Hang On
Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Matthew 22:34-46

October 23, 2005

The end is where it is often best to begin. The story of the Exodus, the most dramatic and gripping saga of the Bible, takes four long books to spell out all its adventures and ramifications. We have only been reading the best parts in the Book of Exodus and now have leap-frogged over Leviticus and Numbers - and all those wonderful laws and genealogies - to the very last chapter of Deuteronomy. The shouting seems to be all over, anti-climatic, barely worth reading.

Nevertheless, lots of people keep reading these words. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached on this text in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated. “I’ve been to the mountaintop... I look over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there. But I want you to know that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” He was only 39, but talked about his full life thus far, that he was not afraid of dying. Scripture was not something he was holding at arm’s length reading; he had jumped in between the lines and was living the story. Often, we celebrate the “mountaintop experience,” but Martin Luther King, Jr., changed how one uses that concept. Few of us get to experience the best things we have accomplished.

Moses saw the Promised Land from Mount Nebo and died right there, simply, living every second to the fullest, ending his days at 120 years, robust and sharp-eyed. Even at his age, Moses really could see the Promised Land. In one of the oddities of the Biblical text, the language seems to say that God was the one who actually buried him right there in Moab. And God only knows where he is buried to this day.

As with Martin Luther King, Jr., there was great weeping and mourning. The Israelites stopped everything they were doing, went nowhere else, and mourned for 30 days. Then they simply stopped mourning and moved on. Joshua, son of Nun, was the expected successor and the succession does seem to have been seamless, according to the information we have been given. That is amazing, for charismatic individuals are awfully hard acts to follow, and as for Moses, nobody does it better.

After arguing with Jesus one more time, laying clever and cunning traps to get him to commit blasphemy and treason, the Pharisees have to admit that no one does it better, so they stop trying to challenge him. Jesus puts back in their laps a scriptural puzzle that he wins. That kind of mental gymnastics was the favourite wrestling ground of rabbis then. If you really knew your Bible, you could get it to say almost anything, and there was nothing it said that you could not mold to your own advantage.

For once, what the Pharisees asked Jesus by way of their craftiness was actually a fairly important question. Which is the most important commandment is a favourite game for an overly-studious bunch. One’s answer can be an interesting and intriguing perspective on what matters. While your answer may demonstrate where you begin in an interesting way, you can easily be wrong as well. The Pharisees were interested in Jesus’ wrong answer. Anything he said could offend someone, and the Pharisees were willing to be someone, anyone, who was blasphemed by Jesus’ inappropriate words and ideas.

Jesus’ answer is simply Biblical, not really original at all. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your being” is part of the great Shema‘ recited in most Jewish services of worship, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.” It is the equivalent of the Muslim proclamation, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”; and perhaps closest in usage to the Lord’s Prayer.

There is a second one like it, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” from everybody’s favourite Biblical book of Leviticus 19:18. All those harsh laws on sexual practice and how one can be holy and clean or impure and condemned to excommunication, even death, nevertheless let sneak out an all-encompassing law that nullifies much of the rest of Leviticus’ exclusiveness.

The connection of the two loves, of God and of humanity, is innovative, especially their equality. Yet a famous first century B.C.E. rabbi, Hillel, is reported to have said almost exactly the same idea, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” Jesus does not have to be original to be true and to be right. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13 that without love I am nothing, I gain nothing. The whole Bible hangs on these two little statements of love. In contemporary language, you have to hang on, no matter what.

Yet, the question was never really answered: which is the first commandment? You and I try to do two or more things at the same time, but really our humanness only allows us to start in one place at one time. Who do you have to love first, God or your human neighbour? And what happens to the other one while you are busy loving the first? By necessity I can only start with one, so let it be the love of God.

God is the beginning of all creation, the beginner of all beginnings, the ground of being. Without God there is no universe. Without God there is no love, because God showed us first how to love, showed us what love is. There is no one who is good, except God, Jesus would say, so the existence of goodness and truth arise out of God in the first place and only exist in reference to God. So we got to have God first. If you are going to love - and I would recommend loving - love God first.

There has been a long tendency to shift away from God towards human beings as the beginning point of our thinking. After all, you and I are one. But once we slide away from God as the ground of all being and start assessing matters and people from a human perspective, we start to shift our prejudices towards our prejudices. What God thinks is what we think, but only in capital letters, and after a while we usually can’t tell the difference.

We must begin by loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Yet our dilemma is always how much of God do we know to love? Since God is so vast and infinite and always so tantalizingly out of our reach, it is easy to miss God. Frankly, a lot of what Christians and others say they love about God is not really God, but those capital letters again.

Linus once declared pompously, yet transparently, to Lucy that he loved humanity; it was people he couldn’t stand. There are lots of people world-wide who love God, but find human beings less attractive. Jesus’ equal commandment to love your neighbour as yourself is the insistence that you can’t go hiding away in the billowy clouds with a vague god while the person next to you has to live with you as if there is no God. If you don’t love that next person, then you don’t love God’s creation, so how can you then love God? Probably really can’t love yourself either as a result.

I have to admit that I do not know which love comes first. It’s one of those typical Biblical paradoxes: how two opposites somehow live together as equals in a way that just doesn’t make sense. It may not really make sense, but it really exists. What makes sense and glues things together is that there is love involved.

However, when you want to love God in a real way, and you want to love another human being in a real way, it’s never a matter of liking them. God’s kind of love, the original and only real kind of love, gives away its self to another being, a most risky and dangerous kind of relationship.

Love is not a matter of emotions, not an occasion of liking something with capital letters. Love is a discipline that will take over your life, consume all that you do. In other words, you have to practice love when you don’t feel like it, over and over again. Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City has a short proverb for this situation: “Not liking someone is no excuse for not loving them.” We keep waiting to like someone before we love them, but usually they are gone before we get to like them. We find we are not attracted to certain kinds of folk, but we have a responsibility to love them anyway - with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength.

I don’t know where we read it, and it was a bit of a shock, a rude de-mythologizing of all we thought we knew about love. As we were waiting for the birth of our first child, it was pointed out that you don’t naturally love your new-born child. It isn’t automatic and lots of mothers and fathers are distressed in the first few hours and days to find this out. You have to learn to love that child. He or she, incidentally, will only learn to love you as a consequence of your discipline. Don’t wait for any wonderful emotion to take you over. You’re exhausted and depleted of sleep and emotions anyway. You have to practice love without expecting anything in return. Over and over, you go out and practice loving; and only then will the power of the love of God gradually become palpable. You simply have to hang on in your loving. Everything else good you will do depends upon how you love God at the same time that you love your child and your neighbour. When you love first, it is surprising how often you will learn to like that loved one.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan