Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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By the time of Jesus, the rabbis had long recognized that the Ten Commandments were easily divided into two groups: the first five speak of our relationship to God, and the second five about our relationship to each other. So when these Pharisees ask Jesus this text-book question: which is the greatest commandment, and he responds with two (love God and love neighbor), it was no surprise. Scholars of the law had been saying that, in one way or another, for years. In fact the question is so simple, and the answer so well-established, that some think it was asked simply to see if Jesus knew his catechism. Could they trip him up on some easy question, and embarrass him? Jesus doesn't stumble, of course. He gives the correct answer, the traditional answer, but he sets a heavier-than-usual emphasis on love. In fact, his response is not really two, but one. What is the greatest commandment? To love. Period. Which (by the way) includes God -- wholly and completely -- and all others, including enemies. It's all one. A person does not love God first and then, as a second task, love his neighbor. Either love is present or it is not.

There is no question, in the Bible, or in the history of the church, that love is the center of the Christian universe. It is one of three things, along with faith and hope, that lasts forever, and is the greatest of the three. It is the dynamis, the power that moves the world. It is the basic magnetism holding everything together: God's love for us, and our love for him and for each other. Just as carbon is the universal element of physical life, love is the universal element of spiritual life. "If I have not love," Paul said, "I am nothing," and he meant that literally. "Nothing!" Matthew Henry said love is "the spring and fountain of all the rest." But the word is much abused today. Love has been cheapened down to a Pavlovian response. Love has a million impostors, and many things that aren't love try to pass for it. How can we tell? What's the difference between Hollywood love and the love of God?

One difference is that Christian love always recognizes God as its source. In the traditional wedding ceremony we pray to God as the creator of man and woman, and "the author of love." We can't create a book without an author, nor can we create (in a marriage or anywhere else) true love, the kind of love that lasts "'till death do us part," without God. Love, here, of course, is far more than affection, far more than feeling, far more than sentimentality -- these things don't last, can't last. The love which God authors (and which Paul says lasts forever) is compassion, and commitment, and sacrifice. It is one person spending and being spent for another. It is honesty and integrity. Watch carefully the words people use today to avoid the word "love," because they know what they're doing isn't love. They say, "I'm fond of him." "He's my significant other." "We are having a relationship." (I'm going to be sick!) I have "a relationship," for heaven's sake, with my dry cleaner. Where is love? Is it too much to believe that we can pull it off? I suppose it is, without God. And if we can't love our lovers without God, how can we love our neighbors, not to mention our enemies? We think we can do it ourselves, but we're not up to it. All true love begins with God and acknowledges that fact

. The next difference between movie love and Jesus love is that (sooner or later) real love involves sacrifice. G. C. Brown, our consultant for the "Find Us Faithful" campaign, has a wonderful way of defining stewardship. It isn't real, he says, "until it touches sacrifice." Love isn't love until it touches sacrifice. In the wedding ceremony, again, we have those awful words, "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health…" It's an honest recognition, you see, that true love will almost always involve sacrifice, of one kind or another, at one time or another. Sacrifice is a test of love. Words are cheap, but sacrifice is not. Clarence McCartney tells of visiting a home in his congregation, where a widow was raising an only son, and seeing there, over the mantle, a plaque with the words of Jesus, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend." In the course of conversation, the widow told him that when her son was small and couldn't swim he fell overboard from a boat. His father jumped in to save him. Somehow, in the confusion, the boy was saved and the father was lost. She said, "I put that plaque there not to make my son feel guilty, but to let him know how much his father loved him." There's no questioning the love that expresses itself in sacrifice. Of course, Jesus was referring to himself when he said, "Greater love hath no man…" In John's Gospel, as we enter the last week in Jesus' life, John introduces the subject by saying that Jesus, "having loved his own…loved them to the end." No greater love, no greater sacrifice.

Finally, if our love is to imitate God's love, it must be without condition or limit. This part is tough. We don't usually give ourselves like that to God or to others. But we have to hear Jesus insistence that we love God fully: "with all our heart, and soul, and mind.," he says, and that we love others "as (much as) we love ourselves" -- which self-love is plentiful and generous, and does not ask questions. This love of God and neighbor becomes almost an obsessive thing with Christians. It is sometimes headlong and foolhardy. It doesn't stop to count the cost. It doesn't try to make rational what is not. But it is not mere exuberance, either. But it is action, not just feeling. It seeks out its object as a good shepherd seeks a lost sheep, or as a heartbroken father waits on the road, watching for his wayward son. And when he sees him in the distance, he is delighted beyond words. That's the way God loves, and if that kind of love is the center of the universe, and God is the author of that kind of love, then we have to climb on board, and learn to love others in that same, unconditional way.

What is the greatest commandment? Give us the law in a nutshell, Jesus. Love God and neighbor. That's easy. We know about love. We see it in the media, read about it in novels. But, in fact, we don't know much about this kind of love. It's still a very strange phenomenon when it happens. We know it comes from God, involves sacrifice, and knows no limits. It is vertical, tying mankind to God, and it is horizontal, tying men and women to each other. It's all one thing, and it is the substance of the universe. The more we are in touch with it, the better we know God. And, when we are out of touch with love, we are out of touch with God. "If anyone says he loves God and hates his neighbor, he is a liar." And I'll tell you something for free: he's pretty unhappy, too.