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Sermon - The Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 26th October 2008
St Alban's Epping 2, 8, 10am
I love books. I love bookshops. I enjoy reading new books. I enjoy relaxing with a good book. But there was one title that really surprised me. It is still on sale, and its selling fairly well. Its called “The Bible for Dummies.” Why would you do that to the Bible? It sounds like “Shakespeare for Dummies” or “Jane Austin for Dummies”. but with such a big book, with a book that covers such a span of history with a book including so much material I could understand why you’d have a book like “The Bible for Dummies.” It helps to have a book that takes you to the essential truths of the Bible. When we think about the Bible and all it teachers, what is it that we really need to remember.
This is what is being asked in our gospel reading. Jesus and the Pharisees had been in a hot debate over a range of issues. Surprisingly, though they felt threatened by Jesus, they found a lot they could agree on. And so they focussed upon the heart of their faith. They asked Jesus which was the greatest commandment. They understood the essential teaching from God came in the form of commandments. For example, they would have in mind the 10 commandments. For the Jews, they believed that the people were those who kept the commandments.
Their problem was, they had 613 commandments, and they knew that no person could keep all 613 of them. So the question became, which were the important, essential commandments, and which were not so important. And with any group, they soon split into factions where some said one lot of commandments were the most important while the others picked a different list that they said was most important. So which group was right and which commandments mattered the most. And so the argument went on.
And notice here that they asked Jesus this question as a way of testing him, perhaps a way of tricking him, and perhaps a way of alienating him from others. They asked Jesus, which is the greatest commandment. And Jesus shocked them with his answer. He said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And this was a great answer. Every Jewish male was expected to make this affirmation of their faith every day of their lives. No one in Israel could criticize Jesus for claiming this to be the greatest commandment.
To summarize the Bible, to summarize those 613 commandments to get to the very heart of the message we could do no better than to start there. The greatest commandment is to love God. But then Jesus took a bold step to claim that there was a second commandment. And this second commandment is like the first. It is a mirror of the first or we could say it is the complement of the first, that is, you really can’t have one without the other and that command is to love your neighbour as your self. So we have these two great commandments. “Love God and love your neighbour as yourself.”
And notice what Jesus says about them. “All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.” None of the law or the prophets makes any sense without these two commandments. They are at the heart of it all. Jesus made a similar comment near the beginning of his ministry in Matthew 7. He said “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.” This is just another way of expressing the importance of loving your neighbour.
But in all of this Jesus is making a second point. Because the heart of our faith is more than what we believe, its about what we do. People have criticized Christianity by saying it requires us to believe six impossible things before breakfast. But here the emphasis is upon the doing as well as the believing. Love is never seen as a theoretical thing where we say we love in theory. It is expected that love will always be express in actions, in loving actions. Love will be seen in what we do. That is why we have instructions in Paul’s letters concerning our duty to love. So he provides commands for husbands and wives to love one another. He provides instructions concerning the care of children. Love must be put into action. Love is seen in what we do.
Paul provides general instruction to congregations “Holy and dearly loves, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” (Colossians 3:12-14). This is all about love from beginning to end. The great challenge for a church community is to be a community of love. That’s not easy. And yet, without it, a church cannot function.
A friend of mine told me how his church is being ripped apart. Its not because of what they believe. It is not a dispute over doctrine. What is killing his church is gossip. People spreading rumours. People talking behind others backs. People telling stories that just aren’t true. Love can’t thrive in a community like that. The challenge for any community of faith is to love God and to love their neighbour. Some churches are good at loving God but they forget the world. Others are great at caring for people but they ignore God entirely. The real trick is to do both. To love God and to love our neighbour.
But its at this point that someone from the crowd speaks up and asks “Who is my neighbour?” And its at there that Jesus’ teaching took a radical new direction. A well know motto from the ancient world was “love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But when Jesus was asked the question “Who is my neighbour?” he told the story of the good Samaritan, the story of the love shown by one enemy to another. Jesus’ challenge is that anyone will love the person that loves them.
But the real distinctive of Christianity is to love those who hate us. This has always been a difficult command to understand let alone follow. What’s more, we’ve been told that in modern times we face new conditions, we face a new kind of enemy., we face a new kind of war. And the old rules no longer apply. That we cannot afford to show any weakness, any tolerance for this new enemy. Well its still a matter for debate whether there is anything new about the current enemy. People have always devised clever arguments to contradict Jesus’ teaching.
But Jesus command to love your enemy was always taken very seriously. He never argued for this kind of love in theory alone. He added authority to this teaching by putting it into practice himself. He allowed himself to be arrested. He gave himself up to the cross in an act of love for his enemies. Christianity can sound weak and otherworldly when we describe it as a religion of love. But it began in an environment where it was important to learn how to live with one’s enemies. It taught Christians how to live under Roman rule. At its heart we must love God and love our neighbours. But it takes on a new challenge a new radical dimension when we consider the implications of loving your enemy. Yet the message of Jesus if of this new, deeper, universal love, a love that Jesus put into action, a love that he calls on the church to follow. The real challenge of Christianity is not the understanding of it, it is the doing of it. Do we have the courage to follow Jesus. Will we dare to do what he has done?