The Great Commandment.
26-10-2014
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46.
May I be helped to speak in the name of the Living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
‘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 neighbour as yourself.’
Familiar words, aren’t they. In this morning’s gospel reading, the Pharisee asks Jesus which is the greatest commandment of the law. I stress the words commandment and law. In reply Jesus starts talking about love. He says love God, love your neighbour as yourself. We are commanded to love.
We take the whole concept of love for granted. But I think it’s worth just stopping and asking ourselves what exactly Jesus is talking about when, in those famous oft quoted words, he uses the specific word love.
When we talk about love, we’re normally talking about some indescribable emotion. A feeling of great warmth, closeness, belonging; a feeling we have for those closest to us. I love my wife, my children. When we say the word love, what springs into our minds is something that ties us only to those closest to us. Not to everyone, but only to those who have a very special place in our lives. So on the face of it none of us can claim to love our neighbour.
This thing, this emotional bond we call love isn’t something we have any choice over. Either we do love, or we don’t. When I say I love my children, it’s not a positive conscious choice I’ve made. It’s something that just is. So if I can’t control this thing called love, if I can’t choose to do it or not, how on earth can I be commanded to do it?
How can you be told you must love God, you must love your neighbour, if loving or not loving is not something you can control? If love means what we normally take it to mean, it is not humanly possible for me to love my neighbour as I love myself, as I love my closest family. In fact it is ridiculous to command that I love others. My failure to love others in that same way is not my fault: it is quite clearly out of my control.
So, unless Jesus was speaking rubbish, there is only one way out of this conundrum … when Jesus talks about love, when Jesus thinks it reasonable to command us to love, he means something entirely different by the word love.
So what does it mean to love your neighbour? We’ve just heard the exchange between Jesus and the Pharisee as it was described by Matthew. In Luke’s gospel, there’s a bit more explanation. After Jesus has said love God, love your neighbour, the Pharisee asks a new question: who is my neighbour? And so Jesus launches into the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
The point of the parable is to show that even your enemy is your neighbour – even a Samaritan should be considered to be a neighbour to the Jew. But importantly, along the way Jesus illustrates what loving our neighbour actually means.
You know the story without me rehashing it now. To love your neighbour seems to mean: to care what happens to them, to help them when they are in need. That’s what the Samaritan does. He doesn’t have any kind of emotional attachment to the Jewish man he finds lying on the floor, he doesn’t love him as we would use the word. But he loves him in the sense that he cares for him when he is in need.
There are so many people in this world in great need, people who we are in a position to help. Overseas there are millions upon millions of people living in conditions we could not even imagine – they struggle for food, they have next to no access to education or healthcare.
We, you and me, can help them – by buying Fairly Traded products, by supporting development charities like Christian Aid and Oxfam, by supporting campaigns which seek to change economic structures.
There are people with great needs closer to home. People in this area living lives of quiet desperation, lives with little or no hope – maybe they are elderly and alone, sick and house bound, trying to raise children alone, unemployed, caught in some form of addiction. We can visit them, spend time with them, show them that there is a community here that does care. Show them that, however they feel, they are valued – God values them, we value them.
That’s what it is to love your neighbour:
it’s about caring what happens to people, helping them when they need your help. It’s about being a Good Samaritan, a friend in times of need.
This kind of love is totally different from that other kind of love, the involuntary emotional feelings we have for our nearest and dearest.
This kind of love is something human beings do have control over. We can choose to help people in need, or we can choose to ignore them.
But Jesus of Nazareth takes away that choice, that option of whether to care or not. When you choose the way of Jesus Christ, he makes the decision for you. He commands that you love your neighbour; he commands that you care about others, help others in need.
What about loving God?
I don’t think you love God by caring what happens to him, by helping him when he is in need. How can you help a God who is in need? It’s a bit beyond our capacity! So we have to think of yet another form of love.
Perhaps loving God is more like showing respect for your parents: they raise you to the best of their ability, they do what they think is best for you, they love you (if I can use that word with its normal meaning). Hopefully, you respond with something approaching gratitude, thanks for all that they have done for you.
God created us and our world; God nurtures us, cares for us; God freely offers us everything he can give us. Maybe to love God is to show an attitude of thankfulness for all that, graceful acceptance that God didn’t have to do this for us, but did anyway. Maybe to love God is to have some form of discipline in your life where you express that response: a time of prayer each day; attendance in one of these places once a week … a visible response of gratitude, of respect.
Showing gratitude and respect to God is something we can choose whether to do or not. But just as with neighbour love, Jesus takes the choice away. To follow Jesus is to say ‘I pass the choice to you’. Jesus commands that his followers should love God, that we should show our respect, our thanks, to God for all that God has done for us.
It is so easy to talk freely about love. But think about what it actually means to do it: to love God, to love your neighbour. And when you’ve thought about it, remember: as a disciple of Jesus Christ, it is something you no longer have any choice in – it’s something you are commanded to do, a basic tenet of the way of life you have chosen to follow.
‘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 neighbour as yourself.’
Rev’d John Routh
Rector of Holy Trinity Parish Church
Sutton Coldfield.