Love God; Love Your Neighbor
Matthew 22:34-46
Matthew 22:37-40 Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… This morning’s Gospel lesson poses two questions for our consideration: a Law question and a Gospel question. The Law question came from an expert in the Law, a Pharisee. It was designed to trap Jesus in His own words. The Pharisee asked, “Which is the great commandment in the Law?” “In other words, Jesus, if You could summarize all that Moses taught in one simple commandment, what would it be?”
The other question is a Gospel question, posed by Jesus. It was a question designed to trap the Pharisees in the forgiving grace of Christ: “What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He?”
The answer to the question, “Which is the great commandment of the Law?” was something the Pharisee wanted desperately to know. If God expects us to obey His law – and He does – then what does the Law require? The great debate among the teachers at the time of Jesus was whether the Torah, the five books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy), could be reduced to one essential commandment from which all the others flowed. They were, in a manner of speaking, searching for the Torah in a nutshell, a bumper-sticker slogan that would fully capture the Law of God.
But this amounted to nothing more than an attempt to defang the Doberman and render it harmless; it is what may be called “The religion of St. Minimum.” In other words, what is the least that I have to do to make it? How often do I really have to go to church? How much do I really have to give? How often do I really need to pray? How much do I really need to know? What’s the bottom line? The Religion of St. Minimum tries to keep things practical, keep things painless. It turns the Law into a household pet that you can put on a leash and take for a walk whenever you want to look religious. It delights in loopholes; it bargains with God to be “fair.” It tries to trim the Law down to a much more manageable size.
Jesus, of course, sensed the trap. He knows what is in a person’s heart. He knows how we twist and turn against God’s law. He replied with not one but two great commands: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.” Heart, soul, and mind is the Hebrew way of saying every last bit of you, nothing held back from God, the whole banana, the whole nine yards; you’re all in. Love God with every fiber of your being. That is the first and great commandment.
“And a second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself.” And most certainly the two commandments go hand in hand. The love of God and the love of neighbor are inseparable; you cannot claim to love God if you do not love your neighbor. On these two commandments – the love of God and the love of neighbor – the entire Torah and the Prophets hang. Essentially the entire law of God can be boiled down to two simple commandments: Love God with your whole being, and love whomever God puts in your face as you love yourself.
And if that still doesn’t fit on your bumper sticker, you can trim the Law down to one four-letter word: Love. Ah, but we have trouble with that word. We have been trained to think that love is a feeling, that love is something you fall into, a warm fuzzy on our insides. But love is not a feeling; it is an orientation of the will in action toward another. To love God and to love your neighbor does not primarily mean that you have particular feelings about God or your neighbor. That is not to say that love doesn’t have feelings associated with it; it certainly does. But love itself is not a feeling.
Neither is love something that you fall into. You fall into holes, you fall into ditches, you fall off a ladder, but you do not fall into love. The terminology “fall in love” is the world’s way of thinking. It’s a curious expression, “fall in love.” What do you think of when you hear the word “fall?” Losing your balance? Losing control? Falling is an out-of-control experience. People who have lost control of their lives often have nightmares of falling and then waking up feeling quite uncertain.
Love, however, is a deliberate action of the human will. To love means deliberately turning yourself toward someone, giving away something of yourself to someone and expecting nothing in return. In I Corinthians 13 St. Paul describes love in clear, self-sacrificing terms: “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” To love is to be turned inside-out toward someone outside of yourself – whether toward God or toward your neighbor.
As Jesus taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan, your neighbor, who is the object of your love, is anyone whom God has put in your path, anyone who has need of you at any particular moment. Or, if you want something a bit more earthy, your neighbors, according to Sesame Street, “are the people that you meet each day.”
Simply and clearly, we love God by loving our neighbor. The cup of water given to someone who is thirsty is given to God. The food given to the hungry is given to God. The comfort given to someone who is suffering is given to God. The time spent enriching the lives of others – at home, at work, in our community, and in our congregation – is time offered to God. Jesus made this very point in Matthew 25 as He taught the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.
