Love God, Love Neighbor 10-29-23
Love God, Love Neighbor – 45th Birthday of TGC
Lev 19:1-2, 15-18; Mt 22:34-46
Lev 19:1-2, 15-18
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Mt 22:34-46
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
Prayer – God of love, your beloved Son Jesus came into the world to show us the depth and breadth of your love for us. We have all too often taken the easy way out and focused on what to believe rather than living out Jesus’ commandment to love you and our neighbor. Jesus was tested on what was the most important commandment – his response – to love you and to love our neighbors. That is a test for us today – give us the passion to follow, the compassion to love and the faith to live out our belovedness for you and our neighbors – amen.
Jesus has entered Jerusalem and is facing one test after another. It seems that the religious and civil authorities are in cahoots to find a way to get this itinerant street preacher off the streets. His religious critics once again bring up the Sacred Law of Israel to test Jesus – and once again, Jesus gives them a response that enables him to evade the trap just as we talked about last week in regards to Caesar’s coin and taxes.
One of the legal experts on the Law asked, “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Hoping that Jesus would answer by picking a favorite commandment, the expert wanted to make Jesus look like a theological liberal by selecting one commandment over all the others, implying that all the other commandments in Jewish law were second-class. Since every commandment represents the word of God, picking and choosing among them would be heretical.
Jesus cleverly sidestepped the trap replying, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, you must love your neighbor as you love yourself. All the law and the prophets depend on these two commands.” Jesus’ reply was actually more clever than a mere sidestep. In Jewish circles the single most famous verse is the Shema from Deut 6. Shema is the Hebrew word for hear or listen, and it comes from the verse, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.’ The Shema was traditionally recited by every Jewish child and adult at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. In other words, there was no single verse from the entire Torah that was better known than this one.
Matthew’s version of this encounter with the Pharisees shows Jesus subtly changing the original version of the Shema. In Deut 6, the Shema commands us to love God with all our heart, soul and strength. Jesus alters it here in Matthew’s gospel to heart, soul and mind, and surely the Pharisees and everyone else around likely noticed the change. It isn’t clear why Jesus made this substitution. Knowledge, the mind, was a key theme throughout Matthew’s gospel so it could have been to emphasize the importance of knowledge of who and what Christ is/was and always will be. Perhaps throwing mind into the mix of the traditional Shema formula fits Matthew’s larger purpose.
It is also possible that Jesus’ mention of mind was also a none-too-subtle rebuke of the Pharisees. They were good at using their minds to do legalistic hair-splitting of all kinds. They were in the process of coming up with a list of clever, trapping questions in order to trip Jesus up. Maybe this was Jesus’ way of telling them that trickery was not the reason God had given them brains in the first place. We are supposed to honor God in how we think and reason just as surely as how we live in terms of other areas of faithfulness.
Jesus quotes from the Torah, the Law, by joining the Shema with the command in Leviticus to love one’s neighbor lets us know that loving neighbor was not an original commandment from Jesus. Rather it shows that Jesus is a faithful son of Israel and is not being novel in placing these two texts together as Israel had long done. Jesus says clearly that this double love – of God and of neighbor – is the key to understanding all the law and the prophets. Thus, this commandment from Jesus is such that we obey with everything we’ve got, ‘with you our heart, and with all our soul and with all of our mind.’
The command to love God and neighbor is one, inseparable piece. I wonder if Jesus puts love of God first as if to say we really don’t have the means to love our neighbor until we first learn how to love God? We are enabled to love our neighbor because we are loved by God. Or, our love of God makes it possible for us – even the frozen chosen – to love our neighbor as Christ loves us.
As I was reflecting on our passage this morning I remembered a story my mother shared with me about her women’s Sunday School class when they were studying the Ten Commandments. So the teacher of the class one Sunday asked, “What’s the most important commandment?” To which one of the older women in the class responded, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and mother chuckled in the telling because this woman’s husband has multiple affairs before the woman finally divorced him.
