Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
“Thou shalt love …with all thy mind”
There is something wonderfully reflective about the Scripture readings in the late part of the Trinity season that is particularly necessary in our rather unreflective age, however challenging we may find it. Here we are being told to love with the whole of our being including “with all thy mind”. Something inescapably intellectual belongs to the spiritual realities of our life in Christ.
We are presented with an imperative, something commanded, not a maybe or a might be but a must be. Here are strong words that challenge all our assumptions about what we think is love. Strong words, too, that are voiced in the context of controversy, a controversy between Jesus and the questioning scribes, one of which, at least, “answered intelligently” by recognizing the significance of the Jewish Shema, what is sometimes called the Summary of the Law, as being “better than all the burnt offerings and the sacrifices.”
But it is a curious thing. Jesus’ answer to the question “which commandment is the first of all” is to relate the Summary of the Law. Love here is about the orientation and direction of the inner activity of our being. Love is commanded. It means loving God with the whole of our being – “with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” With the exception of “all thy mind”, this is simply to quote Deuteronomy, though the addition is really only an explication of what is implicit in the Hebrew parallelism of “all thy heart” and “all thy soul.” Much has sometimes been made of the absence of “all thy mind” in Deuteronomy and its presence in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Certainly it reflects a new and important focus on the logos of God, the Word of God, as apprehended by our minds in the Christian understanding of things. And certainly, the word here for mind is the term which Plato uses as the highest form of human intellectual activity, διανοια.
But Jesus doesn’t stop with just that passage from Deuteronomy; he goes on to say that “the second is like it, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” to which he also adds “There is none other commandment greater than these.” And, at least one of the scribes responds positively recognizing that the Summary of the Law is a complete statement. It comprehends the true meaning of the Law of Israel. The Law is love. We are commanded to love.
