7.30pm Compline for Tuesday in Holy Week, All Saint Oakham
Matthew 22.34-43
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He 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 neighbour as yourself.”On these hang all the law and the prophets.’
‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’
As we heard last night, so again tonight we hear of another attempt by the religious authorities in Jerusalem to test Jesus, to catch him out and disparage him in the eyes of the people, ultimately to destroy him. This time one of the Pharisees asks which of the 613 precepts of the Torah is the most important. Jesus reminds them that this is already settled, quoting the scriptures in answer, giving what we sometimes call the two great commandments: Love God with all your heart and soul and mind; and love your neighbour as yourself.
This episode also appears in Mark’s Gospel and it closes with the questioner praising Jesus for his understanding, and Jesus seeing something in the scribe which makes him say ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God’, an exchange which stops the questioning in its tracks. Here in Matthew, Jesus faces his opponents directly with an answer which is not some new teaching, but a restatement of the central prayer of the Jewish people: the Shema, from Deuteronomy 6 beginning; 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 might. It goes on: Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates…
That is, make these words part of your life, shaping everything about you, and the community in which you live. The second commandment Jesus gives comes from Leviticus, a book which, among other things, gives moral and legal and practical guidance on how to live as God’s people, and extends the concept of ‘neighbour’ to include the aliens, the people who come from ‘somewhere else’.
This attempt to discredit Jesus leads into a whole section in which Jesus calls out the behaviour and attitudes of the scribes and pharisees, calling them ‘blind guides’ and ‘hypocrites’ who lay religious burdens on the people and do nothing to take them away; who look splendid on the outside but are rotten on the inside. He laments for Jerusalem – he says ‘how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings’ – but the city will reject him and his re-stating of God’s invitation to love.
As we look toward our remembrance of the death and resurrection of Jesus, how do we stand in relation to the invitation of God to love? Do we talk to one another about our love of God and one another, wearing our love in our hearts if not on our foreheads and doorposts? We can be quite reticent about these things, but even to think about them is a beginning: to spend some time reflecting on what Jesus has told us: to love God and our neighbour are the priorities for our lives; and if we love our neighbour as ourselves we should be recognising that we are also made in the image and likeness of God, able to love and be loved. And it will take work, to apply all our heart and soul and mind – there are so many distractions along the way, and it’s easy for these other things to push their way to the front of the queue for our attention. But we can come back to these commandments often, and bring them to our own lives. How do I see God’s love for me expressed? How do I love God? Who is my neighbour? When in my life does my heart burn within me with love?
We too might need to learn to call out the secular and religious authorities of our time, to open doors and minds so that our neighbours might flourish and walk in the light of the Lord. This is what we are called to do – but not as a burden. Where Leviticus and Deuteronomy are heavy on ‘you shall not’, these calls to love are an opening, an invitation. As the Dominican Timothy Radcliffe, in his book Alive for God says:
As Christians we are can make the hearts of non-believers burn within them if we just communicate the truth that our religion is ’not just a moral code designed to keep us in order, but a vibrant way of life’
And we do this when we turn our own faces fully into the light, so that we might become lights ourselves, and that our love might grow, for the sharing of the Good News, the Gospel of love, and for the glory of God.
For where God is, there love is; and where love is, God is there too, even as we move towards the darkness of Gethsemane. It is the love of God which will bring us through the darkness to the light of Easter.