A Fourth Church Sermon by Sarah A. Johnson

October 26, 2008 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

The Greatest Commandment

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 90
Matthew 22:34–46

One of the greatest challenges of our American lifestyle is “keeping it all together”—that is balancing our calendars and our Blackberries with our relationships and the pressures of lifestyle and daily needs. There is always so much to be done and certainly not enough hours within which to do it. We often hurry along to keep up with the Joneses or maybe just to keep up, to survive—only to do it all over again the next day.

And yet into all this daily chaos we are offered no short supply of advice to help us along the way: books about discovering our best selves, magazines that promise a thinner physique and more financially secure lifestyle, personal gurus with spiritual truths. Even my gym sent me an email reminding me that in order to achieve maximum success I need to exercise, get enough sleep, eat well, pay it forward, live in the moment, get organized, meditate, say no when necessary, hydrate, and lean on my support system. All of which they were willing to help me do for six easy payments of $29.95.

Two days ago I walked through the bookstore only to spot a book entitled What Shamu the Whale Has to Teach Us about Life, Love, and the World.

As we enter Matthew’s Gospel through our text tonight, we find an unmistakably familiar saying about the way that we might order our lives. The local religious leaders of the day, whom Matthew identifies as Pharisees, have approached Jesus, and they want to know which commandment is the greatest. “Of all the commandments that God has given us, which one, Jesus, matters the most for how we ought to live?”

And the Pharisees think they have him cornered. There are so many of God’s good commandments from which to choose—613 to be exact—and each one of them of equal importance for helping to live a life of faith. To lift one commandment over another would mean to deny the divine authority from which it comes. In other words, the Pharisees already know all the commandments are good, because they all come from God.

This is exactly why they ask. Surely Jesus, who claims to be sent from God, cannot single out or deny any one of the 613 commandments. But if Jesus gives this answer, as the Pharisees think he must, then the follow-up question is an easy one: “If every commandment in the law is great, because every commandment in the law is from God, then, how come, Jesus, you have been breaking so many of these important commandments?”

And Jesus says this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

At this point I imagine that there is an awkward silence; the Pharisees are confused by this. Here they were all set to stump the teacher, and Jesus doesn’t give the customary answer. (I can see them all standing in a circle poised and ready to congratulate one another on fooling this one who thinks he knows God’s way . . .)

Jesus doesn’t say that all the commandments are great. But he also doesn’t say, “Here’s one and the rest don’t matter.” (“Just don’t covet your neighbor’s ox, people, and it will all work out.”) Instead Jesus says something completely different. Stepping over and beyond human expectation, he reframes and reprioritizes the way we think about our lives.

Jesus wants them to see that indeed they are right about one thing: that following God encompasses all that we do, that matching our lives and our faith is a matter to be taken seriously. But he also wants them to see that in the midst of everything that life demands, finding the way isn’t about easy answers, one-way commandments, a line in a book, or even really something else for us to add to our to-do list. Rather, it is an invitation into a different way of living and being in the world, an invitation to be guided by a discerning ethic of love.

In 2000 Walt Disney released an animated comedy entitled The Emperor’s New Groove. The film narrates the story of the vain and cocky emperor Kuzco. Kuzco is a very busy man. Besides working constantly to maintain his own “groove” and firing people who get on his nerves, Kuzco’s life revolves around building a water park all for himself for his upcoming birthday. The problem is that in order to build this one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art water park, Kuzco must destroy one of the villages in his kingdom, blowing to smithereens all the houses and the people in it.

But before Kuzco can decide which it is going to be—water park or people—he gets magically (and accidentally) transformed into a llama by the less-than-competent royal magician of his archnemesis. Now a llama, Kuzco finds himself the property of Pacha, a lowly llama herder whose home also happens to be in ground zero for the water park. Operating as usual, Kuzco demands that Pacha help him become human and return to the palace. Pacha refuses.

So Kuzco is forced to cut a deal (or at least the appearance of a deal): if Pacha helps him become human again, Kuzco will promise to build his water park elsewhere. But Kuzco (as only someone guided by his own personal ethic of “Me” could) thinks, “This is perfect. I’ll get this guy to help me turn back into a human, and as soon as he does, I’ll pull the old switcheroo, change my mind, and put my water park exactly where I want it.”

But as he and Pacha journey together, Kuzco’s perspective changes. Instead of seeing his life as something to be ordered by his own desires or maybe even a list of things given by his royal advisors, Kuzco becomes guided by love. So when it is all said and done and he has returned to being human and the moment comes for Kuzco to decide whether or not to build his water park, Kuzco lets love guide his way of living and being in the world.

Of course he still decides to build his personal water park, but he decides to build it on top of an empty, uninhabited, neighboring hill.

