All Your Mind
Matthew 22:34-46
October 23, 2011
The most interesting person to read about the Christian faith in the 20th century was a Swiss Reformed Church pastor named Karl Barth. After the end of World War I he wrote a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, which sounds pretty boring, except that it wasn’t. If you can imagine a book talking about a dense letter of Paul changing everything, this was it. Years later he described what seemed to have happened in vivid imagery: it was as if Barth was climbing a dark tower, unsure of his next precarious step, when he reached out for something to steady his balance and instead of the next rung of the ladder he was climbing, he grabbed hold of the bell rope and pulling on it, the bell rang throughout the region.
Barth was called to teach at several German universities, but when a certain Adolf Hitler came to power and started pontificating about where German Christianity should be, Barth and others protested. In 1934 a conference was held at Barmen in which Barth wrote the final Declaration that in good theological language – whose political meaning no one misunderstood – said, Ain’t nobody going to be my God and Saviour except my God and Saviour. Hitler didn’t like his theology and in 1935 Barth was removed from his university position and deported from Germany back to Switzerland. From there throughout the war he wrote and broadcast how bad Hitler was for the Church, theology, and for the world.
Barth did not write easy books, but he was awarded a number of times the prize for the best written books in German theology. So when someone asked him what is the essence of the Christian faith, expecting some elegant and involved dissertation on the Christian life replete with a handful of long technical theological words, Barth answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
You don’t need to be a theologian with clever long words to know this, for any child who can sing can say this. That was Barth’s point and it was in response to the same question the Pharisees put up to Jesus.
When the church members found out that he had cooked the liberals’ goose, they ganged up on him, and one of their bright boys, trying to get Jesus over a barrel, asked, “Doctor, what is the most important commandment in the Bible?” Jesus said, “‘You shall love your Lord God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind,’ This is the greatest and most important commandment. Next to it is this one: ‘You shall love your fellow man as yourself.’ The whole Bible hinges on these two.” (Cotton Patch Version)
Not quite the answer the bright boy expected, since Jesus was already getting a reputation for holding a quite distinctive and unorthodox view of Scripture and the spiritual life. He assumed Jesus would choose an ingenious and unique starting point for his theology and then they would have him right where they wanted him. After all, if he chose some other unique commandment, they’d be all over him for ignoring the importance of all those other 612 commandments.
Jesus gave the answer they already knew, the answer everybody recites every morning and evening to this day – the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Every child could recite it, and it was the logical place to begin, a no-brainer with which no one could argue. But maybe you heard it. They were trying to trap Jesus again, but he did not quote the Shema precisely. He changed a word and that word was meant to show up these bright boys.
You shall love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, but instead of “all your strength” Jesus says, “with all your mind.” These bright boys thought they were clever and smart, full of brains about to outwit this upstart rabbi. Yet, were they loving God with all their minds or were they in fact too smart for God?
We seem also to be too smart for God, or is God too simple-minded for us sophisticates? Jesus loves me, this I know, sounds naïve and sentimental to those of us who can really think, eh? We are capable of deciding which psalms we should not sing because they are too violent and unspiritual. We can think so progressively that we can promote the idea of non-theism. Let me tell you, it’s hard to love a non-theistic god with all your mind. Modern novels have more to teach us than that archaic Bible. We love God, maybe we love Jesus as long as he doesn’t get too soppy, but without a doubt, we can think better than God without even trying.
Wait a minute, it sounds so simple, but in declaring the obvious, there is a lot more than meets the eye. To love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength is the beginning of everything else you may do. If you can love God with all you’ve got – and most of us don’t operate to even 50% of our capacity at anything! – then all the other commandments become natural. You are going to love your neighbour as you love yourself, because God loves all those neighbours too.
It is true that loving your neighbour who is visible - and typically makes fewer and more reasonable demands than God - is easier to love. Many non-theists insist that worship is no longer necessary for those of us who know what the real world is all about. Worship is how we tangibly express our love for God. Jesus did not suggest either/or, but loving God, worshiping God, is the beginning of all life – and just like it is loving your neighbour. All your heart takes in all kinds of people; all your soul encompasses all manners of human suffering wherever and for whomever it exists – for all people are God’s souls. All your strength takes your whole body’s effort in serving those neighbours, and all your mind takes all of your ingenuity, creativity, rational thinking to approach the immensity of God that we can never finally capture and define. We love God with all our mind at the moment we realize we will never be smart enough to know all of God, but it’s an awful lot of fun learning everything we can. We love our neighbour as ourselves once we recognize that we cannot know everything about everybody, that every human being, including ourselves, is part of the mystery of God. But the more people we know more or less, the more we see and hear the presence of God.
We can’t love God with part of our mind, we can’t love our neighbour with part of ourselves, we can’t serve the world with only part of our strength. You shall love God with all your mind; Jesus loves me, this I know.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan