Pentecost +21

On Matthew 22.34-40

            The past few Sundays, we've heard again and again in Matthew's gospel where Jesus is looking conventional wisdom in the face - and turning it on its head.

            Two weeks ago the wedding banquet saw a king go from cruelty towards invited guests and friends, to compassionate to social outcasts and misfits, to cruelty again in judging someone unworthy.

            Last week of course the Pharisees and Herodians gang up with the unanswerable question about taxes, Jesus' answer to which befuddles both sides of the coin, so to speak.

            And today: hidden within the text, more unlikely behaviour.

            It starts with the unlikely behaviour of the Pharisees picking up where the Sadducees have been silenced. This is important: because these two Jewish sects are NOT friendly with each other: they've got a history of conflict, in fact. Religious beliefs, cultural understanding, legal interpretation, worship practices: if they can find a way to argue, they do.  So it is significant that these two groups are mentioned in the same sentence. When it came to the effort of taking down Jesus, they were willing to put their differences aside.

            Yikes. How threatened they must have felt!

            So there they are, this legalistic group, and they source out their best legal mind, and they send him off to stump this uneducated, unaffiliated upstart of a man.

            Which commandment in the law is the greatest?

            In Halakha, or Jewish law, there are 613 commandments. They range through civil and religious laws that structure the Jewish life. They are found in the Torah, what we call the Pentateuch (the books of Moses, or first 5 books of the Hebrew - or 'OLD' - Testament.)

            So. out of these 613, Jesus is to answer which is the most important.

            And his reply, of course, we all know: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

            This, of course, is not the first time these words have been uttered. Jesus cites them directly from their original source in the Hebrew scriptures, Deuteronomy.     And in that context, God commands God's people to carry those words in their heart, that they be taught dilligently to their children, that they be spoken regularly, that they be written and bound on foreheads and forearms, and on doorposts. To this day, tefillin (black cubes) are holding these words are bound to forehead and arms during morning worship, and a Mezuzah - or inscription on a doorpost - indicates the dwellers of that home are observant Jews.

            These words, this commandment, truly is great and common in Jewish culture. The beauty of these words are not merely that they are poetic and perfect; it's that they inspire the faithful into daily action.

            Love the Lord Your God. With all your heart, and soul, and mind.

            With all that you are and with all that you have, Love God.

            It sounds great, and is easy to do when we're getting our own way - yet this commandment exists to remind us that we are called to practice this love when things aren't sunshine and butterflies, too.

            And this can be hard. It's hard when life gets difficult, and busy, and distracting, to think about putting God first. To consider how to move beyond the restrictions and distractions of this realm and instead put our focus on God - and God alone.

            However - that's the law. Jesus identified it as the primary law. The most important law. The Greatest Commandment: love.

            It's an abstract commandment - it's not concrete, it's not a black and white assessment. There's no numeric value, there's no gradient scale, it's not even first in the order in the book. It's just there. Love God.

            And this love is not a duty, but a privilege. We have been invited to love God above all else simply because we can. Because we can celebrate that God first loved us. Because we can reciprocate that great gift.

            ...and here Jesus takes his reply further. The lawyer asked for one great law; Jesus gives him the second greatest as well.

            Love your neighbour as yourself.

            That's a tough one sometimes. Because we don't always *like* our neighbour. But we are called to love them.

            In fact, we are commanded to love them.

            So while the world will say to ignore the people we don't like, or mock the people we don't agree with, or insult the people with customs we don't understand, or.give us any other pathetic and flawed rationale to seek out differences rather than commonalities, and to react from fear and anger: God commands us to love.

            And not just with some sort of minimal effort: no, Jesus tells us what God has always told God's people: love them like you want to be loved. With dignity, with respect, with appreciation, with compassion.

            Love. Fully, completely, illogically, excessively, unstoppably.

            So why these two? They don't follow automatically in the original text. In fact, it's in a different book altogether. Love God is Deuteronomy 6.5, Love your neighbour is Leviticus 19.18.

            Because - as Jesus says: on these 2 commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

            Or, to put it another way, because these two commandments are the basis of how God invites us to be the church for the entirety of our human experience. 

These are held up by everything in the law and the by the prophets. Which means that every aspect of the Hebrew texts - the 613 laws, the wisdom, the prayers, the prophesies, the history, the teachings: everything that is to be found in Book of God that we call the Old Testament influences and impacts these 2 commandments.

            Love God, with all you have.

            Love your neighbour, as you want to be loved.

            So our question then becomes: with all of our faith history telling us to do this - how can we do this better? Why do we allow the world to orient us away from love?

            We all have our different reasons: and as we journey inwardly toward God, we can discover more and more what they are.

            And when we know what they are, we can actively choose to redirect ourselves towards love. We can turn away from whatever will keep us from knowing God's perfect love. We can choose to keep love as a verb (an action) rather than as a noun (a thing).  We can find ways to make love so strong that we will be amazed that we ever thought of love as 'abstract'.

            Love God. Love your neighbour.

            What wonderful laws within which to frame our lives.