greatest commandment Archives - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

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. ♫

A painting in muted greys and whites, crossed by a broad diagonal shaft of pale light. At the centre, Jesus hangs on a white cross with his eyes closed and a halo behind his head. He wears a cloth headcovering and, as a loincloth, a white prayer shawl with black stripes. A Hebrew inscription runs beneath the letters INRI at the top of the cross, a ladder leans against it, and a lit menorah stands in a pool of light at its foot. Above the cross, four robed figures float, weeping and covering their faces. On the left, a mob carrying red flags charges towards a village of overturned houses, some burning, and a crowded boat of people raise their arms. On the right, a synagogue burns while a man in a brown uniform ransacks it. In the foreground, a man in a green coat with a sack on his back steps past a smoking scroll, another man clutches a Torah scroll to his chest, an old man wears a blank white sign, a woman holds a child, and open books lie scattered on the ground. — *Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion (1938). Hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Painted in response to Kristallnacht.*

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.