It seems a little nonsensical that a talking llama could be the spokesperson for Jesus—and perhaps it is. But I think that at the very least this story gives us pause to consider that guided by love we might be invited to live differently.

Rooted and reoriented in God’s love, we are given the chance to discern the whole of our lives differently, such that loving God and loving neighbor becomes the true measure for everything else that we do. Loving God and loving neighbor is the outer frame, the hinge on which everything else that we do hangs.

But before Jesus lets the Pharisees completely off the hook, before he lets them think that loving God and loving neighbor is a relatively unspecified overall ideal that might have something to do with Hallmark cards or what Shamu the whale really has learned about love while in the holding tank at Sea World, Jesus says something else: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

Once again, the Pharisees know the answer to this one. That’s easy: the Messiah is the son of King David.

The Pharisees know this answer because scripture had foretold that would be so. The Messiah who was to come, who would usher in the kingdom of heaven, would be descended from David’s line. As such it was expected that the Messiah would be a conquering hero much like David himself. The Messiah would be crowned king, destroying enemies, and with God’s help would be the once-and-for-all hero of God’s people.

Standing in front of them, Jesus wants them to see that indeed the Messiah will be descended from David’s line but that the Messiah will be a much different kind of king—the kind of king whose reign will include suffering, rejection, and death; whose disciples are called to take up the cross and to follow him; and whose ethic for living and being in the world is much different than they expected.

He wants them to see that loving God and loving neighbor is about the kind of life embodied in him; that when we are tempted to love those that are just like us, Jesus says, “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44); when we are tempted to return violence with violence. Jesus says, “Pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44); when we think that the message of the gospel is for some and not for others, Jesus says to the tax collector, “Come and follow me” (Matthew 9:9).

For decades now the Arab-Israeli conflict has made headlines on both the national and world scene. It is a conflict of deep wounds and longstanding ideologies in which people on both sides have experienced hurt and injustice. People in the same families have not spoken to each other for years because of divisive feuds. There are Arabs and Israelis, Christians and Muslims, Orthodox and Melkites who hate each other. People with different political ideas are bitterly fighting.

One person whose story I have found to be illuminating in the midst of all this is that of a man named Elias Chacour. Chacour is a preist in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. He is also a Palestinian Arab Christian who is a citizen of the state of Israel. As a Palestinian priest in the Holy Land, his personal identity is full of contradictions.

As a child, Chacour watched helplessly as his family, along with all those in his village, was removed from their land by Israeli authorities, making them refugees and outcasts in their own home. Chacour lived the shame of seeing all that his father worked for disappear in an instant and experienced the pain of being called a trespasser in the land of his ancestors. And yet despite his personal history and thus ties to the cause of the Palestinian people, Chacour’s vision is for something larger. From the moment he became a priest in the village of Ibillin in Galilee in 1965, Chacour has worked tirelessly for peace and reconciliation among all people of the region.

In his book We Belong to the Land, Chacour recounts a visit with a large Jewish congregation in Atlanta, Georgia. Speaking to a crowd of about 800 Jewish people, Chacour said, “In the eyes of Palestinians in the refugee camps and the villages of the Occupied Territories, Jews are not decent, civilized, or educated people. They are soldiers or occupiers or terrorists. That is the image our children have of you. Our task is to rehumanize ourselves in each others eyes.”

He went on to say, “I do not have a ‘nice dream’ to solve all this. Rather, we people from Galilee have visions, and we believe our visions become a reality. I have a vision of two children, a Jew and a Palestinian, who are friends. One day these children celebrate their friendship. The Palestinian child brings an Israeli flag for his brother, and the Jewish child brings his Palestinian brother a handmade Palestinian flag. They hug each other and say, ‘We were so ignorant, so blind, to believe that those who gave us money and weapons could show us the way” (We Belong to the Land, pp. 187–188).

When Chacour had finished his speech, the rabbi of the congregation came forward with tears in his eyes and asked Chacour to give him a blessing in front of his community. Chacour placed his hand on the rabbi’s head and gave him a blessing in Hebrew. The Rabbi turned to him and said, “I will not become your brother. I have discovered that I was already your brother, and we did not know each other.”

It is true: the heart of a life of faith is love—love of God and love of neighbor. To be a Christian is to be called to that life of love, allowing that life to guide our actions and our way of living and being in the world. But that calling is also a lifelong task that requires our willingness to be surprised by what that love turns out to be (Stanley Hauerwas).

And the really good news is this: Invited into this different and difficult way of life ordered around love of God and love of neighbor, we will discover a way of life more abundant in substance and more boundless in effect than we could have possibly imagined.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”

All thanks be to God. Amen.