The Greatest Commandment

Greatest Commandment

Rabbinical learning - asking eah other searching questions - motivated by the desire to draw closer to the Kingdom of God, together.

But, with the wrong motivation, a wonderful thing can be distorted.

We can easily see how this kind of rhetorical questioning could descend into a kind of spiritual one-upmanship.

When my kids were younger, they would do this sort of thing - ask a question that they knew the answer to in the hopes that their brother would not, and would therefore be made to look foolish.

But the Jewish leaders in Mark 12 take this even further. They are asking these questions of Jesus in the hopes that he will either say something that turns the crowd against him, or say something that incriminates him with the Roman authorities.

So the Pharisees come and ask him about paying taxes to Caesar.

The Sadducees come and ask him an angels on the head of a pin type question about the resurrection.

The teachers of the Law come and aske him about the greatest commandment, hoping to catch him with an inadequate answer. But Jesus cuts to the quick, to the heart of the matter, and gives the most fundamental answer to this, or any other question. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.

Even still, the teacher of the law tries to turn the tables and pat Jesus on the head, and take credit for the truth the Jesus brings. Jesus cuts through with wors of authority: taking the discussion away from one-upmanship and rhetorica traps, and bringing back to the heart of the matter: the Kingdom of God. After this, no-one dares to question him.

Two houses, Two foundations

This story reminds me of the Christchurch earthquakes. Before the earthquake, you could have two houses, side-by-side, with nothing to choose between them. From the outside looking in, the two houses look pretty much identical.

But after the earthquake, one house remains standing and could be repaired or rebuilt. The other? destroyed to the extent that the land could never be build on again.

Now in some places there were whole suburbs that were OK, and whole suburbs that ended up being red-stickered. But in other places, like where my brother and his family lived, there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason. On on side of my brother, the house was ontouched. On the other side the land was red-stickerd and the owners had no choice but to leave. For my borther and his family, the arguments back and forth lasted for years before they were allowed to rebuild.

What was the difference? From the outside these houses looked the same.

The difference was the ground beneath them, the foundation that held them up. One foundation stood firm when shaken, the other turned to soup.

This is what is happening in this interchange between Jesus, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the teachers of the law. Jesus has the firm foundation of God’s love and God’s kingdom. The others, while they seem like they’re honouring the same values on the surface, have a hidden foundation, a hiddenn agenda that cannot stand.

The foundation that JEsus stood on was God and God’s love. The foundation the others stood on was envy, jealousy, anger, hatred and fear.

On the outside, for those listening to these arguments, both sides would look the same. Both are quoting scripture, both are observing the accepted forms of spiritual debate. The scheme to discredit Jesus had every chance of suceeding on the surface, but the foundation Jesus stood on was firm throughout generations, but the scheming f his enemies was founded on the insubstance of deception and fear.

The houses look the same from the outside.

But the foundations are oh, so different.

Love vs. Fear

If I was to ask you right now, what is the opposite of love? Then you might well say that the opposite of love is hatred.

But I’m here to tell you that hatred is only a symptom. A symptom of an underlying fear. We only hate people because of what we fear they might take from us.

When our foundation is fear, our strength, our security, is only as deep as our own resources.

When our foundation is the love that God shares with us, and the love that we return to him, then our strength, our security, is deeper than the root of the mountains.

We we know that we are loved, truly loved by the God who is the creator and sustainer of all things, then no adverse circumstance can shake us.

When we fear that we are in this on our own, and we can only survive by the strength of our own cunning, then we cannot stand.

Think of all the things that are founded on love:

Faithfulness

Humility

kindness

generosity

love itself

Then think of all the things that are founded in fear:

insecurity

jealousy

pettiness

deception

hatred

Where do you want to put your hope?

Whether our actions are motivated by love or by fear, they might look the same on the outside, but the fruits of our labours will be oh, so different.

Loving our neighbours, today

So where does this leave us?

How can we express love for our neighbour in the time of COVID? How do we remain faithful to the love of God when we are faced with choices that could change teh way that we worship and the way that we live?

Because these choices are coming our way, whether we like it or not.

Ho do we act, when our actions might look the same from the outside, but have differing foundations and differing fruit?

We must act, not out of fear, but out of love.

In Luke’s gospel this question of the Greatest Commandment leads into our most well-known parable, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

As we navigate through these COVID days, we are asked again and again, “Who is My Neighbour?”

Is my neighbour the vulnerable person with a weakened immune system who is afraid of what might happen when this virus comes to our community? I think we all know that this is only days or weeks away.

Is my neighbour the vulnerable person who is afraid that the vaccine will harm them in one way or another?

Is my neighbour the person who agrees with me, or who disagrees with me?

My answer: it depends. What is your motivation? Is it loved founded in the love that God shows for us, or is it fear that I might lose along the way?

Love is not being a doormat, and just agreeing to whatever our neighbour wants. Love is having the courage to act for truth and compassion in every situation, knowing that any personal cost pales in comparison to the great love that God pours out for us.

Last week we were reminded that the unvaccinated may well be the neighbour who we’re called to love.

My question is this: Is the love we show founded on God’s love, or human fear? The love of neighbour might look the same from the outside, but the foundation and the fruit are oh-so different.

If our support for people is aimed to give them reassurance that no matter the outcome they are loved, to build up their own foundation of confidence in God’s love, then it is from God. If our support for people is to confirm their fears with our own secret fears, then the ultimate effect will only be to undermine our foundation as well as theirs.

In the coming months, as a church, we will need to decide do we require vaccine certificates, or not. Both ways will have costs. Neither way is perfect. I don’t know the right answer. This is a task of discernment that we can only enter together, prayerfully, as God’s people in this place.

My prayer, here and now, is that we may make our choices based on a foundation of love, rather than a foundation of fear.