GREATNESS

October 23, 2011
Pentecost 19
Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Matthew 22:34-46

(prayer)

The narrative of Moses and the Israelites’ freedom-journey from Egypt to Canaan is told in the books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Moses was born into a time of abhorrent persecution. Exodus tells us that a fearful Pharaoh worried about the cohesiveness and unity experienced among the (presumably) thousands of descendants of Jacob: “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” (Exodus 1:9-10). This led to two very oppressive actions: (1) the Israelites were forced into bitter and ruthless slavery and (2) the Pharaoh put in motion a plan to have male Hebrew babies put to death as soon after birth as possible.

Baby Moses was only saved from this infanticide because of the actions of his mother and sister, Miriam (who hid him in a basket on the river’s edge), and the Pharaoh’s own daughter (who hid him in her household, raising him as her own son).

Later, Moses was called by God to tell the Pharaoh to “let my people go.”

As a result, the Hebrews set out for the wilderness that separated Egypt from Canaan. Along the way, they were fed, even when food was scarce, they were provided with water in a dry desert and they were given a Law to govern their lives as they moved closer to Canaan.

By the time, the narrative reached Deuteronomy, chapter 34 (our first reading today), Moses and the people has made it all the way to the land of Moab and were just one river crossing away from the promised land of Canaan. Moses was 120 years old, but he still had lots of energy; he could still see pretty well and he had a sharp mind, teaching the people the nuances of the Law right up to his final days.

One of the last things Moses did was to hike up Moab’s Mount Nebo on the east side of the Jordan River. From there he could see deep into Canaan. God said to Moses “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, saying I will give it to your descendants.”

Moses was the first and great prophet; he achieved freedom for his people; he led them through a harsh wilderness for 40 years; he discerned the will of God for them and was the giver of the Law. In retrospect, we can see that his part in the story of faith was to lead the people to the promised land. He brought them to the doorstep. That was as far as his story went. Moses got to see Canaan from the top of Mount Nebo, but he never made it down from the mountain. He died in those hills and was buried down in the valley just east of the land to which he had led his people.

Moses greatness was celebrated with a thirty day mourning period. And they honoured Moses once again, by accepting the leadership of Moses’ apprentice, Joshua. It was Joshua’s part in the story to lead the people into Canaan.

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A Pharisaic expert in the Law asked Jesus a tricky question: “Which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” To the Hebrew people, the Law is more than the original Ten Commandments. It includes all of the interpretations and applications of the words which tradition eventually claimed that God shared with Moses. It is more likely that the details of the Law evolved over time. But the narrative tradition honours the greatness of Moses, by seeing him as the exclusive giver of the Law. In fact, the entire book of Deuteronomy is written in the context that Moses stood up before the people in Moab and detailed for them specific ways to live faithfully in peace. From long before Jesus’ time, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures (Genesis, Exodus Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) have been called the ‘Books of Moses’ or even just ‘The Law’.

So the question ‘Which commandment in the Law is the greatest?’ gives Jesus a lot of texts to choose from. The author of Matthew is convinced that the lawyer intended to criticize whatever answer Jesus gave.

So what was great in Jesus’ mind?

He quoted what we label as Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (also called the ‘shəma’): 4Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. 5You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

This simple commandment had come to be very close to the hearts of the Hebrew people. It is called the shəma because that word is the first word in the text (Hear). It is an affirmation of faith and it is a declaration that Yahweh is God. In Deuteronomy 6:7 the people are instructed (concerning the shəma commandment): 7Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

In Hebrew tradition these words are to be said as a prayer as people come and go from their homes – in the morning and at night. For many modern Jews, the words of the shəma are contained on a small plaque nailed to the house door post. People touch it and recite the shəma as they come and go. [The next time you’re watching the movie “Fiddler on the Roof” take note that Tevye takes his shəma off his door post as he prepares to leave Anatevka.]

Even in Jesus’ day: this daily, coming and going, prayer ritual is a legacy of the great prophet Moses. It was widely practiced. When Jesus answered the question about the greatest commandment with the words of the shəma – everyone listening had to have understood the centrality of those words. Jesus calls the shəma “the greatest and first commandment and then (even though he wasn’t asked) Jesus quickly names number two (what we label as the second part of Leviticus 19:18): 18...you shall love your neighbour as yourself.

”On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:40), Jesus concluded.

Jesus may indeed have given the perfect answer to the question: he makes a good point - the entire Torah really could be divided into two basic categories: laws that show a love for God and laws that show a love for people. Since Jesus covered the entire Torah with his answer, he must have answered correctly.

