The Greatest Commandment

Good evening gentlemen. Nice to see you all again.

We are now in ordinary time, and really the proper word that is the basis for ordinary time is ordered time. Ordinary time is ordered by Christ. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus tells us that of all 600+ Jewish commandments, there are two that are the most important.

First you shall love your God with all of your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all of your strength. And the second is you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it, there are only two. How many of us actually do these very well? Let’s look at these a little closer.

You shall love your God with ALL of your heart, with ALL of your soul, with ALL of your mind, and ALL of your strength.

Can you imagine if you spend all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength loving God? What would that really look like. What would we do with the time we had each day if we focused ALL of our heart, mind, soul and strength to God.

And the second one loving our neighbors as ourselves. Wow, we love ourselves don’t we? So that would be amazing if we could actually do that. I think if we actually did this one our days might be lived out a little differently as well.

So, these are the two commandments we are to follows. Jesus didn’t say follow the ten commandments. But if we look at the ten commandments, we’ll see they are really broken up into two sets of commandments which revolve around the loving God and neighbor.

The first three commandments are centered on loving God.

# 1 – Shall not have any strange gods before God” For many people God is an afterthought and there are many things before him.

# 2 “Shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” This shows how much we honor God, by honoring his name. It makes sense that if you’re to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, then you’re naturally to respect the name of God with equal passion and vigor.

#3 “Keep holy the Sabbath day.” To rests one day and give that day to God. Most Christian’s don’t even go one hour to church, let alone giving him the one day of rest he asks for.

So, we have these three to help us keep the first of the two, commandments to give more of your heart, should, mind and strength to God by keeping Him as the primary focus, honoring his name and keeping the sabbath.

Regarding the other seven commandments, they are geared toward love of neighbor.

#4 “Honoring you mother and father and authority. #5 Not killing anyone or their reputation, #6 not desiring immoral sexuality (adultery) #7 not stealing from them, cheating the, vandalizing. Not gossiping or #8 lying about them or deceiving them,), and not being #9 and #10 envious, greedy, and jealous in reaction to what other people have.

But just avoiding bad things is not good enough. Unless you feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned and home-bound, cloth the naked, take care of the sick, unless you do these things, you truly do not love your neighbor.

The point here is that these two commandments cover a lot of ground, and they should be what we strife to do, it is our way to heaven.

Let us think about how much of our time, and our strength really goes towards loving God and neighbor, and see what we might do this week to improve in those areas.