Sermon Tone Analysis

What is love?

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

― C.S. Lewis

“Love, a term almost indefinable, is unconditional regard for a person that prompts and shapes behaviors in order to help that person to become what God desires.”

— Scot McKnight.

Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others (pp.

8-9).

Paraclete Press.

Kindle Edition.

Love is hard to define because it lies at the basis of things.

God is love.

But love is more than sentiment.

It leads to action.

Love is tied to the ultimate good for a person (not the ultimate want/what we want might not be good).

Therefore love is ultimately a moral because it is linked to good.

The power of love

Just as impure love inflames the soul and brings it to desire those earthly and perishable goods which make it also perish, plunging it into the abyss, so holy love raises us to heavenly things, inflames it with the desire of eternal good, urges it toward those goods which will neither pass away nor perish, and from the abyss of hell raises it to heaven.

All love has its own power nor can love in the soul of the lover be idle; it necessarily urges on.

Do you wish to know the quality of love?

See where it leads

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”

― C.S. Lewis

Love is a motive for change and growth for the person loved

Love is a motive for action for the lover

An expansive love

Now we see how the love of God stretches itself over all men.

This is testified to not only in his word, but also in the whole of nature.

The heavens are given to all men.

They cover all men; they are mine and my neighbors’.

The sun is mine and my brother’s.

The greatest as well as the lowest man lives under the same sun, in the same air, on the same earth and by the same water.

We are to treat our fellowman as God treats us.

God himself gave nature as an example, that we are to be of the same mind to all men and not to love anyone more or less than another.

As he is minded toward us, so we are to be minded toward our neighbors, and as we act toward our neighbors, he will act toward us.

He testifies in our hearts to convince us how he is minded toward us.

We are to be so minded toward our neighbor.

Love goes beyond like the love of God goes beyond

The challenge of love

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements.

Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.

It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

To love is to be vulnerable.”

― C.S. Lewis

We love those who love us

We love those we find admirable

We love those who are like us

Love is dangerous because of the potential of hurt, but it is more dangerous not to love

The Good Samaritan

What is a parable?

The parable shocks the audience because of the unexpected virtue of the Samaritan, but the moral does not lie in the unexpected person doing good.

The subversion lies in the moral crisis that the parable offer.

The Shema

What is it that God really wants?

The parable as a moral crisis!

The declaration “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh our God is one Yahweh” (Dt 6:4).

Shema comes from the first Hebrew word of the verse, sh’ma, “hear”.

Verses 4–9 make up the whole of this foundational biblical truth.

While several translations of verse 4 are grammatically correct, the Lord’s words in Mark 12:29 correspond most closely to the one given above.

Religious Jews recite the Shema three times daily as part of their devotional life; no Sabbath worship is conducted in the synagogue without its proclamation.

Within the Shema is found both a fundamental doctrinal truth and a resultant obligation.

There is an urgency connected to the teaching: the word sh’ma demands that the hearer respond with his total being to the fact and demands of this essential revelation.

The Shema summarizes the heart of God’s covenant with His people.

Yahweh alone is Lord, and covenantal faithfulness to Him involves every part of one’s being: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut 6:5 NIV).

God wants us to love people as a reflection of how we love him.

This love is sacred because it is an all or nothing love.

What the scribe is really asking is not just “Who is my neighbor?”

but “Who is pure and who is not?” He’s asking about a classification system.

The “Who is pure?” question is also a “Who is to be loved?”

question.

Knowing that the question masks a larger concern, Jesus tells a story to catch this expert in the web of a moral dilemma so we can all learn.

— Scot McKnight.

Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others (p.

52).

Paraclete Press.

Kindle Edition.

Going beyond

Love as in-group dynamics.

I should only love my neighbour.

What lies at the heart of the confrontation with the lawyer, then, is a clash between two quite different visions of what it means to be Israel, God’s people.

The lawyer’s question about the key requirements for entering the age to come was a standard rabbinic question, to which there were standard answers available.

His own summary is exactly the same as that which Jesus himself gives in Mark 12:29–31 and Matthew 22:37–40.

But what he had in mind was the way in which the law provided a definition of Israel.

The parable as a challenge of who is a true “Jew”?

It is about being the right sort of neighbour.

There are 4 perspectives here

The audience

The priest and Levite

The victim

The Samaritan

These perspectives forces us to review our own definition of what God wants, and who should be included in that command.

The audience

Why is the use of the Samaritans so shocking?

Ideological contrasts.

They each believed the other was false and wrong.

I have the real thing.

Samaria as “keepers of the Law”

Each seeing the other as backslidden

Religious skirmishes, invasions and violence