There’s a quote which says "Jesus said to the people : 'Who do you say that I am?'. And they replied : 'You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationship.' And Jesus said : 'What???'"
I think this quote is one which wonderfully explains how well we, and people through the centuries, have over complicated the Christian faith, and perhaps in doing that have often lost the radical and very personal message of Jesus.
Today’s gospel reading (Mark 12: 28-34) calls us to some sort of normality or reality – Jesus is asked which commandment is the greatest and he quotes from the Jewish scriptures, the Book of Deuteronomy (6:4-9), ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’, and he extends this as he offers a second commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
Apart from these 2 commands Jesus offered us very little in the way of strict commandments, other than to go out into the world and preach the gospel to all nations baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
In all, 3 very simple commands, and yet, for the best part of the 2000 year history of the Church, we, who have often been so critical of the amount of laws and principles and practices that members of the Jewish faith introduced, have done the same !
We have built up buildings, practices, doctrines, traditions and rules that have shaped the way we live out our faith. I sometimes wonder if we have perhaps done this simply because we couldn’t do what Jesus told us to, because we all know that although these 2 commands may be very simply put, they are incredibly difficult to follow.
Jesus said to love the Lord God with all of our heart and soul and mind. For many people that is the easier command to follow in theory, but in practice there are temptations to allow things to get in the way and which stop us from doing that completely.
And yet, loving our neighbour can be even more difficult particularly when we adopt Jesus’ description of a neighbour that includes anybody, even those we find it difficult to like.
Loving God and loving our neighbour must mean following his ways, and the ways which were shown to us by Jesus, and that means offering an extravagant love for everyone, offering understanding and compassion, offering chance after chance to those who seem to have used up all their chances long ago – and it means doing all these things expecting nothing in return, but safe in the knowledge that when we’re doing it, we are doing it to show something of the mercy, glory and love of God.
One of the problems with trying to love unconditionally is that in so doing we are making ourselves vulnerable. C S Lewis wrote, ‘To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable...’
The fact is that we are created to enjoy relationships, both with God and with other people, and we need those relationships in order to function. There are some people who, damaged by the pressures and strains of life, have become hardened to life, and feel very little – positive or negative.
Some people will take their defence mechanism to incredible levels – some have turned to drugs or alcohol to try and blot something out from their lives, some will turn to busyness, some to isolation or any number of different things… but blotting things out is tough because we are not intended to be people who can’t feel anything. Again, quoting C S Lewis, ‘our willingness to love is dependant on a willingness to surrender – to surrender everything that stops us from giving our lives completely to God and to others.’
And I’m not remotely suggesting that a lot of the things that we do in Church, or a lot of things theologians will write are the equivalent of shutting out all feelings towards Jesus, but at times, they have had that effect.
Amidst all the arguments over doctrine and there are many – whether it be women Priests, infant or adult baptism, the meaning of the Eucharist celebration, same sex relationships or anything else that Christian people have debated over the years – the most important commandments of all are simply about love.
And today as we look at the Church here, in our Diocese, in the country, and throughout the world that is still the most important commandment of Jesus.
The Church has many traditions and structures, but the church is not ultimately built on traditions or structures, or upon any of those who have gone before us, but simply on a message, a command, to love one another and love God. In our systems and our occasional bureaucracy we must never allow the deeply personal message of Jesus to be hidden.
Today’s readings are a call to refocus our minds onto Jesus and to live out his message. An American preacher I heard said, ‘the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing’, and it is to that that we return again today.
The main thing!
Jesus called us to love God, to honour him in prayer, in worship, in service, in commitment, and to love one another, caring for those we know who are close to us, whether family members or friends, but caring for and welcoming also everyone else, every person who is part of God’s family – a family which extends beyond the borders of our Church buildings and our comfort zones and out into all the world.
May our welcome, our relationships with one another and with God, and our love for all, grow stronger each day, as we keep the main thing, the main thing. That is that we are loved by and called to love a Saviour who changes us day by day and tells us, without exception, to love God and love our neighbour.
That’s our invitation. How do we want to respond ? AMEN
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