“All you need is love … da, da, da, da …”
Who said it? Yes, the Beatles, in the song of the same name first broadcast in July of 1967. Even so, Saint Paul said it nearly two millennia earlier:
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)
Paul may not have had Lennon and McCartney’s melody, but the message is the same: love is all you need.
These are threatening words for me, of course, as a priest for, if it’s really that simple – that all we need to do is love one another – then why would any of you need to pay a highly trained and credentialed cleric like me to unlock the secrets of the Scriptures for you. If love is all you need, you can work out the details for yourselves!
It does bother me when I see religious clerics who address us in a tone that suggests that they hold the keys to secret knowledge that we can only pray we will one day gain access to.
It makes sense for a Rabbi to be that way as the Torah is a complex legal tapestry. For a Sheikh, likewise. interpreting Qur’an and hadith requires a fair degree of scholarship. But if the early church really decided not to build itself on any labyrinth of laws but simply on one command – love one another – there’s not a lot left to keep professional interpreters like me going!
Of course, the real problem with the church is not that it has overcomplicated things but that it has consistently failed to make love its priority.
This hit home for me recently when I was told that if I wanted to renew my license as a functioning priest in the Diocese of Sydney, I had to start by completing a twenty-two-page questionnaire designed to weed out the unworthy. It asked about sex, pornography, alcohol — but nowhere did it ask whether I had tried to love God and neighbour through my years of ministry, and it did make me question whether I wanted to belong to an organisation so fixated on personal purity and so apparently uninterested in love.
Of course, this is not just a local problem but is the basis of the worldwide schism of the Anglican communion. We are, at this very moment, in the middle of a historic rupture of the global Anglican and Episcopal church, and, sadly, it’s not over Gaza or Ukraine or Iran. Indeed, it doesn’t have anything to do with the terrible suffering going on around the world at the moment. The issues at stake are:
- Same‑sex marriage
- LGBTQ+ clergy and
- Women as bishops
I’m not saying that each of these are not important conversations, but they are not the centre of the gospel either, and they are not worth sacrificing love for.
Sadly, it has always been this way. If the history of crusades and inquisitions have anything to teach us, it’s that the church has always chosen truth over love! We burn people at the stake, not because they are unloving but because they are wrong!
Over the last two thousand years, the church, at least at an institutional level, has consistently chosen truth over love, but what if love is the truth.
I’m not trying to be romantic or poetic here. On the contrary, I remember many years ago reading some of the work of German philosopher, Martin Heideggar, on ‘Truth as Aletheia (which is the Greek word for truth used in the New Testament).
Heidegger challenged what is commonly called the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ where we understand truth as a correspondence between what we say and what scientifically is. When what you mean corresponds with the facts, that’s truth – that’s how we generally define the word truth, but even in English ‘truth’ can mean other things, such as when we say, ‘be true to yourself’ or when we speak of a ‘true friend’.
Heidegger suggested that the ancient Greek word for truth was more focused on the process of uncovering rather than on any static correspondence between word and fact. In other words, maybe, biblically speaking, you don’t have truth if you don’t love and, conversely, if you live in love, you live the truth, just as Jesus was the truth!
I don’t mean to end on too philosophical a note. Let’s go back to the Beatles – “All you need is love, love, love …”
Whether or not the Beatles were inspired by Saint Paul, I’m not sure, but I am pretty sure that Paul was inspired by Jesus. After all, it was Jesus who taught us that all the law and the prophets came down to love (Matthew 20:40)!
It’s not that hard to figure out, is it, and you don’t really need me to unlock any of the hidden mysteries for you. That’s why I’ve got my backup career as a professional boxer – for when you realise that you don’t need me – and I can only hope that some of my fellow priests and bishops will consider similar career paths when their time comes as I think I’ve still got my best fights left in me and I’d love to take a shot at some of those … sorry, that’s not a very loving path to go down, is it?
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” (Romans 13:8) Amen!
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – September 5th, 2026
