What Other Commandment Would We Need?

This sermon, based on Matthew 22: 34-46 was first presented at First Baptist Church, 

Nashville, Tennessee at the "Word & Table Service". 

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?

Easy Answers

The members of the Sunday School class I teach and other friends that know me, know that when it comes to my faith, I do not accept easy answers for tough questions.  I am a skeptic by nature and faith does not come easy to me.  I have lived enough life to have suffered a little and struggled a lot.  The seemingly trite explanations of suffering or the traditional answers to biblical questions are not always easy for me to accept.  When I sit down with my Sunday School Class on Sunday mornings, I want us to wrestle with meaning of difficult passages.  I don’t want to skip over the unpleasant or difficult passages of the Bible.  When it comes to the familiar passages, I want us to slow down and not just accept traditional understandings.  In short, I take the bible and faith seriously, but it is not “easy”.

On a recent Sunday Morning, one of my longtime class members asked, “Just out of curiosity, is there any “easy answer” that you accept?  The class laughed and I blushed a bit.  I did not think of an answer right off, but the question stayed with me all week.  I reflected on the basic tenants of our faith.  I thought about various “truths” I have been taught through the years.  Ultimately, I came to the answer that I usually come to when thinking such thoughts – God is Love (I John 4:8).

I was eating lunch with a new friend this week and we were sharing the respective stories of our lives and how we came to be the people we are and do the work that we do.  I was struck, as I often am in hearing other’s stories, that though my friend’s story was nothing like mine on the surface, what we shared was an overwhelming experience of God’s love.  In my own story, I talk about a time in my life when I felt unloved and unloveable and a friend reached out to me and offered me love.  This act was followed by other friends demonstrating love to me – not wholesale approval of where my life was, but love and acceptance in the place that I was.  I have also experienced incredible love from my wife, Lynda.  This love demonstrated to me by friends has become an internalized experience of what I had previously professed as God’s love, but did not truly understand.  This love has become a living reality for me and the experience has been so profound, I want only to help others have such an experience. 

In a training I recently attended, I heard Richard Rohr say, “I am better at talking about love than doing it.” That sentiment immediately resonated with me.  Having had an experience of transforming love and having done study on the power of love, I am woefully aware of the times that I fail to provide it to others.  At times when I am tired, insecure, frustrated, hurt, anxious, fearful, among other feelings, I can let those other emotions cover and smother the desire to be loving.  Each day I pray that God would make me more loving; that I would live out in my life the love that I have experienced from God through others. 

All of that to say, while I may have questions about some of the fundamentals of my own faith tradition, I cannot just walk away from my faith because there is an experience of love that I have had that literally changed my life.  When I read the bible now, I see that love in the pages.  I desire to love others because I have experienced the love of God.  I desire to be an embodiment of that love for others.  There may be one or two others, but I know that the one “easy answer” that I accept is that God is love and God loves me (and you).  The journey to understanding that and learning to live that out in every circumstance of life is not all that easy, but I can imagine no other truth that is greater for me.  

Jesus replied: “‘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 the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Matthew 22:37-39)

The Modern Pharisees?

The Pharisees of the Gospels are portrayed as being legalistic and focused on outward appearance of righteousness to the exclusion of all else.  Many have written about how this may or may not be an accurate reflection of the religious leaders of Jesus’ time and others have defended the Pharisees’ desire for piety out of reverence for God.  While these things may be true, I would like to observe the actions and words of the Pharisees as they are portrayed. 

The Pharisees had achieved a position of respect and power and did not like anything that challenged that place of power.  They were scholars of the law and sought to remain pure and faithful to God by not violating any part of the law.  The Pharisees are portrayed as noting their own personal piety and seeking to go above and beyond what they believed God expected.  The Pharisee who prayed next to the tax collector in the temple prayed to God with a list of his great accomplishments and then thanked God that he was not like other men, including the one who was praying near him (Luke 18:11).  It is the Pharisees who brought to Jesus the woman caught in adultery (John 8).  It is the Pharisees that questioned Jesus about breaking the Sabbath by healing on the Sabbath (Luke 5:17) and gleaning grain from the fields on the Sabbath (Matt 12:1-3, Mark 2:22-25, Luke 6:1-3).  It is the Pharisees who condemned Jesus for eating with sinners and tax collectors (Matt 9:11, Mark 2:16, Luke 5:30).  This last issue is of particular focus.  To remain pure or to appear pure, the Pharisees would apparently avoid spending time with those that they considered to be sinful or anyone who would, according to the law, make them ceremonially unclean.  To spend time with such people would make them unclean and, therefore, not fit to participate in worship.  Because of their attempt to keep the law, they made distinctions between themselves and those that felt did not keep the law as they did.  They saw their understanding of God as superior and their attempt live out their understanding as making them superior to others. 

