The Unsolicited Second--October 2, 2024

The Unsolicited Second--October 2, 2024

"When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 'Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?' He said to him, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first 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." [Matthew 22:34-40]

They never ask Jesus for his "Top Two," just for the Number One.  But Jesus answers, as he always does, in his own way. He is asked for The One Top Commandment, and he offers an unsolicited second.  Pay attention to that.

Chances are, you've heard this story or one of its parallels in the other gospels before.  The set-up could be heard as a trick question or a genuine interest in what Rabbi Jesus thinks about the Torah, but the punch-line is always the same.  Jesus, having been asked to weigh in on what the "greatest" commandment is in all of God's Law, offers a two-part answer, refusing to conform even in the format of his answer to the expectations of the ones asking him.  They ask him to boil it all down to a single commandment, and instead Jesus' answer is something like, "Well, instead, I'll give you the two that go together inseparably, and you can make of that what you will."

Jesus' famous answer to, "What is the ONE greatest commandment?" begins with, "Love God," before immediately proceeding to the unexpected second half of his answer, "Love your neighbor."  Jesus doesn't seem to think that love of neighbor is a second-tier kind of instruction, but rather it is of the same quality, urgency, and necessity as the first: "The second," he says, "is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  They are two sides of the same coin. Like a magnet cannot have a north pole without also having a south pole, you cannot, according to Jesus, have the commandment to love God without also having the commandment to love neighbor.  Or, to get super-nerdy for a moment, like the physicists who discovered that light behaves like both a particle and a wave, Jesus says that the one Great Commandment is to love, and it is expressed both toward God and toward other people, all the time.

And as we saw yesterday in the passage from Leviticus, ancient Israel was always meant to understand that commandment about loving "neighbors" as inclusive of strangers, outsiders, foreigners, and aliens, not just your best friend from down the street.  Jesus took that same understanding for granted and then told his questioner here that loving ALL those other people is the second-half of what it really means to love God.  Or, as Dorothy Day put it once so compellingly, "I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least."  You cannot separate one from the other, at least not without doing significant damage and causing major distortions to God's intention.

Part of the trouble, unfortunately, is that for so much of human history, Respectable Religious People have been bent on trying to perform a neighbor-ectomy on the Great Commandment and sever the connection between the way we love God and the ways we love others.  But Jesus won't have it.  Over and over again, the prophets spoke out against the ways people would try and buy God off with their prayers, their sacrifices, their songs of praise, or their shows of devotion, and then think it gave them permission to cheat their neighbors, ignore the needy, or baptize their apathy and greed.  And over and over again, God would say in response, "If you're going to keep doing that, then I won't listen to your songs, and I won't accept your sacrifices, because what I have always wanted was for you to treat one another rightly--with decency, with kindness, and with justice."  God has never let us off the hook with thinking we could just lob up a few prayers or give our offerings as an alternative to caring for the people around us.  Love of God and love of neighbor have always been two sides of the same coin.

What boggles my mind, even two thousand years after Jesus' words here should have put this question to rest, is how often I still hear modern-day Respectable Religious Leaders try and wedge a crowbar between the commandments to love God and to love neighbor.  In recent weeks, as news stories circulated about the needs of migrants from Haiti and the additional harassment they were facing after false reports about them went viral, I was shocked to see a number of pastors, pundits, and social media voices, all of whom professed faith in Jesus, saying that the commandment to "love your neighbor" was irrelevant to the situation.   I heard and read people insisting that "loving God" rightly (that is, according to their particular theological traditions or political leanings) meant that they were under no obligation to care about or come to the aid of Haitians or anybody else living in their communities, state, or country.  And it just left me flabbergasted, because Jesus himself certainly seems to make it clear that these are two poles of the same magnet.  

We can discuss what measures are feasible to help this or that group of newcomers or refugees, to be sure.  And we can debate about how to strike a balance between what is financially responsible and what is needed by those who are in need of a hand up.  All of those kinds of nuts-and-bolts conversations are good and necessary, since we live in the real world with real limits.  But what is not up for debate is whether Jesus gives us permission to separate our love for God and our love for neighbor.  We might have hoped, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees who approached Jesus in the gospels, for a simple and easy One Rule to follow that would earn us acceptance with God, but Jesus insists that we cannot love God without loving our neighbor... and that our neighbor includes everyone whom God sends along our path.  We might not have asked for it, but Jesus is determined to give us an unsolicited second half of the Great Commandment that binds our love of God to our love for other people.   

If we are going to take Jesus seriously (and I'm pretty sure that's a bare-minimum requirement for Christianity) then we are going to have to accept his unapologetic tethering together of love for God and love for neighbor.  That means we can never pat ourselves on the back for being "good little boys and girls" if we haven't asked, "How am I attending to the needs of people around me?" And it also means that others around us cannot separate their worship of God from their care and concern for us, too.  Like it or not, Jesus is going to keep compelling us to see God in the face of our neighbor, and to see our love of others as the often most-visible way we love God.  We might as well get used to it--it might just change our lives forever.

Lord Jesus, enable us today to love you by loving the people you have put in our path.