The 503rd Anniversary of the Reformation
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Saint Matthew 22:34-46
If there is anything these past ten months of pandemic has forced us to do is decide what is important and what is not.
Is it important that we go out for dinner, gather at a house party with friends, attend a concert, play or sporting event or not? We’ve had to decide if the wedding we were planning to attend or, for some couples even have, is worth the risk to family and friends.
Even as a church we have struggled are struggling still with just how important is it to gather for worship. There is no doubt that we want to it is just that we wonder if it is safe.
There is a certain level of emotional maturity to has to be exhibited by people of every age in realizing that we can’t always do what we want to do when we want to do it. Emotional maturity forces us to ask if what I want to do safe. And true emotional maturity requires us to ask not only is it safe for me but is it safe for those friends and strangers around me.
Every parent of a teenage son or daughter has had to say to their offspring at one time or another: “You may want to do it but you can’t.” And that is a struggle that we face as individuals, as a society, and even as a congregation.
Is coming together safe? Should we continue to gather in person or would it be better to only offer online worship experiences? Will we be like restaurants open at limited capacity one Sunday only to be closed the next. Will we get confused, frustrated, fatigued? Will we want to throw caution to the wind, rip off our masks, sing at the top of our lungs and say, “It the Lord wants me let him take me!” Or will we wait it out patiently?
The question before us is simply what is important. The question put to Jesus in today’s gospel can help us answer the “what’s important” question that has been before us throughout the year 2020.
Jesus and the leaders of his day have been asking the same question of each other ever since he began his ministry.
Mostly Jesus has been the one doing the asking. He heals people whenever the need arises be it on the Sabaoth or not asking, “What’s more important keeping the law or alleviating someone’s suffering?” He talks and dines with anybody and everybody who comes his way and in so doing asks, “Is it really important that there be insiders and outsiders?”
It is no wonder that the leaders wonder to themselves, “What is important to this guy? What truths does he hold to? Where are his guardrails?”
The Pharisees have failed to figure Jesus out. The Sadducees haven’t done much better and so a lawyer tries his hand. Remember this is long before one the characters in Shakespear’s play Henry VI suggests that one of the ways the band of pretenders to the throne can do to protect their country is: “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”1
Jesus doesn’t appear willing to do even this because he treats the learned man’s question with respect giving him a direct answer.
You want to know what’s the most important, what matters to God, out of all that God commanded what’s the biggie, the first? It’s exactly the command that God said to bind on your arms and your forehead for prayers so that it’s as close to your mind as possible, so that you can’t forget it even if you tried: Love God with all you’ve got to love God. God gave you heart and soul and mind for that reason: so that you’d be able to love God. “This is the first and greatest commandment,” Jesus says.
We can almost hear the Pharisees listening in as their lawyer examines Jesus start to sigh as Jesus gives this answer. It must be what they were hoping to hear, a nice traditional answer, hearkening back to one of their favorite passages.
Jesus continues, “And the second is like it,” raising some eyebrows. Didn’t the lawyer only ask him which was the greatest? What’s he mean, “the second?"
The second is, “You must love your neighbor as you love yourself”. The pharisees sigh a second sigh of relief. He’s just quoting Leviticus. He knows Israel’s scriptures, quotes the Torah. Maybe he’s not such a novel and dangerous teacher after all.
Jesus concludes, “All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” That seems reasonable to us. Why wouldn’t the Law, the Torah, God’s commandments for God’s chosen people, and the Prophets, God’s words to Israel through God’s human messengers, depend on loving God and loving neighbor as self? Really, when we think about it, loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves doesn’t sound like particularly revolutionary moral guidance either. Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do anyway? Isn’t that what nice people regardless of denomination, creed, religion, sexual orientation, nation of origin, or political party are trying to do? To be loving of God, neighbor, self?
No. We know that is isn’t. We wish that is was but it isn’t. There is a lot of meanness in the world and a lot of divisiveness.
That’s why some churches don’t make much of Reformation Sunday any longer. It was only used to be another way of dividing Christians one from another. We try not to do that anymore because there are enough divisions already in the world.
Jesus upped the anti of what’s important by adding this “loving our neighbour” business. We may like our neighbours! We may tolerate our neighbours! We may wave to them over the fence on occasion, but love them?
The guy with the bigger than a billboard yard sign with the name of a candidate I oppose if not downright hate, I’m supposed to love him? The family down the block who seems to have a never ending summer of barbeques (even in an age of Covid!) all accompanied by the boom, boom, boom of loud music, I’m supposed to love them? The person at work who is a pain, them? “Yes,” Jesus says, “Them.”
And we say, “Wouldn’t it have been better if you would have stuck with the original ten commandments rather than adding this condition?”
In his commentary biblical scholar Douglas Hare reminds us:
In an age when the word 'love' is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary component of biblical love is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that Deuteronomy demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment. Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel affection for them. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously.3
That kind of love calls us to speak out when we see a neighbour hurt, or devalued, or treated poorly because, like them or not, we see them as a child of God deserving of love, and care, and compassion.
That is something that is so hard it can’t just be somewhere in writing it has to be in the words of Jeremiah:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.4
If you ever visited an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood you might see men wearing two boxes known as phylacteries (the Greek word) or in the Hebrew a Tefillin. One is strapped to the head to represent thought and the other is strapped to the arm at the same level of the heart. “The head-tefillin imbues ... the idea of subjugating [the] intellect for the love of God. The arm-tefillin, focuses on devoting the person’s strength to the Almighty."5 I admire not only what Tefillins stand for but the courage of those who wear them.
What they represent is just like Jesus said. Love of God and Love of neighbour. Love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. As Dr. James Howell reminds us:
God is just pivoting around you, asking you to love God with every fiber of your being, not casually, not when it’s convenient, or just when there’s trouble. To be sure they understood God wishes to be loved all day long, every day, in everything.”6
And God wishes us to show that love to each other as well.
Times like these remind us again of what is important.
Jesus never said that if we loved him he would take away any challenge but he reminds us that we do not face these challenges on our own because we know that on our own because we know that on our own we don’t have any chance of facing what life throws at us. No one can, or should, ever say, “I alone can do it.”
We need to remember that God is with us and God will show us how to face adversities step by step, day by day, linked to Jesus. And God has given us each other – brothers and sisters – trying to follow God by staying close to Jesus.
Today Jesus has reminded us to hang on to these two most important things during these times and at all times: To love God with all of our heart, and soul, and mind and strength. And to love our neighbours as ourselves.
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1. William Shakespear, Henry VI.
2. William H. Willimon, “Christ Shaped Love,” Pulpit Resource 48, no. 4 (2020): pp. 12-14.
3. Douglas R. A. Hare, Matthew: Interpretation: a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 260.
4. Jeremiah 31:31 & 33. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
5. Shraga Simmons, “Tefillin: A Primer,” aishcom, accessed October 24, 2020, https://www.aish.com/jl/m/pb/48969816.html.
6. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say October 25? 21st after Pentecost,” James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 1970, http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
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