The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
October 26, 2008
Matthew 22:34-46

The breeze of God’s love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen.

A lawyer asked [Jesus] a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" [Jesus] said to him, "`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 neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

I have to confess that every time I sat down to work with these readings this week, a Beatles song popped into my head. “All you need is love…all you need is love….all you need is love, love; love is all you need, love is all you need.”

All you need is love. It sounds so easy, doesn’t it? And it’s a sentiment we readily succumb to—especially the romantics among us: If we just have love, everything else will work out. It is tempting, I think, to boil what Jesus is saying in today’s gospel down to that kind of platitude; it is tempting, but it would, I’m afraid, be missing the point. Because when Jesus gives this summary of the law, as we’ve come to know it, Jesus is not just calling us to love God, not just calling us to love our neighbors. Jesus is not saying, “Love is all you need.” Rather Jesus is calling us to love God and then to make that love the basis for everything we do, to live that love out actively in the world.

Today’s gospel again finds Jesus in the Temple precincts. If you remember from the last couple of weeks, Jesus has been engaged in a series of debates with the Temple officials who question his authority to teach and to preach, and who attempt to trick Jesus into saying something they can use against him. Now we find a lawyer approaching to ask Jesus, “…which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

For us Christians it’s easy to see this question as referring to the Ten Commandments; we’ve all heard the stories about Moses bring those commandments down from the mountain, and it is those commandments that we ourselves often memorize as children, recite in the Great Litany during Lent, or see displayed in churches. So we might hear this question as “which of those 10 commandments is the greatest?” But in fact this question was encompassing a whole body of law of which the Decalogue is only a small part. By rabbinic count, the body of Mosaic Law found in Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew bible) there are some 613 laws that must be obeyed. So when Jesus is asked this question, it’s sort of like asking a congressperson or perhaps a judicial nominee which, out of the whole body of federal law, is the most important? Can you imagine trying to answer that question?

And indeed, Jesus was not the first, and likely not the last teacher to be so queried. Rabbis often debated about “light” and “heavy” law, and the great Rabbi Hillel was reportedly once asked by a Gentile to “Teach me Torah while you stand on one foot,” to which Hillel replied, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation; go and learn," a maxim we might recognize as the “golden rule”.

In his answer Jesus quotes two pieces of scripture that would’ve been very familiar to his audience. The first, Deuteronomy 6:5 comprises the second verse of the Shema, the Hebrew prayer recited twice daily by pious Jews both then and now:

Shema Yisra’el, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad

Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

And the second, Leviticus 19:18 ends with “Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

In citing these two passages, Jesus, like Rabbi Hillel, does not attempt to elevate one piece of law over others; instead he gets at the very essence of the whole body of law, the underlying principle, and he emphasizes this fact by saying, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” They do not replace the law; rather, they are the thread on which the law hangs, the foundation on which the law is built. All the rest—all those 613 rules--reflects a living out of that love for God and that love for neighbor.

We Christians, of course, are no longer bound by the many tenets of Mosaic Law. But that doesn’t let us off the hook, because we are bound by the life of discipleship Jesus calls us to. And just as these commandments to love God and our neighbor are at the root of the law—the reason for the law in some respects--so too are they at the root of the gospel imperatives to feed the hungry and care the poor and oppressed, at the root of the Kingdom of God Jesus heralds in, at the root of all we are called to do and be in this world and the next. Loving God is the bedrock; it is the foundation on which we build our faith. If we fail to love God with our entire being, if God does not come first, all the rest is meaningless. But if we do love God ad make that love central in our lives, then loving our selves and our neighbor as our selves flows naturally and becomes a way of living out that love of God. For if we truly love God and place God at the center of our lives, how can we not also love all that is created by God and reflects God’s image?

But it goes the other way, too. In a very real sense, love is not all we need. If we love God, but we fail to reflect that love in our lives, if we fail to live it out, to demonstrate it in everything we do in the world, we are still missing the mark; our love becomes hollow and meaningless. Because the love we have for God, the love God demands from us is an active love, a motivating love, an energizing love, and when we truly embrace that love for God, it cannot help but overflow into the world.

Is love all we need? Yes and no. We are called to love God with all our hearts and all our souls---with all of our very being. That love reflects the love that God has for us, God’s children, and in one sense that is all we need. But in another sense, that love is the starting point, not an end in itself, it is something active not passive. We are called to love God with all our being AND we are called to live that love out, to express it in everything we do, to let it bubble up and overflow and fill the world. And when we do that fully and completely and without reservation, then we shall sure know the Kingdom of God.

AMEN