Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday October 29, 2023
Scripture: Matthew 22:34-46
(In our Story for All Ages, we talked
about Galatians 3:27, and how we are called to “clothe ourselves with Christ” – not like a
Hallowe’en costume for one day but for every day.)
I said to a couple of people this week,
that this sermon is one of the harder ones I’ve had to write… not because the
reading from the bible is challenging, but for the opposite reason. This
teaching of Jesus is so core to my beliefs, so central to how I try to live out
my faith, that there really isn’t much more I can say about it. A lawyer asks
Jesus, “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?” and Jesus
replies, “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 neighbour as you love yourself. All
the Law and the prophets depend on these two commands.”
Love God. Love your neighbours. Love yourself. That’s it. I really don’t have that much more to say about this teaching.
In the overall story of Jesus’s life, this teaching happens almost right at the very end of it. We’re in the middle of Holy Week. A couple of days ago, Jesus and his disciples entered Jerusalem in the parade that we remember each year on Palm Sunday. If you skip ahead, Matthew tells us that we are currently two days away from Passover, so this would make it the Tuesday of Holy Week. We are two days away from Jesus’s arrest, and three days away from Jesus’s death.
Tensions are running high. Jesus has been saying some very pointed things at the authorities – secular authorities, yes, as they were living under the oppression of the Roman Empire, but especially pointed towards the religious authorities who were interpreting God’s laws in less-than generous ways. That’s why Matthew tells us that the Pharisees were testing Jesus with this question – maybe they will be able to catch him out on heresy and be able to punish him on those grounds. But alas, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy with the commandment to love God with our whole selves, and then he quotes from Leviticus with the commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves – a fairly orthodox answer.
I rather suspect that Jesus knew that the end of his life was drawing closer. He knew that he was provoking the authorities with his teachings, and he seems pretty determined not to back down, no matter the consequences. And so I wonder if he seized this opportunity to sum up all of his teachings into a small, easy-to-remember package, almost like a sound bite. “Love God. Love your neighbour. Love yourself. Even if you don’t remember anything else I’ve said, or anything else that I’ve done, remember this: love God; love your neighbour; love yourself.”
Like I said, this passage is the foundation of our faith, but it’s a hard one to preach about, since Jesus is summarizing everything else that he has taught and everything else that he has done. To expand on this, I would almost have to go backwards and start re-telling Jesus’s other teachings and telling the stories about the things that he has done. I’d have to go back and repeat Jesus’s teachings about forgiveness; I’d have to re-tell the stories about the times Jesus fed a crowd of thousands of hungry people; I’d have to repeat Jesus’s teachings about sharing generously the things that we have; I’d have to re-tell the stories about the times that Jesus healed people who were sick and raised the dead. All of these things can be summarized by “love God with your whole being; and love your neighbour as yourself.”
I wonder if I can go back even further than Jesus’s life. Jesus was a Jewish man living almost 2000 years ago. He seems to have been very observant of his faith, even when he had a more generous interpretation of the scriptures than some of the other religious leaders of his time and place. And these scriptures that Jesus was steeped in – they would have been what we call the Old Testament. Our Old Testament is the Jewish bible, which makes it Jesus’s bible as he was Jewish.
And Jesus tells us that all of the law and all of the prophets – essentially, all of the bible – can be summarized by “love God with your whole being, and love your neighbour as yourself.” All of the laws in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – they can be summarized here. You find laws about having no other gods other than God, laws about how to worship God… these are all of the details about how to love God with your whole being. You find laws about how to care for orphans and widows and foreigners living your land, laws about how to provide food for people who are hungry, laws about how business people are to conduct their business fairly… these are all of the details about how to love your neighbours. And then you have laws like keeping the Sabbath which I think straddle loving God, loving your neighbours, and loving yourself all at once.
Then when you flip past the books of the law into the prophets of the Old Testament, what is the eternal cry of the prophets? “Look at where you’ve strayed away from God! Look at how you are causing harm to God’s children! Turn back to God by keeping God’s commands, and by doing justice and kindness to the most vulnerable among you!” Again – love God and love your neighbours resounds in the voice of the prophets.
So I think that the whole of our bible today – all of the teachings of the Old Testament which was Jesus’s bible, and all of the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament – the whole of our bible today can be summed up in these words of Jesus – love God; love your neighbours; love yourself.
Those of you who attend bible study know that one of the things that we wrestle with as we read the bible is what to do when passages seem to contradict each other. God says do not kill; God says enter the land and kill the people you find there. God says that the people of Moab are evil and shouldn’t be allowed into the temple for 50 generations; God says, well, maybe I’ll make the great-grandmother of the person who built the temple come from the land of Moab.
Along a similar vein, we also struggle when we realize that a story can be interpreted in multiple ways, depending on the perspective that you bring to a story. What is the right way to interpret the bible?
These are the sorts of things that we all have to wrestle with in our faith lives, as we read the stories in the bible, and as we talk about our faith with others… people who might question us along the lines of “how can you be a part of a church when the bible says <insert horrific teaching or story here>.”
Which brings us back to why this teaching of Jesus is so important to me. We are always interpreting the bible as we read it. There is no such thing as truly neutral reading. We are always choosing which teachings to emphasize and which teachings to give less importance to. We are always making decisions about how we are going to understand the stories… both the stories we like and the stories that challenge us. We are always interpreting the bible as we read it; and it can be very powerful to recognize the lens or the framework that we are interpreting it through. And for me, when I read the bible and all of the stories you find in it, I am interpreting it through the lens of these words of Jesus.
Jesus replied, “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 neighbour as you love yourself.”
When I come across any other passage – especially the passages and the stories that challenge me; especially the teachings that I find off-putting – I ask myself, how can I interpret this story in a way that loves God and/or loves my neighbour as myself?
For me, this is the lens that I try to read the bible through; and it’s also the lens that I try to live my life through. As I move through the world, I try to remember to ask myself, “how is this thing that I’m doing or this thing that I’m saying love God, love my neighbour, or love myself?”
I don’t always succeed. In fact, I don’t know if I ever succeed very well at this. But I also know that God forgives me when I stumble, and that I will always be given another chance to try again, maybe in the very next minute. And I also trust that I’m not doing it alone – I trust that the Holy Spirit is working in me, working in all of us, transforming us slowly over time more and more into the image of Christ, so that the work of Christ can be done through us.
And really – isn’t this what it means to be a Christian? To follow the path that Jesus shows to us… to follow the path of loving God with our whole being, and loving our neighbour as ourselves; while letting the Holy Spirit gradually transform us into who God created us to be, so that we can more perfectly reflect the image of Christ to the world around us. To “clothe ourselves with Christ” or “dress up like Christ” by loving authentically and whole-heartedly, and showing the world the face of Christ.
And may this be so in all of our lives. Amen.
Today was the first of our “Sock it To Me” Sundays,
collecting new warm socks for the clients of the
Romero Van. Each church donated ~100 pairs of new warm
socks. In the Story for All Ages, when I asked what “clothing
ourselves with Christ” or “dressing up like Jesus” might look like,
someone suggested that it looked like collecting socks
to Romero Van.
A wonderful message.
ReplyDelete