What Other Commandment Would We Need?
October 29, 2017
Last week we looked at the story of the Pharisees seeking to
trap or trick Jesus by forcing him to pick a side on the controversial issue of
paying the Roman tax. After that, in a
story we did not read, the Sadducees sought to trick Jesus on the issue of
marriage after the resurrection. Today, we once again see the Pharisees back to
trick Jesus. Tim Wildsmith did a great
job reflecting on this passage in the sanctuary service last week – as he
always does. I will do my best to keep
up this week.
In our reading from Matthew this morning, we see the
Pharisees trying to discredit Jesus by revealing what they assume will be his
lack of knowledge of the law. The name,
“Pharisee”, literally means “Separatist” and it alluded to the fact that the
Pharisees had as their purpose to separate themselves from ritually “unclean”
people and things. Beyond that, the
Pharisees were serious students of the Jewish law. They had studied the entirety of the Hebrew
scriptures (our Old Testament) and could tell you that they found 613 laws –
365 prohibitions and 248 positive commandments.
The Pharisees had studied each and every one. They had created sub-rules and ancillary laws
that were designed to make the existing laws clearer. For example, the Sabbath was to be remembered
as a day of rest and kept holy because that was one of the ten commandments
that God gave Moses. The Pharisees would
have discussed and collected rules about what it meant to keep the sabbath
holy; what could be done and what could not be done in order to honor that day
as intended.
Part of the discussion that Pharisees, and those like them,
would have had, would be to take those 613 laws and rank them according to
weight. The would have considered all
the laws to be important and would have sought to keep them all, but they would
rank them as which would be the most important or first among the laws. The Pharisees had already agreed that Deuteronomy
6:5 (that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and
might) was the most important of the
laws. So, their question to Jesus was to
test and see if he would also say the same thing or find out if he had studied
sufficiently to know what the “right” answer should be.
Jesus answers the Pharisees well and he adds the bonus
question of what is the second most important, which is to love your neighbor
as yourself. This was not radical for
Jesus to say this, but Jesus would have had a very different understanding of
what this meant than those who were questioning him. Jesus says that the entirety of the law and
prophets hangs on these two commandments.
Which is to say that every rule given by God in the old testament could be
summed up in Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as
yourself. While the Pharisees would have
still been seeking to obey all of the 613 laws and their additional
counterparts, Jesus is saying all you really need to know is love God with your
whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.
As Tim Wildsmith pointed out last week, these commands sound
pretty straightforward as presented. Do
I love God? Yes. Do I love other people? Well, not ALL the people and not necessarily
ALL the time, but I try. So, I am doing
pretty good. So, end of sermon. I love God.
I try to love other people. I’m
doing pretty good. And that is probably
what the Pharisees thought. They
certainly were trying to prove their love for God by obeying all the commandments. They would have also said they were seeking
to love their neighbor. However…
I told you a minute ago that the name, “Pharisee” means
“separatist”. However, that name is not
what the Pharisees called themselves. “Pharisee”
was a nickname used by people who were not Pharisees to describe this
group. The Pharisees actually referred
to themselves as “Haberim” which means…Neighbor. For the Pharisees to love their “neighbor” as
themselves was pretty easy if they considered their “neighbor” to be the people
that thought like them and lived like them, but Jesus demonstrates again and
again that this is not what he
means.
Earlier in Matthew (Chapter 5) Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? …And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Jesus’ story of the compassionate Samaritan man in Luke 10 is in response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus flips the question and does not say who is the neighbor but asks “who was a good neighbor to the man in need?” indicating that the importance is not on who to love, but how we love.
These greatest commandments would indicate that love originates with God, for the bible says that God is love. We must love God with our whole being. Jesus says to love God with your heart, soul, and mind. Deuteronomy says, “heart, soul, & might”. Other gospels include “Strength”. We could analyze each of these words and it would be interesting and enlightening (Tim did a bit of this last week and did a great job), but the point of including all these qualities (heart, soul, mind, might, strength) is they are inclusive of the whole of our being. They represent our intellect, our spirit, our feelings, our relationships and should encompass everything about us. The point of the commandment is to love God with your whole being and everything you have and everything that you are.