Throughout the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, the life, actions, and teachings of Jesus are presented as being the antithesis of the Pharisees.  Jesus is presented as valuing relationships over keeping the law.  He openly condemned the Pharisees for attempting to appear righteous while not attending to true transformation of their hearts (Matt 23:25-26, Luke 11:39).  He condemned their ways in his story of the Good Samaritan when noted that the Priest and the Levite passed by the injured man fearing that they would be made unclean rather than going to check on the man or offering care for him (Luke 10:25-37).  Jesus openly talked with a Samaritan woman (John 4:1-26) and he regularly ate with those who were considered outcasts, sinners, and tax collectors.  Eating with someone was more than sharing food or sharing a table.  It involved conversation and truly getting to know someone.  It was a sharing of lives and not just food.  When Jesus encountered others, he did not make distinctions among people and did not use the earthly labels that others used to divide themselves.  Jesus healed, talked with, ate with, taught, and loved people of all nationalities, genders, and backgrounds. 

In later years, Paul wrote that in Christ all earthly titles are meaningless.  When we follow Christ, when we are “In Christ”, we are to love one another and we are no longer defined by or define others by the earthly categories that divide people.  Paul names male and female, Jew and Greek, Slave and Free (Gal. 3:28).  In today’s world it might mean that we add the categories of Christian and Non-Christian, Rich and Poor, Democrat or Republican, and Gay and Straight.  In fact, what we read of love says that if we do all the right things, but do not have love, then our actions are worthless (I Cor. 13:1-3).  Jealousies, envy, fighting, all disappear when we truly love (I Cor. 13: 4-7).  When we look at another and see them as “Them” or “Those People”, even if are feelings are benevolent, we are still making distinctions among ourselves.  True love seeks to find the “person” within.  True love seeks whatever is true within that person.  True love seeks whatever is admirable in that person.

This is why I am deeply concerned about the efforts these days to codify the “freedom” of business owners to deny services to another on the grounds of religious beliefs (Arizona, Tennessee, Kansas).  Many of those who are seeking to have the “right” to refuse another person service because the other person does not fit with their understanding of God or God’s teachings identify themselves as Christians.   To say, “If I feel your life or behavior violates my understanding of God’s rules and laws and I do not want to have anything to do with you” is no better than the biblical Pharisees refusing to fellowship with others out of fear of appearing to be sinful or fear of being made unclean by the association.  However, Jesus’ example was that we should have intimate fellowship with these very people; that we should make no distinction between people.  It is not the example of Jesus to shun others.  It is not the example of Jesus to say if you do not obey the law, I will not have communion with you.  That mentality is one that is built on our own attempts to appear righteous and that type of mentality always results in us making distinctions between our attempts and what we might perceive as the lack of attempts in others.  The difficulty is that once we make a distinction between ourselves and others, we have left the example of Jesus.  If we truly believe that “All have sinned” (Rom 3:23), then none of us has any grounds to make distinction between ourselves and others.   

I realize the irony of writing this piece.  In writing this I am making a distinction between those that want to ostracize others and those that desire to be inclusive.  However, I will readily admit that I suck at following the example of Jesus.  In my heart I truly to desire to see others beyond the earthly labels.  In my counseling practice, I seek to know the person behind the traditional diagnoses.  When I am able to connect with that person, then I lose the distance that is created by the label.  The people are no longer “drug addicts”, “homeless”, “mentally ill”, “adulterers”, rich, poor, gay, straight, single, married or anything else.  When I am actually able to know the person, I see in them the person who yearns for wholeness.  I see the person who desires meaning.  I connect with the person who fears being alone.  I can connect with those things.  I can also identify the places that my clients have experienced love or have shown true self-less love.  I can see the places that they fight for justice.  I see in them creativity and beauty.  All these things I understand as a bit of their creator in them and I seek to help those parts grow.  There are times when my work feels very holy.  However, I leave my office and I curse the jackass who is tailgating me down the interstate.  I feel angry when I see people intentionally hurt one another or attempt exercise control over others.  I regularly feel impatient.  I get my feelings hurt and respond with anger.  I am a long way from achieving the ideal of being Christ-like.  I am grateful for the grace of God that allows me to get up each morning and try again.  When I am aware of my own struggles and the ways I hurt others, I can hardly stand in judgment of another person who is also on a spiritual journey.  This, I guess, is why I feel frustration when I see people who claim to follow the same Christ I do, seeking to condemn others, alienate others, or hurt others with whom they do not agree for some reason.  Let us seek something better.  Let us show our distinction as the Disciples of Christ by our love (John 13:35).  For when we love one another, only then do we truly fulfill the law of God (Rom.13:8).