Delivered October 23, 2011
A man called up a church and the church secretary answered the call. The man on the other end of the line said, "I’d like to speak to the head hog." The secretary replied, "That isn’t a very nice thing to call our beloved pastor, Rev. Jones." Again the man replied, "I’d like to speak to the head hog, because I’m going to donate $75,000 to the church. She replied, "Hold on a moment, I think the big fat pig just walked in."
This is Pledge Sunday, but I am not going to do a typical sermon on stewardship. I am going to preach on love, because I believe that if you love God, the money will follow. Jesus said, “Where you treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And the reverse is also true: where your heart is, your treasure will be. If we love God with all our hearts, then our money will serve God. If we do this, then our church financial needs will be taken care of.
In our passage this morning Jesus speaks about loving God with all our heart, mind and soul. He talks about it in answer to a question from the Pharisees. It was the last question that he was ever asked by his opponents. It says in verse 46 that after Jesus answered this question, “nor from that day on did anyone dare question Him anymore.” There is always one big final question. It used to be known as the $64,000 question. On the show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” it is the million-dollar question. Our gospel lesson today says that there was a final question. The passage begins: 34 But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
Theoretical physicists today search for what they call “the theory of everything”; it is also known as the “final theory.” It is the scientific theory that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out. They are still looking for that theory. Theologians look for a final theological theory that ties together everything. The Jews had 631 commandments in the Old Testament, which were the faithful Jew’s responsibility to God. They condensed it to the well-known Ten Commandments. But they were looking for one command to sum it all up. They asked Jesus what he thought it was.
Jesus gave his answer. “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” As John Lennon wrote in his famous song “All You Need is Love.” Love is all you need. This was a revolutionary concept back when Jesus gave this answer. Now, it is not so much so. If you get a group of people together from various religious traditions, they will all agree on the centrality of Love. It was Jesus Christ who came up with this idea, but it has now been adopted by even nonchristian religions. The importance of love is repeated in Christian churches so much so that it is hard to say something new about it. What new thing can you say about love?
Sermons on love are not the most memorable ones. It is like waxing eloquent on the glory of vanilla ice cream. Vanilla ice cream is okay if you put it on something like blueberry pie or indian pudding or apple crisp, but by itself vanilla ice cream is boring. Only when you put something like chocolate chips into it does it get interesting. A sermon on love is like vanilla ice cream. It is so nondescript and vague. I have preached three or four point sermons on this greatest commandment that go through what it means to love God with all you heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. But I don’t want to do that again. I want to come at it differently today.
I want to focus on how. If I try hard I can love God with a bit more of my heart and mind and soul, but I come nowhere near loving with ALL by heart and mind and soul. And the command to love my neighbor as myself? Forget it! I don’t come anywhere near fulfilling that. Would you do for your neighbor exactly the same as you would do for yourself? We don’t do for our neighbor what we would do for our family, much less ourselves. I try to be loving to people – those I like and those I don’t like, because Jesus tells us to love even our enemies. But it comes nowhere near what I do for myself and those dearest to me.
It makes me think of the story of the rich young ruler who came to Jesus wanting to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments. He replied, “Been there. Done that!” Jesus ponders the man for a moment and then says. “Good. There is just one more thing you lack. Sell all you have and give the proceeds to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.” You remember what happened? The man couldn’t do it. It says he walked away sorrowful. If that is what it takes for us to inherit eternal life, could any one of us here do it?
This is Pledge Sunday. We pledge to give a portion of our income to the service of God through this church. Will any of us sell all that we have - our properties, our investments, our bank accounts - and pledge to give it all to the church during 2012? I don’t think so! Yet that is what Jesus was asking that rich young man to do. There is something truly radical that Jesus is asking in stories like the rich young ruler. The command to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and loving our neighbor as ourselves is much more than we imagine. Most of the time we do not get anywhere near what Jesus is asking us to do. We reduce it to mean giving a little bit more, to be slightly more sacrificial. But there is something much deeper here.
These commandments, to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves, are radical statements. When you really meditate upon this type of love, it goes much deeper than the Beatles lyrics. I will tell you what I think it comes down to. I think it comes down to pure selflessness. Think about it. If you love God with all of your heart and all of your mind and all of your soul, what is left? If you give all to God, what is left? If you make no distinction between yourself and your neighbor, what is left? The answer is nothing is left. The real issue is our selves and our preoccupation with ourselves. We put ourselves over against God and over against our neighbor, and we try to balance things. When we fill out these pledge cards and decide how much we can afford to give to the church budget next year and all the other charitable causes that we want to support during the year we are trying to balance our needs against the needs of other people and groups. But it is always our needs that win. We don’t love anyone the way we love ourselves … except perhaps our family. We are human animals designed to survive, and we will do whatever it takes. That is human nature.
