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“The Greatest (Simplest, Hardest) Commandment,” Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 10/19/14

“The Greatest (Simplest, Hardest) Commandment”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, CO

by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair

October 19, 2014

We’ve spent the past few Sundays on the topic of reconciliation – the restoration of right relationship.  We’ve considered reconciliation among races, within families, and with God.  We’ve turned to both testaments, where stories of relationships ruined and restored abound.  We’ve looked to the world around us and within ourselves, examining the places where brokenness binds the ability to reconcile, and celebrating the times when restoration has been possible.

This morning we return to Matthew’s gospel, where Jesus finds himself at odds with the religious leaders of his day.

READ MATTHEW 22:34-46

They’ve been waiting to take him down by tripping him up. They should be getting closer – Jesus has already taken on the Sadducees, the chief priests, the elders, the lawyers, the Herodians.  Now the Pharisees are the last leaders standing.  They send their ace-in-the-hole to try to get Jesus to say something that will be the final straw, his great downfall, the proof in the pudding of Jesus’ false teachings.

Jesus didn’t give them what they wanted. He didn’t fall into their trap.  They trapped him anyway.

This verbal joust with the Pharisees took place during the last week of Jesus’ life before his crucifixion. It’s the clasp on a string of controversies in which Jesus has managed to irritate the heck out of just about everyone who was anyone in the Temple.

The plan was to take Jesus down, although it seems as though the religious leaders preferred he would do it himself. He didn’t.

He spoke the truth. I don’t know if he spoke it in love.  But there’s no doubt that the truth itself was love.

The greatest commandment is this: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Before we go any further, there’s something you should know about love and about commandments in Jesus’ day.

Commandments first: They were abundant. In Jesus’ own faith tradition – Judaism – there were 613 given in the Torah, what as Christians we now know at the first five books of the Bible.  Some of these commands are considered “light” while others are considered “heavy.”  248 are positive injunctions; 365 are prohibitions.  And Jesus wasn’t the first to attempt to “sum up” these commandments.  He was in good company with King David (Psalm 15); and the prophets Isaiah (33:15), Micah (6:8) and Amos (5:4).[1]

And as for love in Jesus’ world? It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy feeling toward someone or for ourselves, for that matter.  Love and hate in the first-century were rooted in group identity.  There were a variety of groups of which one might be a part.  There was the family, the village, the neighborhood, the factions (like the Pharisees) one might join.

It was this group that gave you your identity, a sense of belonging, and advice for actions to be taken or avoided. The group functioned as an external conscience exerting enormous pressure on its individual members.

So you can imagine that in this context, love and hate were best understood as group attachment and group disattachment.  (Jesus requirement to “hate one’s father and mother” now makes a little more sense, too.  To hate in this context meant to detach from one’s family and join Jesus’ group.)  So the command to love God with all your heart—that’s to be totally attached to God.[2]

Emotion, affection. These mattered little in comparison to that feeling of belonging (love!) or not belonging (hate!).  One expressed love, then, not as an emotion or a feeling, but as a pattern of action.[3]

The kind of love Jesus is talking about isn’t the sweep-you-off-your-feet kind of love. It isn’t the motive-for-a-crime-of-passion love, either.

It’s the kind of love that seeks to marry faith and justice.[4]  It’s the kind of love that keeps showing up

This past Monday was dubbed “Moral Monday” in Ferguson, Missouri. Clergy and religious leaders from a variety of faith traditions organized themselves to be part of an act of civil disobedience.

The stated purpose of the demonstration was to ask for justice for Michael Brown and for a change in the police culture present in St. Louis and the surrounding suburbs.

Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist faith leaders approached the police officers who were holding the line against the large crowd. There were clergy who came very close to the officers. One of my seminary professors who was there that day wrote of his experiences in the form of an open pastoral letter to the Ferguson Police Force.  To the police officers, he wrote:

They [the clergy] got in your personal space, I could tell by your body language. I couldn’t hear what they said to each of you. We had agreed that those who spoke with you would say, “You are part of the system that has killed Michael Brown. I call you to repentance, and I offer to hear your confession.” Maybe they actually said that to you; maybe they just followed their hearts. Many of them talked for a long time.

Some of you conversed with the clergy in front of you. A few of you smiled, and even took hands with those who were speaking with you. Others of you stared straight ahead, or looked with controlled anger at the clergy who were facing you. I could see the strain on your faces: the strain of the situation, and a weariness from this long, 67-day siege that has surrounded your department. I understand that this kind of experience takes its toll on a person. I hope that you have support – family, and counseling, and some kind of spiritual support as well. I want you to know that I noticed how you were faring, and that I prayed for each one of you that I saw, moving from face to face.[5]

Showing up to ask for justice.

Naming the ways that the actions of one group of people had violated the rights of another.

Acknowledging the systems and patterns of behavior of which we are all a part

Creating a way for relationship to be restored.

Praying for someone it would be easy to consider enemy.

That is love.

Love beyond ardor; love that is arduous.