The greatest commandment is To Love.

The command to love is great!

It’s sort of like Jesus is saying that it is a great thing to love. And it isn’t too much of a leap to say that one who loves is doing a great thing or that greatness is seen in the living out of love.

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It’s easy to say (or even sing): “All you need is love. Do...dado..dado...”. But loving God requires a bit of letting go of some other things that distract us from faithful living. And loving others requires us to set aside judgements of who is worthy. Jesus calls us to love our neighbours, but let’s be honest some neighbours are easier to love than others! And if we are really honest: a few of them might seem impossible to love!

In order to participate as fully as possible in the living out of these great commandments, we have to be honest with ourselves about what might be holding us back.

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What can hold us back from loving neighbours as ourselves? Well first of all, that commandment implies that we love ourselves. That isn’t always true. When we look in the mirror: is there a part of us that questions whether we are worthy of love?

Every single one of us falls short of our potential: that’s a reality of the human experience.

But sometimes, the message from all around us exaggerates that point in a way that is beyond what really matters. Are we thin enough, fit enough, is our hair colour holding us back? Do our clothes or house or toys express “success”? Are we charitable enough; do we save enough for retirement; do we recycle enough?

If we let these questions mess with us too much, we can actually believe that we are not worthy of adoration and admiration. And yet, the centre of God’s torah is compassion and love – a love beyond condition or judgment. God does not see shortfalls or limitations – God (as the Bible says) “is” love!

If we can open to the belief that God loves us, we can love ourselves. That, Jesus kind of says, frees us up to be able to love our neighbours.

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Then we might ask: what holds us back from loving our neighbours? And I mean neighbour in the broadest possible sense. We find neighbours in many circles of our lives – within our families, in the church, in our neighbourhoods, our schools, our work places, around town, within our province, country and we have neighbours all over this globe! Everyone one is our neighbour!

Usually there are one of four attitudes that hold us back from loving the totality of our neighbours:

1. Fear

2. Anger

3. Selfishness

4. (and good old fashioned) Prejudice

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Fear is a hard attitude to shake. Fear is sold to us so strongly in our media. Lock your doors. Watch out for the gangs, the thieves, the terrorists. If it’s not West Nile, it’s H1N1 or the bird flu or SARS. Just barricade yourself and try and survive to see tomorrow. And of course, we are right on the edge of the end of the world (wasn’t it supposed to end this past Friday); don’t relax though, next year is 2012 and we all know what the Mayans said that means! Fear can paralyze us from loving neighbours.

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Anger has a lot of similarities to Fear. It is a lens through which we look at neighbours. Anger is a sign that something is out of balance in our lives – in that way, anger could be described as an out-going version of sadness. We are missing something: maybe we internalize that and feel sad or we externalize it and react out of anger. When we see the source of this imbalance as coming from others – anger can get in the way of loving our neighbour. It is very hard to be loving while we are angry. Anger can keep us from being able to love.

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We will never be able to focus our efforts on the love of neighbour if all we care about is ourselves. Selfishness is perhaps the greatest opponent of a love of neighbour. We might not be afraid of our neighbours, we might not be angry with them, but if we simply ignore them because our own narcissistic desires, we are a long way from the great love Jesus was talking about. The Love that Jesus preached cannot exist in a bubble only big enough for one (or the few closest to us). Selfishness will thwart many of our opportunities to live out the commandment to love.

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Some people limit their ability to love because of pre-conceived notions of who the neighbour is.

You know, in another new testament story Jesus reminded us that a love of neighbour really has nothing to do with the identity of the neighbour: it is found in Luke chapter 10 and is in response to a very similar passage we heard from Matthew today. Some of you may know this story. In response to the Levitical statement love your neighbour as yourself, the person talking to Jesus asked “ahh, but who is my neighbour?” Where are the edges of this requirement to love?

Jesus told the story about a person from Judea who was mugged along the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. The priest (who passed by) wouldn’t dirty himself by helping the injured man; likewise a Levite (a respected temple worker) walked on the other side of the road to avoid the man. In the end, it was a foreigner from Samaria who brought the man to safety and tended to his wounds. People from Judea did not like Samaritans – they were seen as unfaithful for their refusal to recognize Jerusalem as the centre for Hebrew life and faith. Samaritans were not neighbours in any sense of the word. [The feeling was mutual – Samaritans didn’t think much of Judeans. After all, what was Jerusalem compared to Bethel?] But in the context of this story, Jesus didn’t get into that old battle, but simply asked which person was a neighbour to the injured man? “The one who showed him mercy” was the only possible answer. Go and do the same, Jesus said.

