Richard Hogue Jr.
I want to paint the scene for today’s gospel: everything from last week’s gospel reading and this week’s comes after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, what we associate with Palm Sunday. The crowds adore him, and the authorities fear him. Jesus has ransacked the marketplace of the Temple, it being the holiest site in Judaism at the time. Jesus has made a lot of people very, very angry. Now he’s back at the Temple, only a day after he’s caused such a stir, telling parables, and answering questions. The Pharisees come to Jesus after their forerunners, the Herodians, have been swiftly silenced by Jesus. It’s kind of like taking the kid gloves off, the peewee team had its chance so now the welter weights are coming to douse this upstart Jesus of Nazareth. And that’s where we are, with Jesus on the steps of the Temple.
We must imagine that this place is always busy, like Vatican City or Times Square busy. The sounds of people, children, animals, and music make the air thick with activity. And we must remember they are probably still recovering from the mess Jesus made just the day before. There are, obviously, many Jews there, and some Gentiles, either converts or crowd watchers, and even some Roman imperial soldiers. Jesus isn’t just being seen by a small crowd huddled around him, probably everyone has an eye on him, because he’s the troublemaker. The questions the Pharisees ask are not just for fun, it’s so that they have the maximum amount of eye witnesses, Jewish and Gentile. If he slips up, everyone can see.
And they ask: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” They know the answer, and they know Jesus knows the answer. It’s the third line of the Shema, the most familiar and popular of Jewish prayers: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” I’m not sure how they meant to trap Jesus with this, honestly. Perhaps they thought that he, being a radical, might start to attack the Roman’s for declaring Caesar the ultimate god instead of YHWH. Instead, he adds the golden rule, even though they only asked for one commandment: “And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
He gave two answers instead of one. Why? As I mentioned before, the first and greatest commandment he recites is part of the Shema. It reads “Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” The Shema became widely popular in Jesus’ time as an easy way to repeat and remind Jewish people of their devotion to God.
The Greek we have it recorded in here uses the words: καρδίᾳ, ψυχῇ, and διανοίᾳ. καρδίᾳ like cardiac, heart, think cardiologist. ψυχῇ, literally means breath, and soul, and it’s where we get words like psychology. διανοίᾳ, power, like dynamo, or dynamic, usually translated might, but sometimes as “mind,” like in our service booklet today. “Might,” didn’t mean strength alone for people then, it also meant “wealth” and “property”; the fullest extent of your might was everything you could bring to bear in this world. It came down to a total commitment to God, psychologically, physically, and by property. One gave it all, one’s possessions and existence, because it all came from God anyway.
In last week’s sermon, Charlette Preslar made a wonderful point. While exploring the use of Caesar’s image on the coin when Jesus was challenged about taxes, she brought up how we are all made in the image of God and reminded us to look for the image of God in everyone we meet. By looking for the image of God in others, we are looking for Christ’s presence in everyone. I believe this can be viewed sacramentally, and it reminded me that our Book of Common Prayer defines sacraments as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.” It also defines grace as “…God’s favor toward us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.”
Sacraments are grace we share with God and each other. We share in the divine meal of eucharist, a holy call in baptism—as we celebrated last week, holy anointing, repentance, and we share reconciliation. When money is viewed sacramentally, all that we have and are comes from God. That is some profound stuff: by looking and sharing outwardly in everything with graciousness, we can see and share deeper gracefulness within ourselves and with God.
If we give God our very essence, our thoughts, our breath, our heart—our physical liveliness—and our livelihood, that sounds all consuming. But I think this is why Jesus adds the golden rule, in the presence of Jews and Gentiles: to remind us of who we are to each other. Versions of it already existed, like in Leviticus 19: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and “you shall love the stranger as yourself.”
Around the same time as Jesus’ life, there was a story about Rabbi Hillel. One day, Rabbi Hillel was challenged by a gentile who asked to be converted but demanded that Rabbi Hillel explained the entire Torah while he stood on one foot. Rabbi Hillel accepted him as a candidate for Judaism, stood on one foot, and drawing on Leviticus 19, told the convert: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”
Jesus chooses humanity with the very fabric of divinity intimately stitched into us. God chooses our hearts. The divine and human, having been woven together in Jesus, chose this life, and death, and then resurrection among us. Through family, friendships, meals, parties, miracles, tragedies, joys, and blessings, Jesus Christ established the church as his continuing physical presence, his body, his heart in the world. We celebrate that through the sacraments, baptism, eucharist, sharing our possessions, and myriad other signs of grace, and at the center of them all is the human heart.
Because we are Christ’s body, the commandment that we shall love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, or might, brings this commandment from the ethereal into the very grit and gristle of daily life. The mundane and the mysterious are combined in the person of Jesus, and thus in us as well. Loving God is accomplished by loving each other. Turning our hearts outward, we can deepen our inward love for ourselves with God. If we love our neighbors as we love ourselves, then we can love our neighbors with the same joy, enthusiasm, and dignity as God loves us!
And how fitting, that Jesus, God incarnate, amid all the sounds and smells of humanity, says these words at the steps of the holiest place of his own chosen people, knowing that he will soon die. Imagine for a moment: the sea of Jews and Gentiles, on the highest hill in Jerusalem, and God is among them as one of us, a human troublemaker, declaring that yes, we are to love God with our fullest self, and we are to love others the same way. God loves each of us and knows what it’s like to live with struggles and joy, pain and parties, death and hope, and chooses the ultimate sacrifice to prove it. The love God chooses is for all of us, through all of us. God loves with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our might, and all our mind. We are living love, and in living it we are a reminder to the world. We begin the healing of what is broken. Love is everything we are. Amen.