And so I wonder, is it significant that Jesus places love of God before love of neighbor. Lots of people, even if they’re not Christian or Jewish, believe it is a good thing to love one’s neighbor. Even if they don’t believe in God, they do believe in love of neighbor. In fact, some of these folks may think they are superior to Christians who claim to love God but then don’t show much love at all for their neighbors. I hear that argument quite frequently from folks who don’t want to have anything to do with Christianity is because of many Christians failure to demonstrate any love whatsoever for the hungry, the outcast, those on the periphery – in other words, neighbor.
I suspect it was significant that Jesus doesn’t say, you need to love your fellow human being but says, love your neighbor. You may remember the old saying, “I love humanity, its people I can’t stand.” Sometimes it’s easier to love human beings in general than to love our neighbors. I’ve shared that story of my neighbor in SC whose tree fell across my fence during a storm and refused to have her insurance pay or contribute towards my deductible. If I’m honest, I still am not fond of her though I know, in my heart, soul and mind, that I should love her, it just isn’t that easy.
There are some people who just aren’t very neighborly, can’t get along with anybody, next door or down the street. Neighbor implies someone who lives close to you, someone nearby, and if we try hard, perhaps we can find something lovable about even the most difficult of neighbors. After all, we have an incentive to try and get along with the people who live around us. Do we really need Jesus to command us to love them or at least get along with them? I really wish Jesus had said, love your loving and lovable neighbor and don’t worry too much about the cranky guy on the corner. But he didn’t say that. He said, simply, and pointedly, ‘love your neighbor as yourself. And that can be tough, particularly when your neighbor is one of the most unloving, unlovable people in the whole town.
Jesus – across all walks of his life including his death – elevated considerably our notions of neighbor-love. He intensified our obligations to our neighbors to include a command, not a suggestion, to love our neighbors, our enemies – everyone as ourselves. Even as he died on the cross, Jesus looked at those who abandoned him just as he looked at those who crucified him and said, ‘forgive them.’
In our passage this morning, Jesus says the first and greatest commandment, even prior to loving neighbor, is to love God. Loving God means following the path that Jesus took, being a faithful follower, even obeying God, wanting for our lives what God wants for our lives, doing what God asks us to do out of love for God, loving ourselves and others as God has loved us and others.
I believe it is impossible to truly love our neighbor without first loving God. Jesus lived and showed us what God’s love for all people looks like and so to follow that first commandment means that we love God for who and what God is and does. And the implied promise is that God will give us what we need to enable us, me included to love even our difficult neighbors. Loving our neighbors in the way of Jesus is no small assignment. Therefore, it makes a difference to God that we not only try, but do. I think that is why Jesus makes loving God prior to loving our neighbor.
And I also believe that loving God is the first commandment is that if we really try to love our neighbors, then we need a God who forgives. And I have had to work hard on forgiving that neighbor from years ago and the only way I have been able to try is knowing that God has forgiven me for being un-neighborly, of being un-loving far too many times. God’s forgiveness frees us to hopefully forgive others just as we have been forgiven.
Love of God precedes the command to love our neighbor because in order to love our neighbor in the name of Christ requires that we find a way to look at our neighbor as Christ looks at our neighbor. If we dare to look at others as God looks at all of God’s beloved children, we will see that our neighbors are, like us, flawed, weak human beings who just happen to be loved greatly by God. We are called, commanded, to love, just as God loves, just as Jesus showed us God’s love – even if it means sacrificial, self-giving love. Love is the greatest commandment – love of God and love of neighbor.
This church was founded 45 years ago today. The premise of TGC has been love of God and love of neighbor for a long time. That is our core belief and foundation. We have done the best we can to live out that commandment just as Jesus lived it out. We are reminded this morning, on our birthday that who we are and how we love has not changed in the 45 years of servanthood that has been embodied by this church. So continue to live and love as you always have – following the greatest commandment as uttered by our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ – love God and love neighbor – it matters to God and the world – thanks be to God – amen.