Love God; Love others

00:00:00 Ever since I’ve been a kid, I’ve always had this great thirst for knowledge and this curiosity to to find out stuff, you know? And this was the pre-internet days. You remember those? It was a long time ago, I know, but, you know, you didn’t have access. You couldn’t Google something to find out. And so you had to just troll your way through books or just have that annoying insistence on asking mom and dad if they knew the answer to the question that I was, you know, seeking. And whenever I would find something about, you know, a piece of information, there would be this desire to to try and make sense of it, to try and rank it, to try and fit it within the rest of my life or the rest of the things that I thought I at least understood. And so I get this desire of the scribe to want to know, okay, as Jews, we’ve got all these commandments. 613 mitzvah 613 commandments can be found from the middle of the book of Exodus to the end of the book of Deuteronomy.

00:01:13 As you go through all of those commandments, of course, there are 365 things that you shall not do the prohibitions, things that you shall not kill, you shall not steal, and all those things that we know are very familiar with. But there are also 248 commandments of things that you shall do. You shall honor your father and mother. You shall keep holy the Sabbath day commandments that invite us more deeply into those experiences of life. And so if you’ve got 613 of these blessed commandments kind of stack up on your wall or trying to make sense of them, surely you’re thinking, well, is there something that kind of organizes us? Is there something that provides some structure, some coherence to all of those? Is there one that is kind of driving all of the rest, one that is the most important? And so it was a question, and lots of people would discuss it and debated. And there were different schools of thought. And so the answer that Jesus gives, and it’s interesting that he does provide an answer.

00:02:29 He doesn’t just try and ask another question, try and engage in that conversation, but he goes straight to the heart of the prayer of Israel, because the Shema, which is what he first quotes from, was the prayer that drove the life of every devout Jew. When they rose in the morning. The Shema would be the first prayer that they would pray in the middle of the day, when they are slowing down to have a break for lunch. They would again take the Shema on their lips, and then in the evening, as they were preparing for bed, they would again pray the Shema. So it was the kind of the heartbeat of their prayer life, that whole desire that was there. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one, and you must love the Lord your God. And there are three things in the the text that we read there in Deuteronomy six to to love him with all of our heart. The word is leave that whole experience. And for the Jews, the heart was the center of everything in their lives, the center of all of their their thoughts.

00:03:43 There wasn’t a lot of understanding about what the brain kind of did. Those there’s no word that you can find anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures that indicates any kind of understanding of the brain that came much later in, in human thought and, and and pondering. So to love the Lord your God with all of your love, your heart, with all of your nefesh, your. It’s the word for the throat, the the neck. Because they they realize that something important kind of happened there that, you know, we we breathe and there would be this life that would go down and they realize that something was happening. You know, when you breathe in and then something was happening down here in the chest that the chest would expand and contracted. So something was obviously important here in the very center of our bodies. And that if someone’s head was decapitated suddenly there was no nefesh anywhere. There was no heart, there was not an experience of the very essence of a person. So the soul we kind of think of as just this thing that it’s really indefinable.

00:04:49 It’s it’s completely spiritual, ephemeral. It’s not something you can grab hold of, but in Hebrew, they don’t like Concepts and ideas. Everything is is concrete and practical and realized and physical. And so the nefesh. So you love the Lord your God with all your your live, your nefesh, and all of your may God, your strength, your muchness, or the way that you interact within the world, the way that you do things, the way that you’re able to impact upon the world. The they’re the three elements that this prayer invites us to respond with. So it’s not just to love in a very abstract way, but to love with every way that we experience, you know, from the the essence of being loved and being invited more deeply into love and the way that we attempt to love those around us in all of our experience of the essence of of life and what makes it all good and worthwhile and all the ways that we interact, all of the ways that we express that mail, that that strength, that muchness into the world.

00:05:59 That is how we are invited to into the presence of God to respond to his love. Note that when Mark tells us this story, he doesn’t leave it at the three, but he adds a fourth because in Greek thought or thought, it was this word for mind. And so he adds that word mind to the mix of the the heart, the spirit and the the the strength or the muchness of a person. So kind of filling out and adapting and applying it to a different situation and reminder that we need to be always open to that as our understanding changes and as we grow in a new sense of of how things work, we shouldn’t be afraid of adopting new terminology and new experiences and new ways to express the better way of engaging in that thought. And so that is very traditional, to quote the Shema. That was a standard thing to do. And as I said, the very heartbeat of the Jewish faith. But then Jesus adds this other commandment, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

00:07:16 It’s this very kind of obscure commandment that you find. It’s not even a whole verse that is given to it. It’s from Leviticus 19, verse 18, but it’s in the middle of verse 18. There’s parts before and after. So it’s it’s interesting that it’s kind of just buried. And you might remember when you read the The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, that when Jesus is giving those six examples of the things that we understood or the way you know, you shall not kill, but I say, I say, if you, you know, look angrily with someone in your heart, then you’ve already murdered them. And one of the examples that he gives. You’ve heard how it was said, ye shall love your neighbor, but hate your enemy. That’s not really found anywhere in Scripture, but it was a common adaptation of that thought. You know, to love your neighbor who was seen as that was too hard because especially if the neighbor was everybody. There’s lots of annoying people, you know, and sometimes it’s the person who’s at the front of the church speaking, but you’re just thinking, well, I could love other people, but not that guy in the green dress.

00:08:25 So that’s way too much to love. But Jesus says, no, that’s the way that we experience this. This is the way that we manifest this love. But how do we actually love our neighbor? I mean, it’s always coming back to our experience of God. It’s in being immersed in his love that we we can never love from ourselves. We can never try and just dredge up some form of love in order to offer that expression. We need to keep returning each day to the source. We need to keep coming back in prayer to the heart of the God who’s always pouring out his love upon us, reminding us that even though you’ve sinned, even though you’ve done all these silly things, that I’m there to love you and to invite you into freedom and into life so we can live this commandment. We can offer our praise and worship of God by first receiving that love by first, allowing that love to change us so that we can indeed express that in our heart, in our spirit, and in our mail, in our muchness, in all that we do in the world, and that that manifestation can so easily be poured out upon those around us, not easily.

00:09:47 Sometimes there’s always going to be those challenges, but God is inviting us more deeply into that experience of being loved so that we can love in turn.