In spite of Jesus words, some people (even many that consider themselves Christian) limit their ability to love because of pre-conceived notions of who the neighbour is. Whole groups of people can be written off as unworthy of love because of some category we put them in. Obviously, we see this in racism, homophobia, sexism. But I believe that overt prejudice on aspects of people that are beyond their control is quickly fading from our society. It is increasingly hard for people to find support for a prejudice based on skin colour or sexual orientation or gendre. For the vast majority of the younger generations, these are not issues at all.

And yet, there can be a lot of support for a prejudice based on ‘choices’ people have made.

Criminals, dictators, down-right evildoers: they don’t deserve our compassion and love, do they? Clifford Olsen’s and Paul Bernardo’s horrific actions have exempted them from being seen as neighbours worthy of our love, right? Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Muammar Ghadafi: these men did evil things. Surely, we can’t be expected to love them.

For some people of faith their religious fundamentalism doesn’t allow them to honestly have a love for people outside their expression and practice of faith. That kind of prejudice of okay, isn’t it?

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Jesus’ highlight of this commandment has its hard edge, where love is extremely challenging.

For me, I find it helpful to distinguish between “like” and love; between “respect” and love. I believe I can love someone I may not like or respect.

The love of that ancient commandment is a call to see ourselves as part of a wider circle of compassion – a compassion that is the source of existence itself. Without the love of God, life would not exist. And so, to love our neighbours (ALL our neighbours) is to appreciate the enduring and eternal love of God.

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That brings us back to the ‘greatest’ commandment: love God with your whole being (heart, soul, strength are the words used in Deuteronomy) – I know that the gospel writers have slightly different lists as they quote Jesus:

• Matthew: heart, soul and mind.

• Mark: heart, soul, mind and strength

• Luke: heart, soul, strength and mind.

Matthew eliminates ‘strength’ for some reason and they all add ‘mind’ to the list. Given that Greek philosophy and culture dominated the world of the Roman Empire: still strong from the years of Alexander the Great, some three hundred years earlier, this is not all that surprising – it may very well be true that the place of ‘reason’ was much more secure in the 1st century than it was in Moses’ day.

I kind of doubt that Jesus mis-quoted the shəma. But a few decades later when the authors of the gospels were writing in Greek to churches that were no longer exclusively Jewish, I can imagine, the ‘mind’ sneaking into the old story. It doesn’t really matter – even the three characteristics mentioned in the deuteronomic shəma should not be seen as an exhaustive list. The first and greatest commandment is to love God with everything we’ve got! The emotional (heart); the spiritual (soul); the physical (might, strength). Love God with all that we feel, with all that we believe and with all that we do!

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As I have reflected on this passage over the years, I have sort of concluded that the characteristic that is hardest for us to give to God is that one added by the gospel writers: love God with all that we think – love God with our whole mind.

As our species grows in knowledge, we can begin to think that there is no room or need for God. We are all that we need. We are masters of the universe. Any mystery that still exists is just a scientific breakthrough away. God is a figment of our imaginations. We can reason our way out of a need for God.

To be able to love God with our whole heart, soul and might in this modern world, we are faced with the challenge of loving God with our mind as well.

That requires another biblically-encouraged means of living: humility. The call to be humble invites us to temper our mind with our heart – to let feelings invade the realm of thought. All of the gospel writers knew that as they all included both the head and the heart in the list of ways to love God: and the heart is at the start of the list.

[Now a quick inside sermon for fans of the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, the notion of letting the heart into where the mind exists may come easier to an ISFJ, like myself; but remember my “T” friends, we all need to live away from our preferences from time to time – no matter what our four letters turn out to be, we all have the capacity to both think and feel. End of inside MBTI sermon.]

The simple truth is that faith is not rational. Faith is believing without seeing, without solid confirmation. Faith is believing without evidence.

Loving God invites us to love what may sometimes be hard to grasp. To love God is to let go of the notion that there is no real mystery out there.

There is really nothing other than blind reason that is stopping us from looking at this marvellous universe (and the wonder of the life we do know) and just humbly being open to the mystery that something, someone beyond our understanding is part of this experience along with us. God?

Which is the greatest commandment in all of the Law? ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.’ This is the first and greatest commandment and the second is like it ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

Jesus was not just saying nice words – Jesus was challenging those inspired by him to commit to the hard work of deep and honest and humble and faithful loving – especially when it might make sense not to.

Let us pray:

Holy and Great God,

In you is folded the mystery of our lives. Help us live out the kind of love you have for us. Amen.



#603VU “In Loving Partnership”