How do we love God? Let us count the ways. We love God by having no other gods in our hearts, by giving God our whole-hearted fear, love, and trust. We love God by using His Name properly in worship and prayer, and by our glad attention to His Word. We love God by honoring the authorities He has placed over us in the home, in church, and in the state. We love god by caring for the health and well-being of our neighbor’s body, by upholding marriage in the way we conduct our own personal sexual lives, by helping our neighbor to improve and protect his possessions and income. We love God by upholding our neighbor’s reputation and not participating in gossip or slander. We love God by being content with what we have rather than continually coveting what we don’t have.
Those are some of the ways by which you love God and your neighbor. You know that. And you noticed in that list, didn’t you, the substance of the Ten Commandments.
But you also know and must confess that you do not love God as you have been commanded to do. There is a gnawing and deep fear within you when you hear the Law’s demand to love God and love your neighbor. You shudder at the command to be holy as God is holy. Or you try hard to deny it and ignore it, for who can be so loving, who can be so holy?
Repent. Repent of failing in these and many other ways and turn to Christ who has paid for all these offenses against your neighbor, and therefore against Him.
Now, this question of the Law leads to another question: “Who then can be saved?” Since God demands such wholehearted love for Himself and for others, then who would dare to presume to step into God’s presence? Would you? You know you don’t love like that. Not even Mother Theresa loved like that. That Law question kills you. Truth is, if the entire Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments, then you are hung by the Law and the Prophets.
And as long as we are asking such Law questions, we cannot arrive at the “Jesus question.” Jesus Himself asks the question: “What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is He?”
The Pharisees said that the Messiah or the Christ was David’s son, a blood-descendent of David. But there was more to the Messiah than royal blood in His family. How then can David’s son be David’s Lord, as David prayed by the Holy Spirit in the psalm, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, till I put thy enemies under thy feet”? That is the Jesus question, and the answer puts an end to all the questions.
The Messiah is David’s son, a human being, and He is also David’s Lord. He is both fully God and fully man, a truth we confess in the Creed when we say He is “begotten of His Father from all eternity” and “born of Mary.” Jesus is referring us to the mystery of His Incarnation, the mystery that in Him God has become man. He came to be holy as His Father in heaven is holy. He came to restore the image of God to our fallen humanity. He came to love God with His whole heart, with His entire being, with His whole mind. He came to love His neighbor as Himself.
Jesus came to love you with God’s love. He loved you even when you were unlovable. Jesus is love to the loveless. He loved you to death on His cross. As St. Paul writes in Rom 5:8, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While you were dead in your sinfulness, God gave you Christ’s perfect life, His horrible suffering, His gruesome death, and His glorious and victorious resurrection as a gift in your Baptism. Baptized into Christ, trusting by faith in Him and not in yourself, you are already perfect saints in the eyes of God. Eternal life is yours in Christ. Forgiveness of sins is yours. The perfect love of God is yours. And so is the faith by which you are able to believe and grasp all of these gifts and promises of God.
And your love flows from God’s love. I John 4:19 states, “We love Him because He first loved us.” When you love, it is because you have first been loved by God in Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection frees you to love God and to love your neighbor. You no longer have to love; you get to love. You don’t love in order to get to heaven; you love because heaven is already yours in Christ. You don’t love in order to win God’s favor; you love because you already have God’s favor in Christ. You don’t love so that God will love you in return; you love because God has already loved you in Christ with the greatest love you will ever know, the crucified love of Jesus.
Which is the greatest command of the Law? Love God; love your neighbor. On these hang the entire Torah and the Prophets. Greater than your love, and greater than the Law that judges your love, is the One who loves perfectly – David’s Son and David’s Lord, Jesus the Christ. On Him hangs the sin of the world. On Him hangs your life and your salvation.
And to strengthen and keep you in that one true faith, Christ comes to you with His true body and blood right here at this altar each and every Lord’s Day and other days through the year. Here is real, tangible forgiveness, strength, and certainty, because here is the real, tangible Son of David and Son of God. This is the real thing, a real taste of His love for you.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
