Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne
Readings – 1 Thessalonians 2. 1–8; Matthew 22. 34–46
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
♪ There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung. All you need is love (x3). Love is all you need. ♫
We all know that song by The Beatles. It’s just so sixties, isn’t it? Flower power was going to save the world. All you need is love. Except it didn’t turn out that way. The optimism faded as we found we couldn’t magic away war by sticking flowers into gun barrels any more than we could magic away crime by social science and psychology.
Our own Turbulent Twenties have never been anything other than a dark and troubled time – the era of Netanyahu and Hamas and Trump and Putin. All you need is love? Well, none of us would like to live without love, but is it really all you need? I mean, a drone production industry and a nuclear deterrent are also quite useful.
Surely all this talk of love being what holds up the law is all very well and good for the idealistically minded, but it’s not very practical in a world of serious criminals and political hard men, is it? Well, that’s what we’re tempted to say anyway.
But, hang on, let’s ask ourselves where and when Jesus says that loving God is the greatest commandment, and that the second is to love your neighbour as yourself. It’s just a few days before He’s crucified, in the Temple, the stronghold of the Jerusalem religious establishment, which is already plotting to have Him killed. And Jesus knows all this.
There’s more: by this point Jesus has already been ambushed twice in the Temple. First He was asked about tax – “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and all that; then about the Resurrection – the woman who married seven brothers in succession after they mysteriously kept dying. Now a clever religious lawyer is trying a third trick question. And Jesus doesn’t hesitate or dissemble – so different from the sort of political interviews we get on the TV – but comes straight back with a straight answer, a two-part answer directly from the Law of Moses, one part from Deuteronomy and one part from Leviticus.
Jesus says the most important commandment is to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind. This comes from Moses’ final speeches to the Hebrews as recorded in Deuteronomy, just before he died and the Hebrews crossed into the promised land under Joshua. This is a text that Jews back then – and still today – know as the Shema. Some of you will know about Orthodox Jews wearing little biblical texts strapped to their foreheads and their arms – well, one of the texts is this, the Shema. Jews recite it twice a day and it isn’t written in touchy-feely language but in the language of covenant: a binding agreement of love between God and His people. There’s no arguing with Jesus here.
Jesus says the second most important commandment is like it – linked to it, in fact, by love: that is to love your neighbour as yourself. It comes from Leviticus, which records it as part of the Holiness Code that Moses gave the Hebrews when they were camped at Mount Sinai early in their wanderings in the wilderness. While some later rabbis also esteemed this call to love of neighbour highly, it seems to have been a genuinely radical move for Jesus to pair it with the Shema as the capstone of the law and the prophets.
This is a gutsy, brave answer, to which there is no comeback. It’s a perfect answer – a divine answer.
After seeing off all these attempts to trap Him, He follows up with a question about how the Son of David could be called Lord by David, quoting the Psalms with a few traps of His own. It was such a clever riposte that Matthew records that from that day nobody dared ask Jesus any more questions. Instead, the people who opposed Him seem to have become determined to kill Him.
So this proclamation of the primacy of love comes in the face of death, in a place of acute danger, as an answer to people who are out, at best, to trap and publicly humiliate Christ. This is a love that is capable of remaining true even surrounded by the worst lies of power, and control, and hate. This is what genuinely tough love looks like.
St Paul knew all about that kind of gutsy love. In our first reading he reminds the Thessalonians that he came to them straight from Philippi, where he’d been beaten and thrown in gaol. Yet he had the courage to declare the gospel to them in Thessalonica despite local opposition. Another part of the Bible, the Acts of the Apostles, tells us it was so fierce that his friends had to smuggle him out of town by night. Paul was very proud of this young Church in that tough port city, which seems to have been made up almost entirely of converts from Gentile backgrounds: it was among the first fruits of his radical decision to actively seek converts beyond the Jewish community.
Paul is usually imagined to be a bit of a hard nut, and he was certainly capable of writing hard things to the churches he founded when he felt they needed it. But, here, he reminds the Thessalonians how gentle he had been among them, like a nurse tenderly caring for her children, in the days when their faith in Christ was new. The Roman Empire prized the dominant virtues – getting on and making your name in the world, with your elbows out as needed. Paul, in contrast, modelled gentleness and tenderness in the name of Christ.
And Paul writes that he shared his very self with the Thessalonians. In this he imitated Christ, who shares Himself with us, each and every time we celebrate Holy Communion. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under His table – but He is the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Christ still offers Himself for us, body and blood, in broken bread and shared wine – a sacrament of His eternal presence with and love for us.
Christ saying that all the law and the prophets hang on love of God and neighbour has tremendous implications for us. Following Christ isn’t just about service of neighbour, detached from faith in God. Loving God is not an optional extra for Christians but our primary goal. Meanwhile, loving our neighbour as ourselves implies we should love ourselves not because we are perfect, but because we know that God loves us in all our imperfections.
Remember that Christ didn’t give this answer in a place of safety and security, but in the face of cunning, and lies, and His own imminent death. The hard men of His own time seemed to have won just a few days after this encounter, when they nailed Him to a cross. But what seemed to be the defeat of love was actually the seed of its universal triumph when God raised Christ to eternal life on high.
Love seems to suffer defeat after defeat in the short term – but it always wins in the end. So, in a world where the hard men who dominate the news headlines seem to make most of the running, have the guts to be gentle. Love God and neighbour on earth, and you will share in Christ’s eternal victory in heaven.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.