Jesus is the Incarnation of God in this world, and if God wants a new thing, God can do a new thing. And God does a new thing in Jesus. But this new thing that God is doing in Jesus is not a sharp break with the past. When God becomes incarnate in Jesus, God becomes incarnate in a deep and rich tradition. And Jesus is faithful to that tradition. We see that in the way he was raised. We see it in the only story we have from his childhood when is in the Temple engaging with religious scholars. We see it in his regular attendance in synagogue that the Gospels tell us about, which was probably weekly. We see it in his rich prayer life between his weekly synagogue visits. We see it in his regular visits to Jerusalem for the festivals and going to the Temple. And we see it in his deep engagement with scripture.
There is a rather new idea about scripture. When I say new, I mean a couple of hundred years old. The idea is that scripture has a plain meaning. You can look at the text and whatever it obviously says is exactly what it means. It is very plain and simple right in front of your eyes. All the methods of interpretation that other Christians have are too complicated and they get you away from what God is really trying to tell you in scripture. This is a new concept, and not a widely held idea about scripture. The vast majority of Christians around the world belong to an interpretive tradition that is not the plain meaning of scripture concept. This idea gets an outsized voice in American Christianity because more practitioners are here and they have a louder voice. But when you look at the whole world, the majority do not hold this view of scripture, even Americans. During the first seventeen hundred years of Christianity, nobody held this view that there is a plain meaning of scripture. All traditions before this time, and most Christians today, understand that scripture has to be interpreted.
You see that very clearly whenever Jesus engages with scripture, he is engaged in questions of interpretation. My favorite story of Jesus interpreting scripture is the time that the Disciples were picking grain on the Sabbath. Jesus is criticized for his Disciples working on the Sabbath, which seems to be a clear violation of the rules, the laws of scripture. But Jesus has a different interpretation. It is definitely not plain meaning. It is a creative and playful engagement with scripture. While the critics are talking about the Sabbath, Jesus says do you remember the story about David? This has nothing to do with Sabbath, but the time that David and his men went to the High Priests in the temple. David convinced the Priests to give them the bread, the Holy Bread that was reserved only for the priests. David was able to get that bread to feed his men. That was a clear violation of the rules, but it was necessary at that moment because the men were hungry and they needed to eat. Eating trumped that thing that seemed to be so clear and obvious. Jesus goes on to say that is similar to what is happening here. Again, it has nothing to do with Sabbath, but he takes another story and unpacks it, and shows how it is relevant to this situation.
Today's Gospel reading is another example of Jesus engaging with questions of how to interpret scripture. A man comes up to him and asks what is the most important commandment, the most important teaching in scripture. Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love the Lord your God with all you heart and mind and soul comes from Deuteronomy, the reading we heard this morning. It is sometimes called the Shema, for Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One. The second part, love your neighbor as yourself, comes from the Book of Leviticus. These two things, Jesus says, are the greatest commandment.
There a couple of interesting things going on here. The first is that there is nowhere in scripture that says certain commandments are more important than others. Here Jesus is taking two commandments and says these two are the most important. When you are engaging in scriptural interpretation, these two trump the others. There is no commandment greater than these. If you follow these two, you will be fine. You can see what Jesus is getting at in the story of David. There is something more important in the moment. In that case it was people being hungry. It is more important to feed someone who is hungry than to follow the letter of the law. Love is the most important thing. Love embodied in feeding the hungry, and love embodied in other ways. Loving God and loving neighbor are the most important commandments that God has for us.
In Mark's version of this story, he remembers Jesus saying these are more important than the other. These are the greatest commandments above the others. But when Matthew tells us this story, he says Love your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Then he goes on to say on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. This is slightly different. Mark says these two are above the others, these are the greatest. Matthew says on these two hang the others. The way we understand these other commandments is through love of God and love of neighbor. Love is the interpretive lens through which you read scripture. If you look at any other commandment in a way that is unloving, you got it wrong and you must try again. Or as our Presiding Bishop loves to say, if it's not about love, it's not about God.
God is all about love. That is the heart of Jesus's proclamation. The heart of what the Kingdom of God, the reign of God is all about. It is all about love. Jesus sums up the greatest commandment in terms of love. When he gives the New Commandment in John's Gospel, it is about love. When he explains what is going to happen on the cross, it's all about love. We see his followers coming back to this same point in the Book of Acts when they are trying to decide which rules the Gentiles need to follow: the most important thing is love.
Paul says the same thing when asked what the most important commandment is. He says it is love of your neighbor. James, in his Epistle, is all about love. If you don't feed the hungry, or take care of the widow and the orphans, you are not engaging in those acts of love in this world and not following Jesus and doing what he asks of you. We see the same thing in the Epistle of First John when it says that God is love. Therefore, if you do not love, or do not act in love, you do not know God because God is love.
This is the heart of the Gospel message, to love God and love your neighbor. When we read scripture, we should be reading it with that lens of love to be sure we are reading it in terms of how does this help me love better in this world.
Love is what Jesus keeps coming back to, and keeps asking us to come back to. Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor.
AMEN.
