Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday October 25, 2026
Scripture Readings: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18, Deuteronomy 6:1-5, Matthew 22:34-40
I’ve got two things to say about the reading from the gospel of Matthew that we
just heard. First of all, this is
probably my favourite passage of scripture.
I know that most of you know that I have many favourite passages, but
this is the passage that I chose to have printed on my business cards, and this
is the passage that you’ll find at the bottom of every email that I send. Love God.
Love your neighbour. The whole
message of God can be summed up in these two things.
The other thing that I have to say about this passage though, is that it’s
really hard to preach a sermon on such a perfect piece of scripture. What more could I possibly say about it? Love God.
Love your neighbour. Anything
else I might say runs the risk of diluting Jesus’s message. So I’m going to have to tread very carefully
this morning.
One strategy for preaching – giving you a peak behind the curtain this week –
is to try and find the point of tension, the point of discomfort in the
scripture, and lean into that. Explore
the tension and what makes it uncomfortable, and often a thought-provoking
message will emerge. But that is where I
am struggling with this piece of scripture – it resonates so deeply with me
that I struggle to find a point of tension to lean into, and I’m worried that
I’m about to preach a very bland and boring sermon about a piece of scripture
that I hold so dearly to my heart!
So where can I find the tension-point in this passage?
If you’ve been following along with our scripture readings this fall, then you
already know where we are in the story of Jesus’s life. We’re in the final days now. Jesus has already entered Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday, he’s been doing and saying a whole bunch of provocative things, and now
he is in dialogue with the officials and leaders in the temple. They keep trying to trip him up, looking for
any excuse to arrest him. And if we step
out of the storyline for a moment, we also know that in three days Jesus is
going to be arrested, in four days he is going to die on a cross, and in 6
days, the tomb is going to be empty for he will be risen from the dead.
Needless to say, in this moment in the story, tensions are high. And the Pharisees – who were all experts in
the Law, so it’s curious why Jesus’s questioner is explicitly named as a lawyer
– they ask Jesus, what is the most important commandment of them all.
And Jesus – well, he gives a very orthodox answer. We saw in our readings from Deuteronomy and
from Leviticus that he is quoting directly from the scripture when he says that
the most important commandment is to love God with our whole being
(Deuteronomy); and to love our neighbours as ourselves (Leviticus). Jesus wasn’t even the first person to suggest
this pairing – a generation before Jesus, Rabbi Hillel had said essentially the
same thing when he was asked to recite the entire law while standing on one
foot. Love God, love your neighbour, and the rest is commentary.
Which leaves me with the same problem that I started with. Where’s the tension point in the reading that
can help me preach a sermon this week that isn’t boring? The setting is full of tension, but what
Jesus is saying isn’t.
Or is it?
How are Jesus’s listeners going to hear what he is saying? Are they going to nod along with him and say,
“Very wise. Very profound of you,
Jesus.” Or are they, are we, going to
gradually come to the realization that they, we, haven’t always been able to
keep these commands perfectly?
I don’t know about you, but I know that I don’t always perfectly love God with
all of my being. There are times, as I
go about my every-day life, when God is not at the forefront of my mind. There are times when I even do things that
make God sad. I, like most if not all of
us, am trapped in systems that cause harm to God’s creation and cause harm to
God’s children – a dependence on fossil fuels is one that comes to mind, or
economic systems that always favour some and oppress others. I think that maybe these sorts of things make
God weep.
And I don’t always love all of my neighbours perfectly. Sometimes a thoughtless word slips out of my
mouth or from my fingertips that causes pain in another person.
Heck, I don’t even always love myself, which we can probably consider the third
part of the love commandment.
And so even though I keep this scripture in front of me, at the bottom of my
emails and on the back of the cards that I give out, even though I try to use
this scripture as the lens that I interpret the rest of the bible through –
even with all of this, I’m still not able to keep this commandment
perfectly. My human-ness trips me up.
And I wonder if this might be that tension point in the reading that I was
looking for. Jesus’s listeners, then and
now, already know what the right answer is; but they and we are also aware that
we don’t always follow what we know to be right.
If you were to read on ahead a little bit, Jesus’s questioners are chastened by
his answer, and we’re told that they didn’t dare to ask him any more questions.
But I don’t necessarily think that the answer is to simply throw up our hands
and walk away, because the other message that Jesus gives to us is a message of
grace. Even when we mess up and miss the
mark, God doesn’t stop loving us. God’s
love is without conditions and limitless in its scope. When we are able to love God, I think that maybe we are
just reflecting the love that comes from God back to God; and when we are able to love each
other and love our neighbours, then it is God’s love that is flowing through
us.
We are human. We all mess up sometimes…
and if you are someone who never messes up, please let me know what your secret
is! But God’s love never ends, and God
is working in you and working in me by the Holy Spirit, allowing us to love
more perfectly. Thanks be to God.
Image: “Love”
Babak Fakhamzadeh on flickr
Used with Permission
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