Loving God

 

Text: Matthew 22:34-39

Focus: Loving others

Function: to help people see that we love God by loving others.

³⁴When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, ³⁵and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” ³⁷He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

Well, it seems to me to pretty simple to explain this passage. According to the Apostle Paul, it is the summary of all of the teachings in the bible.

And I love to focus on the concept because it frees us to obey Christ and to set his example to a broken and needy world. I want to be able to look at the world through the eyes of the Christ who sees the good and value inside of each and every human. Christ believed that all of humanity is worth redeeming.

We were valued worthy of redemption by God and it is evidenced in the cross of Christ and his example of non resistance in the face of evil. Oh that we could love and forgive like Jesus the Nazarene.

And we can! By the power of the Holy Spirit.

The gospel of Matthew was originally written in Aramaic, the language that Jesus and the disciples would have spoken to each other and it was translated into Greek. We don’t have any of the original Aramaic manuscripts left, so all of our translations are translation from an original text.

And Matthew, as a gospel was written for a specific audience. It was written for the Jewish constituency and it has a lot of symbolism about it that shows Jesus as the archetype of the sacrificial lamb that the Jews used to obtain forgiveness of sins.

Matthew shows how all of this happens during the week of Passover. And he shows Jesus as the sacrificial lamb. The lamb was chosen on Palm Sunday every year, it wasn’t known as Palm Sunday then, just the Sunday before Passover. And the lamb was presented to the leaders for inspection.

Matthew demonstrates how Jesus passes the inspection during Holy Week.

We read in the text that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees. That was Matthew showing us he passed the first part of the inspection. And now the Pharisees, the experts in the law, ask him a question and the text says that it wasn’t really a sincere question that they wanted to learn about or hear Jesus’ opinion on, but an insincere question used to test him.

I believe they were hoping he would fail. But in the end he outsmarted all of their tests, and passed.

It was in insincere question. But it isn’t the only time Jesus is asked this question in the different gospel accounts.

In this answer, Jesus gives the textbook answer: Love God with all your heart…. And he doesn’t stop there, he equates the answer with one other one. He won’t let “Love God” stand alone without saying, “Love one another.”

He makes them equal. And when he does this in one place, the Pharisees seems to agree with him and seems to perhaps repent and believe in Jesus’ message. In this case, the expert doesn’t seem to respond with an act of faith in Jesus’ teaching.

The question is asked sincerely at other places.

I would ask it this way: How we we practically God?

What does loving God look like?

There have been a lot of answers to that question over the ages. And sadly too many wars have been fought over misplaced devotion to religious principles.

During the Charismatic movement of the 70’s and 80’s, I used to lead the worship in a small Charismatic church. In that church, and during that point of my own Christian journey, I defined my love for God in the way I worshiped God. Mostly by singing and praying.

I wonder if a Church with “Bible” instead of Jesus in its name defines themselves as loving God by staying true to what they call God’s word.

There are a lot of ways Christians have defined loving God. Some good, some over zealous and destructive, like the Spanish Inquisition, or the Salem witch trials.

But Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey me.” And “the one who has seen me has seen the father.”

So, one could respond with the answer “Loving God is obeying Jesus.”

And I like that answer, it seems simple enough, or it can seem complicated. It gets complicated when our doctrine gets in the way of loving others.

I look forward to the day when we can share the same bread and cup of communion with our fellow Orthodox, and Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. But alas, our love for our doctrine has overshadowed our love for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

So, the question of how do we love God is made easier for us by Jesus who said: A new commandment I give you, Love one Another. By this, all people will know you are my disciples if you have love for others.” We call that the Great Commandment.

Last week we looked at the Great Commission. This week, we look at the Great Commandment. Love One Another.

Every single command in the bible is a subset of this one command that we love one another.

Time and time again, Jesus emphasizes this point in his teaching. And John the Apostle echoes the same sentiments exactly in his gospel and in his letters.

So, as I pointed out, Matthew exposes Jesus as the once for all sacrificial lamb for humanity. And after taking all that time to make the point, he comes to the 25^th chapter whereby we read the words from Jesus that those who care for the least of these are the sheep who will get the rewards and those who refuse are the goats who are denied the rewards of heaven.

He makes the case that if we refuse to show these physical acts of love then we are lost and not part of the new Kingdom that Jesus has come to establish.

It is almost like he is saying that by loving others, we gain our eternal reward.

We have taught in evangelical theology that there is nothing we can do to add to the love of God with our own works. Otherwise we could say that we earned it and it was not God’s mercy and grace that has saved us.

I believe it is a false understanding of what it means to be saved. To be saved is to be restored to God and to others. In my formative years, it simply meant we were not going to hell anymore. And for that blessing, we owed a lot.

But Jesus came to us to heal and restore us to God and to others. So no one can say they earned mercy because what we are talking about is the healing and restoring power of God in our lives that transforms us from selfish peoples into the light of the world, Christs’ disciples, Christ’s body in the world, the Church. Us.

So, we love God by loving others and that restores us to God and to each other.