Jesus is challenging that human nature. He is telling us to give that human nature – our heart, our mind, our very soul – all to God. That is what it means to love God with all our heart and mind and soul. This can only be done if there is a transformation of our human nature into something new – a new creature, a new creation – to quote the apostle Paul. In a very real sense to love God with all our heart, mind and soul is the end of self-centeredness. We cease to be the center of our lives, and God becomes the center of our lives. To love our neighbor as ourselves means that our neighbor and I are two equal human beings centered on God. This involves a spiritual Copernican revolution. In the 16th century Copernicus revolutionized the way we understood our place in the universe. He established a new model of the cosmos where the earth revolved about the sun and not the other way around. Jesus is doing the same type of thing here spiritually. In Christ’s universe, the center of our lives becomes God and not us. And our needs and our neighbors needs all revolve around God. That is what these great commandments mean.
II. The really interesting thing about this passage of scripture is that this is not the end of the discussion that Jesus has with these Pharisees. The conversation continues. They had asked him a question. But like Jesus so often does, he turns it around and asks them a question. 41 While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, 42 saying, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He?” Jesus turns the conversation from loving God to the identity of the Christ.
As I said previously, love is universally accepted today as a virtue. Adherents of various religions and no religion extol the virtue of love. They do not really get to the heart of what that means, but they will sing the Beatles song with us, “All You need is Love.” But Jesus takes this a step further. He moves the conversation from love to Christ. “What do you think about the Christ?” People don’t agree on this. People can agree on love as long as you keep it as a warm feeling or a spiritual sentiment.. But you start bringing in Christ, and it is a whole different matter. But that is exactly what Jesus does. He turns the discussion about morality and love into one about the nature and person of Christ.
Jesus begins to quote scripture. He quotes a passage from the psalms where King David is talking about the Messiah as his Lord, even though the Messiah had not been born yet and wouldn’t be born for a thousand years. I don’t really want to get into the details of his argument here. But it boils down to the idea that the Messiah must be eternal. The correct answer to the question, “Whose Son is He?” is not just that he is the Son of David, that the Messiah was to come from the genealogical lineage of King David, but that he is also the Son of God. Christ is divine.
This is important for two reasons. First, if Christ is God, then to love God means to love Christ. You can’t love God with all your heart, mind and soul without loving his Son with all your heart, mind and soul. Second, if God is love, then Christ is love. He is the incarnation of love for God and love for neighbor. That is why Jesus brings the subject of Christ into this discussion about love. If you want to know what it means to love, look at Jesus. Christ shows us what it means to love with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. He shows us true selflessness. He shows us what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves. Incarnated in Christ, this lofty ideal of love becomes very practical.
Love is supremely represented in the cross. The cross is love. It is the greatest symbol of love in the history of humankind. The cross is Jesus loving his neighbor as himself. More than that; it is loving his neighbor more than himself. The cross is the picture of God loving us and also what it means for us to love God. Jesus loved God with all his heart and soul. And for him it meant dying on a cross. That is true selflessness. The cross is a picture of the self dying out of love. We love God with all our heart, mind, and soul by embracing that cruciform love. If we love God with everything in us, then there is nothing left. Jesus loved until there was nothing left. Not even his life. Jesus said that those who seek to save their lives will lose it, but whoever loses his life for his sake will find it. That is a description of the cross.
That is love, people. That is what it means to love God. If you want to know how to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, look at Jesus. If you want to know how to love your neighbor as yourself, you look at Jesus. The concept of love is not boring or fuzzy or ethereal. When you tie it to Jesus it is very down-to-earth and practical. In Jesus’ case love of neighbor meant dying for his neighbor. The apostle Paul says in Romans 5: 7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
The apostle John says, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Love cannot really be understood until it is experienced. It is experienced in the life and death of Jesus Christ. We love God loving his Son, Jesus Christ. People want to talk about love but they don’t want to talk about Christ. Jesus wouldn’t let the Pharisees get away with that. If you want to talk about the love of God, you have to talk about Christ. If you want to talk about the love of neighbor, you have to talk about Christ. No one has ever loved like Christ loved. And if we love God, we will love him. And if love him we will give ourselves unreservedly to him. And when we do that, everything else – including all of our money and all of our time and all of our talents and gifts and abilities, will be put to the service of the one whom we love with all our heart, and mind, and soul.
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