Matthew 22:34-46
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Sermon: Summarizing the Law
A few weeks ago we looked at the 10 commandments and we talked about how
they summarized the law, and brought the community of Israel together. But now
the question is brought to Jesus – what is the greatest commandment? What is
the most important thing that we are supposed to do? And Jesus answers with
what some call the vertical and the horizontal rules. Love God (the up and down
law) and love each other (the side to side law). Jesus then says that all of the
law and the prophets hang upon these two things. What is interesting about
these two particular statements is that they don’t sound much like rules or
laws; rather, they sound like statements about our heart.
But we could couldn’t really make a law that says “Thou shalt stand
reverently during the hymns.” Because you can’t really command that internal
state, you can suggest it, you can encourage it, but that doesn’t mean it will
happen. In fact we have no real way of knowing if it is happening, because we
can’t see what is going on inside the person. All we know is that they are
standing – the heart and mind are invisible to us. In fact, “Directing a person
to be reverent in no way assures that they will or are even capable of doing
so. Reverence is not something you can simply conjure up in yourself at will,
your will or that of another.”[1]
And we would probably say that the same is true with love. Imagine that two
of you break into a fist fight after church. I can run up to you and tell you
to stop. I can command you to shake hands and make up. But I can’t really
command you to shake hands with love in your hearts. Truth is, you would
probably be too angry to do so, even if commanded. And yet, Jesus says that the
two greatest commandments are not about our actions, but about our attitude and
our hearts. He has the audacity to claim that God commands love. Even after a
fist fight.
Love is not some mystical force beyond our understanding and outside of our
control, but that we have the ability to say to ourselves, “I will love that
person, I will love my enemy.” When I shared this with praise team on Thursday,
Emily said that she imagined Jesus saying that in the way our parents told us
to try broccoli. Try loving them you might like them. And I replied, I don’t
want to love them, they’re yucky. But you get the idea, Jesus is saying that
such an emotional and irrational act is possible for us.
I admit, this is relatively new thinking for me. For a long time I have
read this command to love, and what I have interpreted Jesus saying is that we
must treat people with love. That when we do the actions eventually the heart
follows. But I believed that Jesus wasn’t really talking about or commanding
our emotions.
However, having recently been reading various books, I have come to realize
that our emotional state is much more under our control than we normally admit.
That we can actually change our own feelings, but it takes practice and work.
With training, you can teach yourself to be more joyful. With training, you can
teach yourself to be more compassionate. And so perhaps, what Jesus is saying
to all of us, is that with training, and with God’s help, we can be taught to be
more loving: to love God and love people at will.
If that is true, then most of us have work to do! It means that we need
practice in compassion, that we need to work on ourselves so that when God
commands us to love, we can actually change our hearts and love will come forth
from us. Not just actions, but actually deep and real love.
Having thought about it, I think it is true. As I look around the world, I
see people who have learned that. They clearly have spent years working on
their ability to love others. When you are with them, the compassion in their
hearts is evident. You know they care deeply about you. And when they go to the
next person, they love that person fully and completely too. They have
cultivated that ability. The suggestion is that we can learn that—let me take
that back, it isn’t a suggestion, the commandment is that we learn that kind of
love.
Those questions led me to my second interesting observation from the
passage. That Jesus has told us that our faith is about love, and for some
reason we don’t believe him. For example, In the book Churchless by George Barna and David Kinnaman, 3 in 5 Christians
said that the most important thing in follow Jesus is following the moral rules
of God; in other words, the law (p. 80). They didn’t say it was about loving
God or loving others, but about moral rules. Now maybe they say that because
they think that the way you love God is that you follow God’s rules, which
makes a little sense. Unfortunately that then gives people outside the church
the wrong impression that the church is about legalistically following the
laws, and not about a real change of heart toward God and toward other people.
And so if you were to ask people outside of the church what the two most
important laws of the church were, do you think they would answer these two: love
God and love one another? I doubt it. I would guess based upon what is in the
news and the public arguments that they would respond quite differently than
this. They might answer closer to what is in the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou where she tells us
Momma’s two most important rules were Thou shall not be dirty and thou shall
not be impudent! Yep, the church is often more concerned about dirtiness and
impudence than love. We get all fussy over moral dirt, because we can see that.
But we forget about the state of our own hearts.
Now, I don’t want to diminish the importance of these other laws, because
quite honestly, the rules are often intended to help us do the right thing. And
our arguments within the church on how to apply the rules often center on what
is the best way to show our love for God and our love for others. Should we be
accepting or should we show tough love? Should we emphasize grace or holiness?
But the fact of the matter is that we are not communicating the underlying
principles to others the way we should. We aren’t communicating it well enough
to ourselves if 3 in 5 Christians didn’t realize that loving God and loving others
are the most important things in following Christ.
As much as we like to talk about getting rid of dirt, as much as we like to
cure impudence, those are secondary to the change that comes in here. [point to
heart].
So why don’t we want to believe Jesus when he tells us that our faith is
about love? Honestly, I think because changing our hearts is harder than
changing our behavior. It is easier for me to stop punching my neighbor in the nose
than to love him or her. It is easier to obey a list of laws than it is to
truly and deeply fall in love with God. In a recent book, James K. A. Smith
writes that, You are what you love. Not what you believe, not what you think,
but what you love. This has profound implications for us as Christians –
suddenly it isn’t about our head or our intellect, but about our deepest
desires as human beings. Advertisers know this. They don’t try to change our
minds, they try to change our wants. Likewise, in the end, love is what God
wants and expects of us. “Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our
intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new
ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves,
your longings.”[2]
Because love is what God has for us. Our commands are to love God and love
others because God loves us and God loves others. God only expects us to do
what God is already doing. We are to love because God loves. God is capable of
loving us when we are dirty. God is capable of loving us when we are impudent.
So God says, “Love others when they are dirty, love them when they are
impudent. If you struggle to do it, let my love fill you. Learn to love like I
do, learn it from me. In fact, I command it. All of the law and the prophets
hang upon this. So love me, and love others.”
So unlike other times when I have read this and thought Jesus meant act
lovingly toward others, this time I read it and I thought, Jesus really is
calling us to change our hearts not just our actions. And it is time we acted
like we believe him.
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