The kind of love Jesus put not only at the top of the list, but as the list’s very foundation – on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

As simple – and as hard – as this great command may be, this wasn’t a mic-drop moment for Jesus.

He joins the Pharisees at their own game, asking a question for the sake of seeing what kind of answer he could trip them up in: What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?

The Pharisees give the “right” answer, the one you’d find at the back of the book: The son of David. That was the technically correct answer – the “Sunday School answer,” if you will.  Common Jewish belief was that the Messiah was David’s son, and as such, would be even greater than David.  Yet Jesus shuts the Pharisees down with David’s own words from the psalms about his relationship to his Lord.

And that’s the end.

No one speaks another word to Jesus.

No reconciliation occurs, at least not then.

And not when Jesus goes on to preach against the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23).

And not when the chief priests and elders gather with the high priest to conspire to arrest Jesus and kill him (Matt. 26:1-5).

And not when Judas kisses betrayal on Jesus in front of the chief priests and elders 26:47-56).

And not when the scribes and elders and high priest hurl accusations against Jesus and question him following his arrest (Matt. 26:57-68).

And not when the chief priests and elders hand him over to the governor, Pilate (Matt. 27:1-2).

And not when the chief priests and elders persuade the crowds to ask for the release of a well-known criminal, Barabbas, instead of Jesus (Matt. 27:15-26).

And not when the chief priests and scribes and elders mock Jesus in his misery on the cross, taunting him, “He saved others; he cannot save himself…He trusts in God; let God deliver him now…For he said, ‘I am God’s Son.’ (Matt. 27:38-44).

And not when chief priests and the Pharisees seal the stone of Jesus’ tomb to ensure that even if he does rise on the third day, he won’t be able to go anywhere (Matt. 27:62-66).

And not when the chief priests and the elders bribe the soldiers who guarded Jesus’ tomb to tell everyone that Jesus’ disciples had stolen him from the tomb instead of the truth (Matt. 28:11-15).

It seems difficult to pin down a point in scripture where the religious leaders and Jesus reconcile, where their contentious relationship is restored.

But maybe we can. Sometimes it‘s a death that starts that process of reconciliation.

Jesus’ death reconciled the world to God, even those who couldn’t stand who Jesus was and what he stood for. I wish we could say the same already for Michael Brown.

Over the past few weeks, I just keep coming back to Ferguson.

I have to confess: The pain if racism and the city of St. Louis are roots intertwined around my heart. My last year of seminary in St. Louis, I was Student Cabinet co-president.  In that role, I was part of a deeply painful – personally and corporately –conversation about racism, specifically institutional racism.

Because of a decision that my fellow leaders and I made, we brought to the surface tension that had long been simmering in a school that had predominantly white leadership (faculty, staff, and student) during a time when the black student population was growing rapidly.

I felt paralyzed by the implications of the decision we had made; its consequences were ones I never would’ve foreseen. Long conversations with the Dean of Students and my co-president ensued.  So did the churning of my gut.  When it came to discerning a way forward, however small that step would be, all I could think of was the table.  (And I wasn’t even a Disciple yet!)

After what felt like weeks of tense, difficult conversation amongst the members of our Student Cabinet, we finally decided that breaking bread together in the form of communion served to one another was one means of moving forward. In addition to that corporate act, I personally covenanted with one of our black student leaders to have breakfast together once a month for the rest of the school year.  To be honest, I’m not sure what, if any, kind of impact that had on him. I do know it had a significant impact on me.

In my heart and mind, and in the hearts minds of my classmates, I know, we realized that true racial reconciliation was a long way off for our institution, for our city, for our country. It’s not surprising then that Ferguson ripped the band-aid off a deep, deep wound that wasn’t all that tightly wrapped to begin with.  It’s a wound that won’t heal quickly or easily.  And perhaps it shouldn’t.  So it can be on the path to reconciliation.

What I do trust is that when we build our lives around the law upon which all others stand – the law of love Jesus commands – it makes a difference. It’s not the let’s all hold hands and sing kum-bah-yah – lovely as it is – love, but the let’s-get-our-hands-filthy love – that can put us on the path to reconciliation, even if the road signs aren’t all that clear.

It’s love as a pattern of action that propels us to show up even when we don’t know what we’re doing or how it could possibly make a difference. It’s love as a pattern of action that invites us to this common table to break bread together amidst the brokenness of our everyday lives.  It’s love as a pattern of action that was so scandalous it got Jesus into some serious trouble.  It’s love as a pattern of action that may be our only hope for a way out of it.

[1] John J. Pilch, The Law of Love. Accessed at liturgy.slu.edu/30OrdA102614/theword_cultural.html.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Sarah Dylan, Proper 25, Year A. Accessed at www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/10/proper_25_year_.html.

[4] John Kavanaugh, All You Need is Love. Accessed at liturgy.slu.edu/30OrdA102614/theword_embodied.html.

[5] Christopher Grundy, A Pastoral Letter to Members of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Force. Read full post here. October 15, 2014.