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Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost
Light of Christ Anglican Church
The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, October 29, 2017


The Greatest Commandment


Text: Matthew 22:34–48

In many families, discipline is in the hands of the father. How common is it that when the children misbehave, the mother says to them, “Wait until your father gets home?” That was not the case in my home. I remember one time when I was in fifth grade, I was going to sleep over at my best friend’s house. I was so excited that I forgot to do my chores, one of which was to take the dog out for a walk. Because she missed that walk, she had an “accident” on the rug. My mother punished me by telling me I couldn’t go spend the night with my friend.

When Dad came home, he found me angry and surly. I told him I hated my mother. And my father responded by trying to correct my thinking. He told me all the things my mother had done for me and for him, and what a fine person she was. He was genuinely hurt that I hated his wife.

I remember well that incident of over 60 years ago. And it is not because I never got over missing the sleepover. I remember it because it showed me an important thing: when you truly love someone, you want others to love her as well. I’d like you to keep that reality in mind as we think together about today’s reading from the Gospel according to Matthew.

Jesus was somewhere in Jerusalem and a delegation of Pharisees showed up to ask him a question. This was supposed to be a test. Exactly what they hoped would happen, we are not sure. But it was an important moment, for Matthew, Mark and Luke all selected this story to include in their Gospels. The question the Pharisees asked, through their lawyer, was, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus’ answer is familiar to us all, and it is an unforgettable one:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22:37–40)

Here Jesus said not only that Love God and love your neighbor were the greatest and the second commandment: but he also said that in them all of God’s commandments were summed up. The Pharisees got way more than they bargained for.

It was a moment of deep significance. It was a moment when in a very few words, Jesus told us everything about God and about who we are in relation to God. He was not, by the way, making it up on the spot. These words were not new with Jesus. What Jesus called the Great Commandment comes from the Bible as it already existed in his day. It comes from Deuteronomy, Chapter 6, and we call those words the Shema.

Shema, O Israel. Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:4–5)

The Shema comes from the oldest tradition of the Jewish people, spoken to them by Moses. And when Moses said this to them, he went on:

Keep these words that I am reciting today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6–9)

God’s people were never to forget these words. And the Hebrew people took to heart what Moses said. Even today, Jewish worship opens with these words from Deuteronomy, and every child who learns Hebrew learns these words first. No self-respecting Jewish home is without its Mezuzah on the frame of the front door, a rectangular box containing the Shema.

The “Second Commandment,” as Jesus called it, was also not spoken for the first time by Jesus in the Gospels. It came from the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 19: “Love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. Keep my decrees.” (Leviticus 19:18). This was a moment of such significance that three of the four Gospel writers included it as an essential story in the narrative of who Jesus is. What made it so significant was that here was Jesus, the Son of God, the Word made Flesh himself, telling us the meaning of our relationship with God. We are to love God completely, and therefor to love our neighbor, whom God created.

As I say, the commandment to love God with our whole heart and soul and strength goes back to the earliest tradition of the Jewish people. It was there as the entire Bible was taking shape. And yet, if you search the scriptures for passages about how the people loved God, it is interesting what you find.

But what is extremely rare are expressions of simple love for God. David is often thought of as the one who loved God in a wonderful way. But even in the psalms, the beautiful prayers and hymns of praise that David wrote, the talk of love is about:

Even in Psalm 18:1, where David starts off, “I love you Lord, my strength,” he ends the phrase by saying “I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised, so I shall be saved from my enemies.”

But in Psalm 42, David shows that he understands the Greatest Commandment.

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
So my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and behold the face of God? (Psalm 42:1–2)

This is what it means to love God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole strength. But you find only rare nuggets of that love for God as you dig through the prayers and prophecies and psalms of the Old Testament. This is why the moment in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel is a moment of eternal significance. For in the one who speaks this command of God and calls it the Greatest Commandment, we have God’s greatest gift of all. Here, standing in our midst is God himself, having taken on human flesh, making it possible to truly love him.

Standing before us this day in God’s holy city of Jerusalem was God himself in the humble form of Jesus of Nazareth. Can you imagine a simpler and lovelier act of God than to give himself to us as a person we could love? That is what he did in Jesus. And that is what makes this moment of eternal significance as Jesus stood before those who would test him and proclaiming God’s highest law, upon which all the Law and the prophets depend.

How much more possible was it now for God’s people to love him, having met him in the flesh? Jesus was somebody you could touch and listen to and talk to. He is someone you can love.

Walking on water to his disciples’ boat,
Turning water into wine at a wedding,
Casting demons into pigs and sending them into the lake,
Allowing a fallen woman to wash his feet with her tears.

How can we not love him, who loves us so well?

In Jesus, God has done the remarkable thing of showing us in the flesh who God is. He has given us a person whom we can love with our whole heart and our whole soul and our whole strength. It is he who stood there that day in Jerusalem saying this is the first and greatest commandment.

And he said there is a second like unto it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Now I could call all that I have said “point one,” and preach to you about all the things Jesus expects of us in that little phrase, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I could talk about the signature works of the Christian, such as caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, embracing the suffering of people you don’t know, visiting the prisoner. But all I need to say about that second commandment is that when you love the Lord your God with your heart and soul and strength, everything else falls into place. Loving your neighbor becomes second nature. Loving your neighbor becomes the natural outworking of loving God, when you love God totally.

Our failing is not so much with the second commandment as with the first. There are so many things that occupy our time and energy and affection that have taken the place of God as number one in our lives. And the result is that doing what God has appointed us to do becomes a chore, a duty, a “command” with which we comply grudgingly if at all.

But when we put away those childish things and give our whole heart and soul and mind and strength to loving God, our Father in heaven, everything changes. Then it isn’t good enough to sit back and say you love your neighbor by leaving him alone and doing him no harm. It isn’t good enough to paste over his needs with a little check that you might otherwise have spent on lunch. It does not satisfy your need to show God your love by saying “God bless you,” to a suffering stranger, instead of listening to the longings of her heart. Now, you find that you actively want to be in there for people as Jesus would, with compassion and integrity and truth and surprise and sacrifice.

Which brings me back to the story with which I began. When you love someone, you want others to love that person as well.

And you see it in people who love the Lord their God with their whole heart and their whole soul and their whole strength, and their neighbors as themselves. For they want their neighbors to know this Jesus whom they love so much.

©2017 Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar

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