The reality is that though we say that we love God, we do not always show it with every part of our life. We have the parts that we hold on for ourselves out of fear, insecurity, materialism, lust, anger, among other reasons. Demonstrating our love for God with everything we are and everything we have is hard. We may desire it, but we rarely accomplish it. It is a good thing that our loving God perfectly is not a pre-requisite for God loving us perfectly. Our grasp of God’s love for us is the beginning of our ability to love God, love ourselves and love others. When we have aligned our whole being with the God who is love, then we, in turn, can love well.
The command is to love your neighbor as yourself. It is clear that this love of neighbor also grows from our love of self. It seems perhaps the implication would be that we already love ourselves. We already seek what is best for ourselves. We already try to get what we want or what we think we deserve. We are concerned about our rights and our freedom. We want to be sure we and those we love are taken care of. If this is the interpretation, then the encouragement is not just look out for your own interests, but look out for the interests of others as much as you look out for yourselves. It would be impossible for us to be completely selfish if we are considering others as important as we consider ourselves.
But many of us have been taught that we should not love ourselves at all. We have associated love of self with self-indulgence or selfishness. We don’t want to be selfish or self-focused and so instead, we focus on how we should be loving and serving others. However, this verse does not say Love your neighbor instead of yourself. It doesn’t even say love your neighbor more than yourself, but as much as you love yourself, love your neighbor that much. There is some love of self that is involved. I have thought a great deal about this passage through the years because my experience has been that in trying to live out different understandings of this and other passages in the bible, so many people have felt that they have been called to be doormats in the world to be walked on by others. In trying to live this out, some have tried to avoid arrogance and potential conflict and have limited their own abilities, diminished their own gifts, and denied their own wishes and will. In trying to always put others first and in the name of trying to keep the peace, many become “burned out” and exhausted because they are always giving and giving to others and never taking care of themselves. For many of us, to always deny ourselves and put others first without any conflict means we seek a kind of watered down conformity that does not allow for a genuine expression of our personality. For some it means limiting ourselves, not expressing our opinions or developing our own interests in order to make others happy. But I do not believe that this way of thinking about this passage captures healthy love of self either. If we are not practicing a healthy self-love, then we can assume that we are not practicing healthy love of others either.
There are two truths that form the foundation of healthy self-love. You have gifts and abilities and you are imperfect. You have gifts from God. These gifts are a combination of your genetics, your life experience, your influences, and more. Our personal calling and our source of fulfillment is often found, as Frederick Buechner said, “…[in] the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” We should follow our passions and gifts and seek to cultivate those things within us.
As we seek to cultivate our giftedness, we strive for excellence, but we must also acknowledge that we are also flawed and broken. Again, our genetics, our life experience, our psychology and other influences are always at work in us as well. Too many times when the evidence of our “failure” is exposed, we feel flawed. We are embarrassed, and we try to hide from others. We can beat ourselves up and we are hard on ourselves. However, if we are seeking to love God with our whole being, we might seek to accept that God loves us every day, all the time. The things we see as our failures are not game-changing incidents. They are merely setbacks in our effort to be all that God has created us to be. So, we accept that God loves us. We acknowledge that God is with us. We seek to learn from our setbacks and we get up each day and try again.
Loving ourselves is seeking to be all that God has created us to be in cultivating our gifts and passions and seeking to learn and grow from our setbacks knowing that God’s love is steadfast. Caring for ourselves, also includes caring for our physical and emotional selves. We seek to eat healthy, we exercise our body, and we seek to get adequate rest. It may mean that we do not waste our time trying to do things that others are more gifted at doing because our job is to what we do, as best we can.
Our healthy love of ourselves says that we do not think too little of ourselves because we are all loved by God and we are all gifted, but we cannot think too highly of ourselves because we are all flawed and broken. So, we are honest about our struggles and we encourage others when they struggle. We cultivate our gifts and we encourage others to cultivate theirs. As we seek to be all that God has called us to be, we help others become all that they are called to be. In our relationships we sometimes have difficulty because we are afraid that another’s success means that we might not get enough. We sometimes feel jealous of other’s gifts. However, the greatest commandment we have is to love God with all of what is in us, let the love of God inform how we love ourselves and, in turn, love others in the same way. What other commandment would we need? Is not everything we need to know wrapped up in these two great commandments – to love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself?
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