Leviticus 19.1-2, 15-18; Matthew 22.34-46
Jesus says that all the books, pages, and verses of the Bible are summed up in one concise statement: love God and love your neighbor.
This is not new information. Jesus simply focuses and deepens the scriptures’ core message. He cites two passages from early in the Bible: Deuteronomy 6, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might;” and today’s reading from Leviticus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
These two commands, Jesus says, are like hinges opening the one door to a God-centered, God-directed life. Jesus unites these two commands and exalts them above all other biblical teaching and wisdom.
In doing this, Jesus stands in a long line of biblical tradition and witness summarizing God’s will into clear, concise statements. One of the most famous and familiar is from the Old Testament prophet Micah. “The Lord has told you what is good and what the Lord requires: to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with your God.”
Another is when the Lord speaks through the prophet Amos. During Amos’ time, God’s people were outwardly prosperous; yet that same prosperity concealed exploitation, corruption, and religious complacency all beneath the surface. The Lord’s message through Amos was simple. “Seek me, and live.”
When Jesus makes love of God and love of neighbor the fundamental truth of faith, seeking God and seeking to care for others, he gives us a direction to face and a way to be. The very core of our being—heart, soul, and mind—filled with devotion to God; and that same devotion overflowing outward in how we treat others. You shall love the Lord your God. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
And note how, for Jesus, the starting point and orientation for a life of faith is love. Love is first and foremost: not fear, compliance, or towing the line; not outdoing the people around us, not being the smartest person in the room, not even being right. Love.
Isn’t this what St Paul says in his famous chapter on love, 1st Corinthians 13? If I speak like an angel, understand the hidden ways of God, accomplish noteworthy things in my life, none of it matters if love is missing. If “I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Jesus, when asked about the core message of a life of faith, begins with love. You shall love the Lord your God…You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus gives us a direction to face and a way to be.
Yet the challenge in understanding Jesus’ double command to love both God and neighbor, and applying it in our lives, is that it’s easy to lose sight of the biblical meaning of love. We often equate love with warm feelings or intense emotion. ‘I love autumn, it’s my favorite season; I love sleeping in on the weekends, it’s the one chance I have to make time for myself. But in the scriptures, love is not primarily a feeling, it is an act of will.
To love God is not simply to feel affection toward God, though to love God with our heart does mean there will be times when our deepest desires and affections are grasped by what Psalm 16 means when it says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” But warm feelings come and go, as you know; affections ebb and flow, even toward God. This is especially true when God, in love, calls us to do something we would rather not do: to love our enemies, to forgive when we’ve been nurturing a grudge; to endure weakness with the strength that only God can supply, even while wondering if God has forgotten us.
To love God, then, means giving our whole self to God, the very essence of who we are, not only our affection but also with trust through uncertainties, suffering, and doubt.
As for loving our neighbor? Well! This does not mean we must feel warm affection toward people in every circumstance or take a sentimental approach to those around us. We can be grateful when such feelings come naturally, but it is hardly realistic to expect them all the time.
In my files for this Sunday, I’ve recently added a classic cartoon from a vintage Peanuts comic strip. Linus, ever the philosopher and theologian, responds to an irritating comment from his sister Lucy by saying, “I love humankind. It’s people I can’t stand!” If you’ve ever thought that being a Christian would be easier if it weren’t for the people around you, you understand Linus. But love of neighbor is deeper than emotion. It means to seek and serve the well-being of another, actively seek their good.
Biblical love is not something we feel as much as it is something we do. To love your neighbor as yourself is to make a practice and habit of placing yourself in another person’s situation, identifying with their circumstances, and making a conscious choice to act on their behalf and for their sake. ‘If I were grieving or going through a dark time, how would I want to be treated? If I needed to ask money from a stranger to buy food, how would I want someone to respond? Dale Bruner translates Jesus’ command to love our neighbor by saying, ‘All the ways that you wish people would treat you—there! That’s how you should treat them.’
Today, Jesus gives a direction to face and a way to be: the very core of our being—heart, soul, and mind—filled with devotion to God; that same devotion overflowing outward in how we treat others. And from the pages of the New Testament on, generations of Christians have known that the best way to show that they were followers of Jesus, the best way to witness to God’s ongoing love for the world, was done in practical, down-to-earth ways and in the details of ordinary life.
The letter of James says, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” No distinctions between believers, no dishonoring the poor, no showing partiality, says James. All very practical and summed up with James saying, “You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
And this love for neighbor in down-to-earth ways is true not only in the New Testament, but also in the Old. We often forget that and think that the Old Testament is filled with tiresome rules and regulations that no longer apply. Leviticus, source of today’s first reading, is often misunderstood this way. Now there are, to be sure, plenty of things in Leviticus that are difficult to read and challenging to apply. I’ve never met anyone who includes this book among their top ten favorite in the Bible. But even in its oddness, Leviticus deserves attention. Because in it, you find texts that enlighten us so that we reflect God’s goodness.
This morning’s reading from Leviticus is a small portion of a larger chapter where the command to love your neighbor is applied in very practical ways. In that chapter we read how, for example, when you harvest your crops, you don’t harvest to the very edge of your field but leave grain behind for the poor and hungry so that they can glean and eat; you don’t have to be a farmer to know that what that means for us is that giving someone the dignity of work and food to eat are acts of love.
Elsewhere, this same chapter reminds us not to speak ill of the deaf who can’t hear you or put your foot out to trip-up the blind who can’t see what’s in front of them; what that mean for us is that being mindful of the vulnerable and making sure they are protected is an act of love.
Leviticus calls believers to treat foreigners living among us as native-born citizens because God’s own people were once outsiders in the land they now call home; what that means for us is that welcoming the stranger is an act of love. Love the God who loves you; cherish the persons who meet you to promote their well-being; throw yourself in devotion to both God and neighbor.
When Jesus today makes love of God and love of neighbor the fundamental truth of faith, he stands in a long line of biblical tradition and witness that summarizes God’s will into clear, concise statements. And, in Jesus, the starting place for love of God and neighbor does not originate in us. That is a relief because our love, both as feeling and action, inevitably ebbs and flows. Rather, love for God and neighbor originates in God’s own self as a gift, our sharing in the life of the One who loved us first.
“In this is love,” says the letter of 1st John, “not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent the Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Jesus self-giving on the cross is an act of love. Then John invites us to an echoing, responding love of our own, our own self-giving. “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” The one love that Jesus and the scriptures command—love of God and love of neighbor—begins with, and is permeated by, God’s love for us and for the world.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” These two commands are the hinges that open the one door to a God-centered, God-directed life. The very core of our being—heart, soul, and mind—filled with devotion to God and that same devotion overflowing toward others in the way we live.
Today, in love, Jesus gives us a direction to face and a way to be.
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