Based upon Matthew 22:34-46
I’m sure that Jesus’ reply to the rather sneaky line of questioning in today’s gospel is familiar to many of us as it’s something we hear repeated at the beginning of most communion services throughout the year. He begins with the Shema, the command from Deuteronomy 6, also repeated daily in Jewish morning and evening prayer:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind
But Jesus adds to this from Leviticus 19:
You shall love your neighbour as yourself
I think we could agree that Jesus does nothing by accident and therefore it’s the relationship between the two verses he uses that’s the important thing. If we stripped our entire faith down to it’s barest of bones what Jesus says here is the core of our belief.
Putting these two commands together, not having just one or the other, matters. If we just have the Shema we run the risk of our journey with God becoming about an isolated relationship between the two of us, just us and God. If our faith develops in that bubble we can become oblivious to everything and everyone outside of it.
God exists within the relationship of the Trinity, giving us a clear example for our own lives. And so Jesus adds a third party to our relationship with God. Our Faith journey is not just us and God, it’s us, God and neighbour.
Whilst doing some background reading for today’s sermon I came across the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux. He was a monk writing in the early 12th century and examined what it means to love God with our entire being, and love or neighbour as ourself, in what he called The Four Degrees of Love. I’m going to share some of his thoughts with you in the hope that he can help us pick this apart a little bit.
The first degree of love is the love of self for self’s sake, putting our-self first because it benefits us. This is where most of us start out. We have our own needs and wants and this is what we’re mainly interested in taking care of. It’s in our human nature, but if left unchecked we can go too far, we can hurt others by the pursuit of our own desires and happiness. Our love of neighbour should hopefully keep our love of ourself in check.
The second degree is the love of God for self’s sake, loving God because we may benefit from it. We may be in the middle of a crisis and turn to God, we may be asking the big existential questions about creation and existence or we may have come from a background where we think if we don’t love God we’ll be punished, or that loving God will put us in the holy good books and God will treat us more favourably than others.
This is the kind of faith which tends to crumble when we meet real adversity and perceive that our prayers haven’t been answered. We’re a good person, a good Christian- why has this happened to us? When we’re able to open our hearts to the suffering of others, suffering outside of our own immediate situation, knowing lots of bad things happen to lots of good people, we begin to move past this.
The third degree is loving God for God’s sake. This is when we keep loving God, even when bad things happen and our own needs aren’t being met because when we continually do our best to love God, and keep loving God, we learn to know God’s goodness and as or relationship develops we love because we sense we are loved. We care for others because we come to the realisation that Jesus cares for us.
This is a mature faith, where most of us probably find ourselves.
Bernard describes one final degree of love: love of self for God’s sake. This is much more difficult to understand because so few of us experience it. It’s a moment of transcendence, rare and fleeting, when we will be of one mind with God, and our wills in one accord with God. The prayer, “Thy will be done,” will be our prayer and our delight.
This is the perfect love of God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. I think some people spend their entire lives trying to find this, it’s like a glimpse of heaven. Unity and oneness with God. We see ourselves and others as God sees them.
Bernard writings remind us of the centrality of love in all things- those which come from God and those of our own making. He writes “Love is the fountain of life, and the soul which does not drink from it cannot be called alive.” In Jesus’ answer to a man trying to catch him out he places love at the centre of everything- our entire faith.
Here and now, we continue to experience varying degrees of isolation, particularly with an increase in the restrictions we face but our experiences this year have helped us examine how we live alongside each other and what our communal responsibilities are. So many of the choices we have to make are driven by a love of neighbour as we choose ways of being and living that may inconvenience us in the hope that we’re doing the right things for the community as a whole.
Even when living in a more isolated way than we ever have, we can find new ways to love our neighbour and through this love to see our own place in a much bigger picture. As we, as Jesus instructs us, strive to love God perfectly, by loving each other better, we may be moving a little closer to a taste of that perfect oneness with God that Bernard tells us is achievable by each of us, if only even for a moment.
Amen.
