by CCW | 3 October 2010 14:16
Love constrains us to speak of love. It seems such a commonplace thought. Yet, I wonder if we do not altogether miss the absolutely extraordinary thing about this commonplace concept. I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world. That heart is the heart of Christ. That love is spoken and shown in the face of controversy and debate; in short, in the midst of the hostilities and animosities of our human hearts. “And yet the common people heard him gladly.” I hope that can be said of us.
Two things are extraordinary and noteworthy here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;” in short, with the whole of our being. “Hear O Israel,” says the One who is the Word of God himself.
To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word as a people of the Law. They come to be that people by that Word spoken in the Burning Bush, by that Word passing over them to free them from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke, by that Word delivering them from the Red Sea waters, by that Word sustaining them in the wilderness wanderings, by that Word establishing God’s will and covenant towards them in the Law. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Thomas Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity.” That charity begins and ends with God.
God commands us to love him. This is the first extraordinary thing and indeed, in the face of the current troubles which manifest the deep divisions, divides and animosities within the global human community – the community that is ever at war within itself especially when it forgets the divine ground of our being and life – such things need desperately to be remembered and pondered. God commands us to love him.
What does this mean? Does God stand in need of our love? Is he, perhaps, jealous for our love? Surely not. Better to say God is not jealous but zealous for our perfection. Thus, the command to love God springs from no insufficiency or lack on God’s part. It is, instead, the expression of his pure activity and essential character. It is for us and for our everlasting good.
“The cause of every good that comes to us is God and his love” (Aquinas). No doubt, love is a commonplace but here is the love of God which is charity, the charity of God. It is far more than sentimental journeyings of the heart, far more than emotional contentment, far more than the simperings of psychological self-satisfaction, the feel-good love of contemporary culture. No. To love is to seek the good of another, to seek their true and objective character in short, to seek the perfection of the beloved. Do we seek God’s good in loving God? Not as if he lacked any good but as seeking and desiring the perfection of his will in us. It is a kind of yearning for holiness that the scribe in the Gospel seems to seek, so much so that in recognizing the power of Jesus’ Summary of the Law here, Jesus says to him that “Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God.”
It is an extraordinary exchange, one which brings out a real desire on the part of the Scribe to know and understand. Jesus response silences the others, for “after that no one dared to ask him any question.” The scene is a kind of testing of Jesus by the learned scribes of Israel. Jesus 1, Scribes 0, we might say!
The fuller implications of this first extraordinary thing appear in the second. Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour, even as he is himself the union of God and man. And out of a myriad of Levitical Laws, Christ takes hold of the love of neighbour as “the second like unto the first” which he quotes from Deuteronomy. This couplet of love literally sums up the entire Old Testament. It is summed up in Christ himself. The perfection of Christian life – soul, mind and body – consists in the charity of Christ.
The love of God embraces the love of neighbour. “It is,” as Augustine puts it, “from the one and the same love that we love God and our neighbour. God, however, for his own sake; ourselves and our neighbours for God’s sake.” St. Luke gives us a picture of that love in the story of the Good Samaritan; Mark shows us the real thing: Christ on the road to Calvary. The divine commandment to love finds its ultimate fulfillment and truest expression in the cross of Christ. “Christ pierced upon the Crosse is liber charitatis, the book of love laid open to us”(Andrewes). We read from that book of love in order that we might read and learn, that we might learn and love, and that we might love and live in the way of perfecting grace. We come to the altar of love, after all, only by way of the rood of Christ’s passion. In him the love of God and the love of neighbour are made perfect. As the poet John Donne puts it:
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? Then digest,
My Soule, this wholesome meditation…
’Twas much that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
But, of course, you will have noticed. I haven’t said anything about the final debate and controversy in this remarkable Gospel. You see, it is really all about Jesus’ teaching. “How say the scribes that the Christ is the son of David? he asks, rather provocatively really. It reveals something of the religious climate of the day, the yearning for a Messiah as based upon the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. What kind of Messiah? He will be “the son of David,” the scribes say, someone from the line and house of David who will be a political saviour; in short, a human leader who will restore the fortunes of Israel and deliver them from their current political oppression under the thumb of Roman authority.
Jesus’ response is truly extraordinary because he teaches us something profound about the Messiah. He opens us out to the beginnings of an understanding about true Messiahship; it is rooted in the life of God, in his essential divinity. I can’t put it more bluntly than that. What Jesus teaches here is amazing; he reminds us of David’s loving submission to God as Lord. The Messiah cannot be just human. He must be who and what Jesus is, namely, God and man. This requires a deeper grasp of the logic of mediation. The scribes have only got one part of the equation right – Jesus, humanly speaking, will be of the line of David, true, but that won’t square with all of the texts of Scripture to which they appeal. The Messiah must be God, fully divine as well. Jesus 2, Scribes 0, it seems!
As with the thoughtful scribe, Jesus’ response is grasped by the common people who get the point. Salvation is and must be of God even though it is for us and for our humanity. It is the mystery and the wisdom that Donne so eloquently expresses, the mystery and the wisdom that unites the divine and the human, the love of God and the love of neighbour, the two loves that meet in Jesus and are one in him.
’Twas much that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
Such are the extraordinary things contained in the commonplaces. We find here the two extraordinary hands of God’s love: the commandment to love God and the fulfillment of love in the sacrifice of Christ, for “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son”. In him we find the perfection of charity and in him we find the way of perfecting grace in our lives. The commandment to love God is our “wholesome meditation.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVIII, 2010
Christ Church, Windsor
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/10/03/sermon-for-the-eighteenth-sunday-after-trinity/
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