Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 26, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I think it’s safe to say that all of us have what theologians call our “canon within the canon.” Canon—one n in the middle, not two—means the books that are considered part of the Bible. Having our own canon within the canon means that there are certain verses that sum up all of Scripture for us, that say in a concise way what it’s all about for us. I have a few Bible passages that act that way for me. Mine include Micah 4:3, they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; Micah 6:8, What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?; Matthew 5:44, love your enemy; Matthew 5:39, do not resist evil with violence; and perhaps most of all Romans 8:38-39, neither death nor life not anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So it struck me this week as I reread the passage from Matthew that we just heard known as The Great Commandment that Jesus had a canon within the canon too; and the verses that made up his canon within the canon are in mine as well. We see Jesus’ Bible within the Bible in Matthew’s version of the Great Commandment. Asked which commandment in the law is the greatest, Jesus says: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Then Jesus says something that tells us that these two verses from Hebrew Scripture, the first from Deuteronomy and the second from Leviticus, as his Bible within the Bible. He says: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” When he says “all the law and the prophets” he is referring to the entire Hebrew Bible, so what he’s saying is all of the Bible hangs on the commandments of love of God and love of neighbor.

He says all of scripture “hangs” on love of God and neighbor, but what precisely does that mean? It means, I think, that everything else in the Bible depends on these two basic commandments. It means everything else in scripture is suspended from these two. They hold everything else up, and without them everything else falls into a meaningless heap. But all of that is metaphor. How are we to understand what Jesus is saying here? I understand what he is saying this way. If everything else in scripture “hangs” on the commandments to love God and neighbor, then everything else in scripture must be interpreted in the light of those two commandments. That’s what it means for something to be our canon within the canon. For me, everything else in Scripture must be interpreted in the light of those few passages that I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, the passages that say the Christian faith is about peace, nonviolence, justice, and the unfailing love of God. And in the light of Jesus’ Great Commandment to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves, with neighbor of course being understood to include all people everywhere. Jesus is saying here: Interpret everything else in the light of love, the love of God and the love of your fellow human beings. If there is a question about what some Bible verse means, accept the reading that is grounded in love. If a passage cannot be read in a way that reflects the commandment to love, reject it as not being true scripture.

I think we can get some further insight into what Jesus is saying here by looking more closely at the second part of the Great Commandment, the command to love your neighbor as yourself. We first heard that commandment this morning in our reading from Leviticus, its original setting and the place Jesus took it from. It is part of a much larger body of laws known as the Levitical holiness code, also called the purity code. The term holiness code comes from Leviticus 19:2, which says “you shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” The book of Leviticus is made up of hundreds of specific laws that spell out what “holiness” meant to the priests who were the authors of that book. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is one of them, but it is a rather obscure one, not at all prominent in the broader sweep of the holiness code.

Yet Jesus pulled it out of its obscurity and raised it to equal dignity with a passage that every Jew knows by heart and that acts as the foundational creed of the entire Jewish faith. The passage is from Deuteronomy 6:4, and it says: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Why would Jesus pull this one obscure law of love of neighbor out of the holiness code and make it foundational for faith, equal to the command to love God? After all, as many of you have heard me say many times, much of what Jesus said and did constituted a rejection of the holiness code. He violated its laws left and right by, among other things, performing work in the Sabbath, eating unclean food, and touching and palling around with unclean people. So why pull “love your neighbor” out of the holiness code and raise it to equal dignity with the foundational creed of Judaism?

The answer lies, I think, in an important fact about the Levitical holiness code, a code that was central to the faith of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. The word “love” appears in a law or commandment in the holiness code only twice. The first time is in our “love your neighbor as yourself.” The second time is in Leviticus 19:34, which says “you shall love the alien as yourself.” That doesn’t mean a visitor from outer space. It means a non-Jew who lives among you. I think Jesus didn’t quote that one because he subsumed the alien under neighbor, as his parable of the Good Samaritan shows. So he cited basically the only law out of the holiness code that commands love of other human beings and made it equal to the command to love God. In his teaching and in his life he made everything else in the holiness code subject to those laws of love, which of course led him to reject much of the holiness code, which, as we have just seen, hardly mentions love of other people at all. And just by the way, remember that the primary text that Christians use to condemn gay people comes from the holiness code, most of which Jesus rejected.

Jesus’ canon within the canon, his Bible within the Bible, is love God and love your neighbor. He interpreted everything in the light of these two commandments both in his teaching and with his life. Most of all with his life. He lived love of neighbor by associating with people the guardians of the holiness code said were unworthy sinners whom righteous people should shun. He lived love of God by staying true to his mission and his message though it led to his brutal execution on a cross.

And he calls us too to live God’s commandments of love and to proclaim it loudly to the whole world; but in order to do that we have to ask: Just what does the commandment of love mean for us? To answer that, let’s look at what Jesus was actually facing when he proclaimed the commandment of love. The Judaism of his day proclaimed a huge number of specific laws and said that those laws come from God. It said that the way you love God with all your heart, soul, and mind is to obey those laws. Jesus said no. You love God primarily by loving your neighbor as yourself—and he didn’t mean what a friend of mine once said. He said we do love our neighbor as ourselves, which is to say, not much. No, he meant love your neighbor truly and deeply. Popular Christianity today doesn’t say obey all those old Jewish laws, but it does have its own set of rules for how you love God. It pulls out one of those old Jewish laws and says you love God by condemning gay people, something Jesus never did by the way. Beyond that it says that you love God mostly by believing the right way, by believing in Jesus. It says you love God by loving those who believe like you do and by trying to get those who don’t believe like you do to repent of their unbelief and start thinking like you do.

And to all that Jesus says no, just as he said no the holiness code so long ago. To all that and to us he says love God precisely by loving your neighbor as yourself, just as he said to the Pharisees so long ago. Love, and do not hate. Love, and do not condemn. Love all people for who they are just as, we hope, you love yourself for who you are. Judge sin, but understand that it is sin only if it hurts you or your neighbor and not just because it violates some precise rule of conduct. In every situation in which you must make a choice ask not “what do the rules say” but “what does love command?” Everything else hangs from that question. May God grant us insight as we seek always anew to discern what the commandment of love means to us. Amen.