David Lose, one of the preaching professors at Luther Seminary, tells this story of one of his colleague named Frank. When Frank was nine or ten, he found himself in an argument with his younger sister. Before long, arguing turned to pushing and shoving, and pushing and shoving then turned to hitting. Just as Frank had his sister pinned on the ground, fist raised in the air, his mother came into the room. "Franklin," she bellowed, "stop that!" At that, as Frank would tell it, he turned his head toward his mother and said as only a young boy can, "She's my sister, and I can do anything I want to her." At which point Frank's mother swooped across the room, towered over him, and said, "She's my daughter -- no you can't!"
Dr. Lose goes on to say, “That's the law: God's will, desire, and good intention that all of God's children flourish in this life. It is the law, ultimately, of a loving parent: "She's my daughter -- no you can't." “No you can't have everything, hoard everything, own everything. Yes, there are all kinds of laws in both Old and New Testaments, but they all boil down -- as Jesus says in Matthew's account only -- to this: Love. Love God. Love your neighbor. And, as it turns out, these two aren't all that different. Love, you see, isn't an interior emotion, affection, or attraction in the Bible. It's an action, a behavior, a commitment to seek the good of another no matter what. To love God then, is to love God's children and seek the best for them.”
So, how is your love life? With God? With your neighbors? With your family? With the people sitting next to you in church? It’s called the great commandment, and I think great is the perfect word for it: it’s what we say when we hear it, “Great.”
Today, Jesus continues his long spar (it takes the lectionary four weeks to do what Jesus did in a day…) with the religious authorities. This time, the Pharisees gather together and a lawyer comes trying to beat Jesus at his own game… you see, in rabbinical tradition, questions are answered by series of questions. The lawyers of the day were religious leaders, experts in the laws of Moses, to whom they trace their ancestry. By this point in time, the rabbis had counted 613 commands, 248 you shall’s and 365 you shall not’s. That’s a lot of rules.
Imagine their surprise at Jesus’ answer: here they are, trying to test him, to trap him in a way that allows them to order him arrested, and they hear the words of the commandments, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” These make a great memory verse, but they’re so much more than that. Loving God with all your heart isn’t just the love you feel in your heart… its all of the emotions, all of the joy, all of the sorrow, it’s everything we feel. The word for soul covers a lot more than the part of us that goes to heaven someday. Here, it’s not so much about your soul, specifically, as it is about with all your being, with everything that gives you life, with all that is within you, with everything that means something to you. Loving God with all our mind... this one is hard. How do I love God with all of my thoughts? Love God with all that you are, with all that you have, and with all that you hope to be. Love God with parts of you that you don’t know how to love with.
Jesus doesn’t stop at this: “The second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” By listing the two commandments side by side, Jesus sets up the expectation that the second commandment is not simply like the first commandment, but flows out of it. If you love God with all that you have and all that you are, the second commandment naturally flows out of that. It is not another commandment to follow, another rule, another thing to do. It is what naturally flows out of people who love God with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their mind, and with all their strength. It isn’t for your sake that you do these things, it is for the sake of your neighbor. God isn’t just the God of you, God is the God of your neighbor, too. I cannot help but hear the next question, which is in Luke’s Gospel (not Matthew’s): “And who is my neighbor?”
The truth is: we kind of want to find a way out of this one. Love is tough. We aren’t just called to love the people we already love, we are called to love the people we find hard to love, the people who are unlovable, the people who irritate us… and how does that look?
Leviticus gives us a bunch of practical suggestions on how to love our neighbors… but I think it might be even more simple than that, though all of those suggestions are good. Each Sunday, we come together. Each Sunday, we confess our sin in the presence of God and one another. I’ll never forget the first confession of sin I learned: “We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart, we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your son, Jesus the Christ, have mercy on us, forgive, renew, and lead us so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name.” Sometimes, it’s easy for this to become rote… for it to be taken for granted what we’re really asking God - and our neighbor - to do for us. Yes, we have already been forgiven. Yes, our sins have already hung on the cross of Christ and are no more. But we continue living on earth, among God’s people who are sometimes hard to love. And we fail and need to confess our failure to do what God has asked us to do. This commandment reads both ways: If we love God, then we love our neighbor as a natural result. When we fail to love our neighbors, we fail to love God. So, week after week, we come back with the same confession: we blew it.
Now God, in His mercy, knows and understands human nature better than we ourselves do. I think this is part of the reason why God gathers us together, week after week, in this place where we admit we have sinned. We are not left here, though. We are forgiven. In one breath, confession, in the next, forgiveness of sin. Here, we let go of the things that get in the way of us listening to God, namely, our sin and our previous failures to hear God’s voice. It’s a way of drowning out all of the noise in our heads, all the things we forgot to do, all the things we try to do better at… quieting us enough to listen, not for our voice, but for God’s.
How appropriate that reading Scripture follows! With our ears opened, our mouths silenced, and our stomachs hungry for some good news, we read God’s word for us. We share the peace and the Lord’s Supper and are sent back out into the world so that, strengthened by His love, we spring forth as new people.
The love of which Jesus speaks is not the love of feeling, it is the love of being. It is love that is empty of self, love that happens on a cross. As a two-year-old child who is asked how much she loves her father, she stretches her arms, hyper-extending her little shoulders as though to say, “I can’t love you enough I love you so much.” She barely knows what love is, but she knows however much of it she has for her father is more than she can express. Her little cruciform body is a jarring reminder of what love – pure, unadulterated love – looks like.
This is the love that is asked of us. But let us not ever become confused about its source. It is not our love that is capable of selfless emptying. It is not our love that is capable of saving. Throughout the Bible, God has been saying to us – over and over again – “I love you with all that I am.” Here, God is the child, extended arms. Our love is a reflection of God’s love. It’s disarming. It’s a love that silences us. It’s the love that goes to the cross not as a punishment for sin but as a gift. It’s a gift that opens our arms to embrace our neighbor, and it’s not the neighbor that mows our lawn or brings us firewood… it’s the neighbor that has two dogs, fifteen cats, and eighteen birds and smokes three packs a day that yells at our kids as they pass by… and we don’t love her because we’re just that good or because we’re just that holy. It’s because God has said, “She might be your cantankerous neighbor, but she’s MY child.” “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength,” because God has given you your heart, has given you your soul, and has given you the strength. You are to love your neighbor as yourself not because you find them particularly loveable, but because God does. And don’t think your neighbor gets off so easy: she has to love you too! To that, I say, “Thanks be to God.”
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