The Two Commandments That Sum Up Everything

OpeningWell, we have some wonderful Scriptures today, but I would like to make some comments on only the first part of the Gospel reading, just because it is such an important passage of Scripture.The Greatest CommandmentA lawyer comes to test Jesus and asks him, “What is the greatest commandment in the law? What is the great commandment in the law?” He is essentially asking Jesus: What is the most important thing to do in this world, in life?And Jesus’ answer is, as we have just heard: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And there is a second commandment like it, interestingly: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets, he says. In other words, the entirety of what we would call the Old Testament is summed up in these two commandments.Attention: Spotlight, Daylight, and StarlightI recently read a very interesting book about how the modern world is making it harder and harder for us to pay attention to anything for a long period of time. Our attention spans are shrinking, apparently. Towards the end of this book, the author talks about an interview he had with a former Google strategist whose name is James Williams. James Williams has apparently done some thinking about the nature of attention, and he has developed a metaphor for the different kinds of ways that we pay attention to things.To begin with, he says that attention can be like a spotlight. When we are really focused on something in particular, everything else is filtered out and our minds are fixed on one thing only—the kind of attention you may be paying to this sermon right at this moment, I hope anyway.Attention can also be like daylight. Daylight is a slightly more zoomed-out form of attention that helps us to take in information and gives us the capacity to make decisions about how we are going to order our lives in a practical way.And the third thing that he says attention could be like is starlight. Starlight is the kind of attention that helps us to make ultimate decisions about the nature of life and of our lives. It is not about daily choices as such, or specific things, but about the kind of attention that we are going to pay to life in general. And the author of this book writes: it is called starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars and you remember the direction you are travelling. If you become distracted from your starlight, you start to forget where you are heading.I would suggest that today’s passage invites us to this kind of attention. It invites us to consider the ultimate nature and purpose of human life in the most general terms. Who are we, and what are our lives for? What are they about? How should we order our lives? What should be our ultimate direction? Where are we going?Loving God with All That We AreAnd Christ’s answer, in a way, is very simple—but when we start to think about it, it is also very challenging. He says that the first commandment is to love God with all one’s heart, one’s soul, one’s mind—in other words, with all of our self. And this, of course, means to attend to God, to worship God, to obey God, to commune with God in prayer, and to draw closer to God in the spiritual life. It means to orientate one’s existence towards God as we recognise him as the source and the end of our entire being. It means that God is, in a sense, the highest value that we possess. And it means that to put anything else first—whether that is money or relationships or family or career or work or pleasure or anything—is to make a kind of mistake. It is to put something that is not ultimate in the place of the one who is ultimate. And this is surely why Christ says that this is the first and great commandment: to love God.Loving Our Neighbour as OurselvesBut in itself this commandment is not complete. And this is why Christ says that there is a second that is like it. And that commandment, as we have already heard, is to love your neighbour as yourself.I would like to step back and ask ourselves what this word “love” means. What does it mean?I have already said that the word love as it applies to God must mean that we obey God, that we have communion with God. But what about our love for our neighbour? How does our love for our neighbour express itself, particularly in this context?Well, there are a couple of things at least we could say about this. We are commanded to love our neighbour by God, and so in a sense obedience to God—and therefore love for God—is fulfilled in the way that we love our neighbour. But perhaps that is a bit of a thin way of thinking about it.We might also ask ourselves: How has God expressed his love for us in Christ? And there we would of course think about the gospel and the way that the gospel is spoken about in Scripture. For example, in the First Letter of the Apostle John: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”In other words, if we wonder what it means to love, let us look at Christ and the way that he has loved us: how he divested himself of his glory in heaven, came to live among us, to be a servant to the poor, to heal those who were sick in body and in spirit and in mind, to teach the ignorant, to liberate the captives, and ultimately, of course, to give his life as a sacrifice for our sin. This is how God has expressed his love for us in Christ.The Apostle John continues: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” So God has shown his love for us in Christ; he calls us to love each other in a similar way; and in a sense this is how God’s love is manifested in the world. And we see that pre-eminently, of course, in the Church and in the community of the Church. This pattern has been laid down for us. We know what love is, because God has shown it to us in Christ.When Jesus says, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” what could this mean? Well, I will say something about who our neighbour is later on in this sermon, but I would like first to answer the question specifically: What does it mean to love our neighbour as ourselves?The point here appears to be that as we naturally care for ourselves—by feeding ourselves, by clothing ourselves, by washing ourselves, in general seeing to our own good—so we are to extend the same concern for our neighbour. And of course that raises the question of what it really means to love ourselves and to love someone else.Of course, sometimes we love ourselves by indulging or experiencing things which are pleasurable or nice. But self-love often involves discipline and sacrifice. And it may be that sometimes our love for our neighbour involves similar things. So love for our neighbour is not just indiscriminate charity in that sense—thoughtless charity. It is actually paying a careful regard for our neighbour’s welfare and a commitment to help where and when we can. We might think there of Thomas Aquinas’ famous definition of love, which is to will the good of the other—not just the other’s comfort or pleasure, but the good of the other.What Does This Mean for Us?So that is something about those first two commandments. But what does all of this mean? What does it mean for us?I said earlier that this passage is like starlight: guiding principles that provide a general direction through life. How can we apply what Christ says here to ourselves? Well, some thoughts on this.Firstly, these commandments speak strongly against a disembodied and purely spiritual construal of our faith. What I mean by this is that Christ does not teach here something which is a kind of spiritual retreat from the world and a lack of concern for the people in it. He does not teach here that progress in the faith can be measured by, if you like, spiritual experience or visions … This is a public episode. 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