority, Jesus goes to the temple and starts kicking up dust by calling out the religious authorities and unceremoniously tossing them out on their ears.