When Christ was asked which law was the most important, He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” If we want to live according to God’s greatest commandment we must learn to love how God wants us to love. We can’t love the way God wants on ‘day one’. It takes time to learn how to love.
Transcript:
My brothers and sisters, this morning we learned, I should say we are challenged to learn what it means to love. When Christ was encountered by the lawyer, he says, “Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law?” And Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment,” But Christ continues, he says, “And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments, hang the law and the prophets.” Now, this was a statement that the Jews would’ve understood. When Jesus said the law and the prophets, he was talking about what we would call the entirety of the old Testament. When the Jews referred to the law and the prophets, they were talking about what we call the entire old Testament, which means that if we want to understand the old Testament, we must learn how to love as God wants us to love. That is the core of life.
And Christ says you shall love the Lord with everything, all your might, all your strength, all your heart, all your mind. And I’m here to tell you, as the saying goes, that’s much easier said than done because the truth is, we cannot love like God wants us to love on day one or even day two or day 300. It takes time to learn to love as God wants us to love. If God were expecting us to get it right on day one, he wouldn’t have needed to establish the church. If God would’ve expected us to be perfect on day one, we wouldn’t have holy confession, we wouldn’t have the Eucharist God knows better than we do that it’s going to take time to learn to love. So the question is, how do we learn to love as God wants us to love? If the entire law and the prophets rests on learning how to love, he then says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He’s not saying love yourself. We don’t need any help loving ourselves.
From the moment we get out of our mother’s womb, we love ourselves, but Christ says to love others as we love ourselves because what we want for ourselves is always the best. We want the best honor, we want the best conditions, we want the best treatment from others. We want the best for ourselves, and so Christ is saying, how we love others is to want that for them more than we want it for ourselves. And we’re going to do it because he says this is just like the first law, with all our strength and with all our heart and with all our mind. You see, my brothers and sisters, it takes every ounce of us to love like God. The moment we leave one thing behind, we’re going to have to go and pick it back up again. You can’t just love a little, we have to love a lot. And we learn that, my brothers and sisters, through the life of the church. And the life of the church is a life of prayer, a life of fasting, a life of taking care of the poor.
What a better way to learn to love others than to take care of them, to clothe them, to feed them, to nurture them. And I’m going to add one more, one that we don’t always think about, but to bring them to Christ. None of us would want to be left out of heaven, and so in order for us to love others as ourselves, we need to want them to be in heaven with us. And so this is why it is such a great and difficult challenge for us, my brothers and sisters, because left to our own selves, we’ll just make sure we are in heaven, whoever wants to follow, that’s up to them. But that’s not how God wants it. God wants us to love others more than we love ourselves, to put others first and to bring them the hope that rests in Christ, to share with them the grace that comes from God. And I’m here to tell you, if we can learn to love with that type of love, these walls will not be strong enough to keep the people in.
There’s no advertisement on television, there’s no special blog post, there’s no special meme that’s going to bring people into Christ. It is our love for them more than our love for ourselves that’s going to bring them to Christ, and that is going to be the foundation that God wants it to be. Glory to God for all things.
