Last Sunday After Trinity

Sermon preached by the Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis 

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

It must be something to do with my obsessive personality, or my architectural training long ago. But I have a predilection for the vertical and the horizontal. I like things straight, up and down, left and right. I’m offended by a picture hanging crooked on the wall, or by handwriting that slopes down the page. I like well-ordered design which balances the vertical with the horizontal, and in the same way I like an argument or a theory that is nicely structured, or a piece of music that expresses itself clearly and whose direction I can follow. 

I don’t suppose I am on my own in this. Crooked thinking, like fake news, is generally offensive. We want politicians to answer the question, not go on being evasive. We would like clarity about the science and above all we want to know where we are heading, and for how long we must be in this provisional limbo.

So it is refreshing to come to today’s gospel reading and find Jesus being totally straightforward with the Pharisees. They want to test him, to trick him if they can. They may be devious, but Jesus is straight. So one of them, a lawyer, asks him a question, “Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” This is the rabbis’ most frequently discussed question, endlessly debated at rabbi theological college. Of all the commandments given by Moses, even including the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, the greatest commandment is that found in Deuteronomy 6.4, and Jesus quotes it back “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 commandment. In Deuteronomy 6.4 it is prefaced by the imperative “Hear O Israel!” Throughout Judaism it is known as the “Shema”, the Hebrew word for “Hear!” Every Jew recites this every day. As it is written, “These words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gate.”

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.” It speaks above all of what it means be Jew, identified with the Jewish race, the ancient people of God.  On our one unforgettable visit to the gas chamber at Auschwitz, we found ourselves on the edge of a group of Jews from a synagogue in New York. The whole group of them walked into the chamber where millions of Jews had been murdered. We followed at a distance. They stood silently for a long time and then burst into song – and the song was the “Shema”, “Hear O Israel, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

 Jesus honours this great commandment by quoting it. So we can take it as our great commandment also. Our task is love, love of God, and we should learn how to do this with our heart, our soul and our mind.

 Now this challenges me because I see it as a vertical commandment. Between me and God, Jesus calls me to the work of love, despite my failures. Between earth below and heaven above Jesus calls me to the work of loving my Lord God. Despite the distance, it’s a straight path of love, up and down, down and up.

But though he has answered the lawyer, Jesus doesn’t leave it there. He then quotes another commandment from Leviticus 19. We heard it today in our first reading: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  Now Jesus has quoted this wonderful commandment twice before in St Matthew’s gospel. Once during the Sermon on the Mount, when he says “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy’; but I say to you Love your enemies.” And then again when Jesus challenged the rich young man to sell his possessions and follow him.   The challenge of this commandment is of course that our love for our neighbour must be of the same quality as the love we have for ourselves. If you have little love for yourself, you will have little love for your neighbour; but on the other hand if you love yourself greatly, then your love for your neighbour will be abundant. This commandment challenges us to do both. Loving is not a one-way street.

And my interest in this commandment, of course, is that it is a horizontal commandment. It demands that we look around us, to right and left just as much as up and down. It demands that we be firmly centred that we may confidently look either side.

“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” says Jesus. Emphatically, within the whole of the Old Testament, no commandments compel our attention or inform our behaviour more than these two.

But this is the first time Jesus has drawn the two commandments together. You shall love the Lord your God; and you shall love your neighbour as yourself. Two complementary imperatives, the vertical and the horizontal.  Jesus has drawn them together.

And when you draw a vertical and a horizontal together you get an intersection. The two lines cross. An intersection is both a resolution and also a point of tension.

I suppose for people like us, trying to love and be loved, this intersection is something of a struggle.  It is to be found right in the centre of our being, somewhere within our core, somewhere near our heart, where our God-love is affirmed by our neighbour-love, and where our neighbour-love enlightens our love of God.

 And for God himself there is another kind of intersection, also a struggle. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son into the world. The incarnation was a supreme act of vertical love, self-denying and self-emptying.

“When peaceful silence lay over all, and night was in the midst of her swift course: from your royal throne, O God, down from the heavens, leapt your almighty word.”          Wisdom 18.14-15a

And Jesus, the incarnate word, whose mission was a lifetime of horizontal love, lived continuously at the point of intersection between God’s love for the world and his love for humankind. This life, which was an outpouring of love, ended on the cross itself. Nailed upright on the cross, he opened wide his arms for us. His mangled, broken body on the cross demonstrated the intersection of vertical and horizontal love.

Our life in Christ is a calling and an answering between the intersection of love within us and the intersection of love within God. We might call it praying, for it tell us what we mean by loving. It’s not a passionate set of feelings set on fire by the flutterings of our heart, but rather a deep conviction emerging from our core meeting the eternal and endless steam of loving that flows from our broken God. On this relationship is founded our joy in God and our hope for the world.