Matthew 22:34-46
To love like God.

Amongst the many and sometimes conflicting things that Christians claim about our beliefs, there is one claim that is universal amongst all Christians. That one universal claim is the claim about loving God. We are very good at convincing others and ourselves that we do what we do because of our love for God. Why do you come to church? Why do you give to the church? Why do you volunteer in the church? Why do you pray? The answer is of course obvious, because we love God! When Jesus told the Pharisees what the greatest commandment is, he was not telling anything new to the Pharisees. This was a commandment that the Pharisees and any Jew for that matter, from the time they can speak learn to say daily. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” But if you notice, Jesus gives an extended answer to the Pharisees by tacking on a second commandment. Jesus says, “and a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” If you continue reading further in the Gospel you will find that Jesus follows by highlighting these two commandments in the parable of The Good Samaritan.

The point that Jesus is making to the Pharisees and to us today is that we cannot claim to love God without being concerned about what God is concerned about. And God is concerned about people, God is concerned about bringing justice, God is concerned about healing broken-ness, God is concerned about human suffering, God is concerned about forgiveness, reconciliation and hope of righteousness. My husband and I come from very different backgrounds; we came with our own ideas of what it means to be a family. Sometimes the values that we each held and brought into the relationship were poles apart that it seemed impossible to find a meeting ground. But over time both of us learned that if we claim to love each other, we had to also learn to understand each others’ concerns and hopefully come to love and make each others’ concerns not “his” or “mine” but “ours.”

Often in our Christian journey we find ourselves alone; feeling that we are the only ones who really care about God, feeling there is really no one who can love God more than I do. We feel that we have to do everything within our limits to defend and protect the holiness of God. But, defending or protecting God is not what it means to love God. The Pharisees and the Sadducees of Jesus’ time actually were not the villains that we make them out to be today. They genuinely believed that their love for God was true. They also believed that they were doing what was required to show their love for God. They were passionate about their desire to be holy and righteous before God. But unfortunately in their desire to be righteous they had forgotten to spend time with God.

Just imagine you have a very dear and close friend that you love very much come to spend sometime in your home with you. You are so happy to have that friend come to you, you want to make sure he or she is comfortable, eat the best home cooked meal, all in all you want his or her stay with you to be a memorable one. So you spend long hours cleaning the home, putting new sheets on the bed, going to the market to get the best seafood and whatever you think he or she will like. When the friend arrives at your home, you let her sit on one side, talk over the music playing in the background and concentrate on preparing the seafood for him or her. Mind you, all in your effort to show just how much you love her/him. At the end of the day, you find yourself so tired that when your friend starts talking it is impossible to concentrate on what he or she is saying! Remember the story of Mary and Martha to whose home Jesus went. Martha was so concerned about making Jesus comfortable that she became resentful of Mary’s unabashed desire to just sit at Jesus’ feet. The Pharisees really thought they could protect and defend God and they really believed that was what it meant to love God.

But God does not need defending! God is holy not because we have cleaned the area around Him! The essence of God is holy and righteous. So Jesus is saying, if you really love God, you will be where He is, and you will understand His concerns and make that your own. God is not calling you and me to be lone ranchers having a so called relationship with Him that involves a one-way street to righteousness, where we can look back and tell ourselves “Oh, now that I have prepared a smooth road for God, He can walk down this road.”

It is not us who prepare the road, it is God who has opened the road for us to see and follow Him. If we claim to love Him, we must walk side by side with Him. And the road that God has chosen to take is one of being together in the suffering of the world. God came to be with us because He loves us with an everlasting love, with a love that is not like ours. God has the capacity to love everyone equally, and that love does not come with conditions. To love God as completely as He has commanded us to do is to take time and effort to understand that He suffers with all His children; that He finds joy in the presence of His children; that He is the one who clothes his children with holiness and righteousness; that He is the one who feeds his children with the bread of life and the living water; that it is in God alone that we all find our salvation. To love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, is to love like He loves us. If we truly love God, we would want to be with Him more than anything else. And to find Him, we must know where to look for Him. God is not waiting for a well-paved road to reach His children, God is not hoping for the best home-cooked meal, nor is He interested in seeing how clean we have managed to scrub around His throne. God is where there is suffering. God’s deepest desire is to be with the broken hearted, the sick in mind and in body, the discouraged, the downtrodden, the oppressed, the forgotten and the lost. On the cross of Christ God has shown us not only what it means for God to love us, but on that same cross He has shown us what it means to love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. If we really love God, we must love like He loves all His children, which is with hope of transformation. Amen.