H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Springs Presbyterian
July 25, 2004
JESUS’ GREATEST HITS: The Great Commandments
Mark 12:28-34
By rabbinic calculation, Moses gave 613 laws to the Jewish people. That’s a lot to keep track of,
so in Jesus’ day many teachers attempted to summarize all 613 laws in a few words, to boil the Old
Testament legal code down to its essence. For instance, one teacher was challenged by a Gentile to
explain the whole of the law while standing on one foot. The teacher obliged, and balancing on one
foot he said, “What you hate for yourself, do not do to someone else. That is all the law.”
However, other teachers objected to this practice of summarizing the law, arguing that every single
law was equally important in God’s eyes and we must not elevate one above another. When the
scribe approached Jesus and asked him, “Which commandment is first of all?” he was inviting Jesus
to express his opinion on this hotly debated issue.
The answer our Lord gives is surely one of Jesus’ greatest hits. He quotes first from the book of
Deuteronomy, a passage known to any practicing Jew and recited by faithful Jews to this day,
passage commanding us to love God. This is the foremost law, says Jesus. Then he quotes a more
obscure passage from Leviticus, a verse commanding us to love our neighbor. This is the second
great law, Jesus says. In all the books of Moses, there are no commandments greater than these.
It’s interesting that according to Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus quotes the Old Testament law to
love God, our Lord actually expands it. In Deuteronomy we are commanded to love God “with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength,” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Jesus adds another
item to the list. Jesus says, Love God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
mind, and with all your strength.” That was a bold thing to do, to enlarge the Old Testament law.
Jesus feels so deeply about loving God that he makes a strong law even stronger. Jesus wants us to
love God with the entirety of who we are, with every ounce of personality and emotion and intellect
and action. According to Jesus, this is the great purpose of life—to love God with our whole selves.
Imagine yourself carrying out some strenuous task, removing an old tree stump, for instance. To
accomplish that one job, you might do all sorts of things. You might dig for a while, then you might get
out the axe, and then the chain saw. In the end you might hitch up a tractor and a chain. But even
though digging and chopping and sawing look quite different, they all spring from one single
motivation—to remove that stump.
That’s how it is with loving God. We do countless things in the course of a day—we work, we
play, we interact with other people, we drive cars, we shop, we answer the phone—but in some
sense, all those different doings are merely diverse expressions of our love for God, our obedience to
God, our desire to please God. When Jesus challenges us to love God with all our heart and all our
soul and all our mind and all our strength, our Lord is teaching us that no part of life and no part of
ourselves can be held back from the central and fundamental task of loving God.
The other great law is to love our neighbors. This is not quite on a par with loving God, but it is
almost as important. Once again Jesus strengthens and intensifies the Old Testament law. The
command to love your neighbor in Leviticus clearly refers to one’s fellow Israelites, the people of one’
s own nationality, one’s own like-minded group.
This is the perennial temptation, to love our neighbors selectively. To just love other Christians. To
just love family members. To just love white people or friendly people or hard-working people. To
just love the healthy, the heterosexual, the law-abiding, the American.
But Jesus has in mind a much larger definition of neighbor. Jesus means neighbor to be anyone
within our reach, anyone who might need our help, anyone at all. We know this because when Jesus
was asked what he meant by neighbor, he answered with the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story
about reaching across the dividing lines of culture and religion and nationality. Jesus never intended
our love of neighbors to be limited by tight boundaries and tiny categories. Even back then before
television and the internet, Jesus knew what we are still discovering. When it comes to loving our
neighbor, there is only one neighborhood—one huge neighborhood of many languages and beliefs
and cultures and colors, and the neighbor we are to love is everybody.
Jesus was certainly not the first Jewish teacher to stress the importance of loving God. Nor was he
the first to emphasize loving our neighbors, even the neighbors who are quite different from us. But it
does appear that Jesus may have been the first rabbi to put those two commandments side-by-side.
Loving God and loving our neighbors are interconnected. For Christians, one commandment
cannot be separated from the other. Like the cross, love has both a vertical dimension reaching up to
God and also a horizontal dimension reaching out to the people around us. Take away either one, and
you no longer have true love as Jesus intended it, because our love for God flows into our love for
one another, and our love for one another teaches us how to love God.
Loving our neighbors isn’t easy precisely because they are our neighbors. We know all their bad
habits. They have loud parties every weekend. Their dandelion seeds blow into our weed-free lawn.
They park on the street and block our mailbox. Their cat has lunch at our bird feeder. The better you
know most people, the less loveable they become.
In the Peanuts comic strip, Linus says, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand!” Of course!
Loving humanity in the abstract is always easier than loving the imperfect, irritating people we run into
all day long. But then Jesus never said, “Follow me and I’ll show you the easy way.”
In the First Letter of John, we get this warning about a problem that must have existed in the
church back then just as it does today—people who want to love God but not each other. John
writes: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do
not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The
commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters
also,” (I John 4:20-21 NRSV).
You can’t love God without loving your neighbors. What about the other way around? Can we
love our neighbors without loving God? Let me be fair about this. I’m certain there are multitudes of
people who are utterly indifferent to God and yet they still deeply love their children, their spouses,
and maybe even the people who live next door. I’m not going to stand here and say that only religious
people really know how to love others. That would be unfair and untrue. I’ve known some truly kind
and charitable atheists.
But I will say this for Christianity. If we begin by loving God, then we have a head start in loving
our neighbors because as Christians we are forced to acknowledge the infinite value of every human
being. We don’t get to look at someone and say, “I don’t want anything to do with that person: he
has a tattoo; her tongue is pierced; he voted for Bush; she sleeps around.”
Of course we become judgmental sometimes, but down deep we know better. We know that
Christ is calling us to higher ground. We know that whether that guy appeals to us or not, he is still
made in the image of God. Whether we like her looks or not, she is precious because Jesus Christ
died on the cross for her.
Jan gave me a mat cutter a few years ago, and I’ve discovered that anything you put in a mat and
a frame looks pretty good. I’m serious. Take a cheap post card or a Campbell’s soup label or a
crayon scribble—double mat it, put it in a nice frame, and suddenly it’s worthy of display, it deserves
to hang on the wall.
When we Christians set out to love our neighbors, we have some help, because we don’t see that
person simply naked with all their flaws and warts. No, we see someone framed in God’s image and
bordered by the love of Christ, someone who deserves love and respect just by virtue of God’s
presence within.
It may surprise you, but Jesus didn’t talk all that much about love. Maybe that’s one of the great
differences between you and me on one hand and Jesus on the other. We make a great commotion
about love. We sing about love, we make movies about it, we set aside special days for it. We talk
about love a lot. In fact, we do a lot more talking than loving.
But not Jesus. “Love God. Love each other.” When it came to talking about love you could put
what Jesus said in a nutshell. But when it comes down to loving, the whole wide world isn’t big
enough to hold his love.
Soli Deo Gloria!