Matthew 22:34-46
“The Perfect Combination”
Last week I was talking with someone who said, “There is an ordinary despair that so many people feel in the face of the enormity of the world’s problems.
What can one individual do?”
So many of us feel powerless in the face of so much pain.
It has been said that the Wall Street protesters, feeling that same sense of powerlessness, have taken to the streets to express their discontent, and to try and claim their power and their voice.
And similar protests have now spread all over the globe.
How many of you feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the world’s problems?
It can just seem like too much to shoulder, can it not?
From a loved one who lies in a nursing home bed day after day and week after week…
…to our own aches and pains and feelings of mortality--despair tries to break through.
I mean, what is this crazy life about anyway?
And what can I do to make this a better place?
This is how the author of Ecclesiastes felt when he wrote, “Meaningless! Meaningless!...
…Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!”
Then he goes on to write that Wisdom is meaningless, pleasures are meaningless, work is meaningless, riches are meaningless, success is meaningless.
He had lived a long life and had investigated all these things.
He had searched for meaning in everything under the sun, but had found none.
But thankfully, his search had not been in vain.
For at the end of the Book, he finally writes, “here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commands, for this is the whole duty of man.”
Ahhh…there is meaning after-all!!!
Praise God, praise God, praise God!!!
We know that the Pharisees were testing Jesus in our Gospel Lesson for this morning, but perhaps, at the same time “the expert in the law” who approached Jesus had a similar feeling of being overwhelmed when he asked Jesus, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
To us, the answer may seem a bit obvious.
But that is only because we have heard it and heard it over and over again most of our lives.
But for the Pharisees, there were 613 Laws to choose from.
How was a person supposed to keep track of them all, let alone prioritize them?
There were 248 positive commands, corresponding to the number of the parts of the body, and 365 negative commands, corresponding to the days of the year.
There was also the view that all the commands were equal…
…that means it was just as important to clean one’s hands between every course in a meal as it was to say…
…take care of the widows and orphans…
…which would have been a part of the “moral law”…
…whereas cleaning one’s hands would have been part of the “ceremonial law.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty overwhelmed just thinking about it.
Religious rules and regulations, many of the Jews found, were a terribly heavy load to try and bear.
Of the Pharisees with all their meticulous rules, Jesus had this to say in Matthew Chapter 23: “They tie up heavy loads and put them on [people’s] shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”
And God, in the Bible, says more than once, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”
A colleague of mine recently wrote, “As a child I always followed the rules. I remember thinking when classmates broke the rules, ‘well, I won’t get caught doing that because I want to be a good Christian.’
She goes on, “I would distance myself from playmates who got in trouble because the rule says you’re known by the company you keep.
I based my relationship with God on rule-keeping because I wanted to be a ‘good girl.’”
And there is nothing wrong with this.
We should all hope that everyone wants to be a “good girl or boy.”
The problem comes in when the rules get in the way of our relationship with God and our ability to love others.
For the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, the rules had become more important than relationships.
Law superseded love.
Remember how disgusted they were that Jesus spent so much time with prostitutes and tax collectors?
Remember how much they despised Jesus for making friends with the outcastes and the marginalized?
Remember how angry they got when Jesus healed sick and diseased persons on the Sabbath?
The Pharisees hid behind their rules.
But what Jesus has pointed out through His ministry, His life, His teachings is that behind every rule is a wounded soul.
Let’s face it.
We are all broken.
And this brokenness leads some of us to take refuge in rules.
And rules are good.
Laws are good.
But we must be careful with them because laws can form judgment; whereas love forms relationships.
Jesus said the Pharisees were “hypocrites,” and told them that “justice, mercy and faithfulness” were what they needed to focus on.
But, they continued to “strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
Are we ever guilty of doing something similar?
Humans do have the tendency to major in the minors.
I believe it was the Bolshevik Church that spent their energies fighting over the length of the candlesticks on the Communion Table while the city burned in a bloody revolution outside their doors.
And wars are started because people are majoring in the minors.
Churches split because folks major in the minors.
We fight about the silliest things, while people are starving in the streets and folks are dying without a relationship with Christ!!!
Praise God; Jesus doesn’t major in the minors!!!
So the Pharisees had tons and tons of rules—everything from the kind of animals people were allowed and not allowed to eat to regulations about mildew.
I would say that could cause some despair, a sense of powerlessness—perhaps.
I mean, how were people supposed to know how to please God…
…it must have been a very frightening proposition, indeed!!!
Anyhow, “an expert in the law tested [Jesus] with this question: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’
Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
And that’s it!!!
That’s what it’s all about.
Now the loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind part comes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5.
It is part of the Jewish Shem(awww), which is the closest thing to a universal creed in Judaism.
It formed part of the prayer that every devout Jew prayed every day, in a tradition that continues unbroken to this day.
The part about loving our neighbor as ourself came from Leviticus 19:18.
But Jesus was the first One to ever combine the two into a single command.
For when Jesus says “the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’”…
…The word “like” does not mean merely that loving our neighbor is similar to loving God, but that it is of equal importance and is inseparable from loving God.
A person cannot love God without loving their neighbor, and vice versa!!!
The two go hand in hand.
When Jesus tells us to “Love our neighbor as ourself” in Luke’s Gospel…
…in order to remove all doubt as to who our neighbor is Jesus tells the story of the “Good Samaritan.”
You see, in Jesus’ day, a neighbor was thought to only be another upstanding Jew…
…not a Samaritan or someone of a different race or religion.
You weren’t under the compulsion to love “them.”
But Jesus changes the whole ballgame.
Our neighbor is anyone and everyone…period!!!
Do you love like that?
Do I?
Not in my own strength I can’t.
No one succeeds completely in keeping this Law.
Even those of us who have spent our whole lives trying to follow Jesus and live by His grace and love know that we fail miserably at this.
Yet this Law is life eternal.
What Jesus says about loving God and loving neighbor only makes sense when we set it within the larger picture of the Gospel—of Jesus dying for the sins of the world and rising again…
…and sending His Holy Spirit to live within those who will believe.
Are we not told in 1 John Chapter 4 that “We love…” only because… “God first loved us”?
It is God living inside us through the Holy Spirit which enables us to love.
It is the Holy Spirit transforming us into a new creation which enables us to love God and neighbor.
It’s all about grace.
It is not something we can do on our own.
It’s not about trying to follow a bunch of rules.
It’s about radical transformation.
It’s about becoming a new person all together.
It’s about losing ourselves in God.
And allowing God to love others through us….allowing God to take over.
“Just be yourself” we say.
In Christ, our true self is found in God and learning to love like God.
And that is the only place where there is rest in this world of “ordinary despair” and “discontent” in the face of the world’s enormous problems.
Jesus has come to save.
God so loves the world.
The Holy Spirit lives in you.
You can love because Jesus died for you.
And that….
….is what it’s all about!
Amen.
