October 23, 2011

 

 

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“Give to God What Is God’s!”

Matthew 22:34-46

Preached at Providence Lutheran Church in Holland, Ohio

By Pastor Dennis R. King

 

          I have a story for you this morning. It goes like this: A sick man went to the doctor’s office, accompanied by his wife. The doctor examined him and ran some tests, while the wife sat nearby in the waiting room. When the doctor came out with a concerned look on his face, she grew anxious. “Doctor, will my husband be OK?” She asked.

          “I’m afraid your husband is very ill,” the doctor replied. “He has a rare form of anemia, and if it is left untreated, he will most certainly die from it. However, there is a cure.”

          “A cure?” the wife questioned.

          “Yes. With rest and proper nutrition, the disease will go into remission and your husband should live for many more years. Here is what you need to do: Take your husband home and treat him like a king. Fix him three well-balanced meals a day, and wait on him hand and foot. Don’t let him do anything that you can do for him.  If he needs something, you take care of it. Give him a back rub in the morning and a full massage every evening. Oh, and one more thing. Because his immune system is weak, you will need to keep your home spotlessly clean at all times. Do you have any questions?”

          The wife had none.

          “Do you want to break the news to your husband, or shall I?” asked the doctor.

          “I will,” the wife replied.

          She walked into the examination room. The husband, sensing that something was wrong, said, “It’s bad, isn’t it? What have I got?”

          His wife answered with a tear in her eye, “The doctor says you are going die.”

          When we say we love our neighbor as ourselves, even when that neighbor is one of the loved ones most close to us, we most often fail when it comes to putting our words into action. Jesus did not whisper tenderly into our ears that he loves us - rather, he served us and laid down His life for us.

 

          The Jewish leaders are determined to trip up Jesus. They want to find and expose a loophole in His teaching. He is coming across as too wise; He is gathering too much of a following; He is threatening their authority.  So Jesus is questioned by a lawyer, someone more knowledgeable about the law than the average Pharisee. “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

          What is so tricky about that question, you might ask? Well, first you have to know that the Pharisees assumed that all the commandments were equal. To their way of thinking, no one commandment stood out as greater than any other. Therefore, there could be no “right answer” to the question. In the same way, if we assumed that all verses in the Bible were equal, than asking “What is the most important verse in the Bible?” would be a trick question.

          Jesus answered them, “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.” He is not telling them anything they don’t already know. He is simply quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, scriptures the Pharisees already knew.

Here Jesus, our Lord, the One who came to show us the pathway to God’s love, who came to not only show us but to clear the path back to the Father, our Lord states simply the basics of obeying God and loving our neighbor, He called them the Greatest Commandments because they summarize every other law or teaching about the laws of God, which had become so complicated and difficult to follow. The average believer never knew for sure where he or she stood with God. Confusion was certainly never God’s intention when He gave the original Commandments to Moses.

To help us this morning grasp the power of these two commandments, let us picture again the cross, since it is through the victory  over sin which Christ accomplished on the cross that we can have any hope of applying these two commandments to our daily walk.

First: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” Consider, if you will, how the basic loving of God affects the success of our prayer life. If we love God with any sincerity and devotion it is usually because we have come to the belief that He died for us on the cross out of His unconditional love for us. “For God so loved me that He gave.” It is not that I first loved God but that while I was yet a sinner He loved me.” True love of God is always a responding love to what He has done for us undeserving as we are.

A woman who had almost perished in a fire expressed her gratitude to the fireman who had risked his life to save her from the clutches of death. “It is a strange love I feel for this man. I can never repay him for giving me my life when I didn’t know him. Every time I think of him my heart is filled with such a thankful love for what he did for me.

It you can sense the love of gratitude this woman feels, you can begin to understand the kind of love we are to have for our Heavenly Father. Contrast this with the conditional kind of love many of us show toward God. We love God so that He will love us and respond to our prayers. We act out that love by performing good works. This conditional love honestly only leads us to feeling guilty and legalism.

Instead, to love God out of gratitude for what He has already given us leads us to approach Him in prayer with a humble and thankful heart.

Secondly: Until we learn how to love God in this way we cannot learn the basics of loving our neighbor or even ourselves. However if I do learn to love God because He has given to me when I didn’t deserve it, I can begin to love my neighbor who many times doesn’t deserve it. For what does it profit a man if he only loves those who love him? The basic of neighbor love is in radical opposition to the world’s idea of love.

The world says: “Love those who meet your needs.”

Jesus says: “Love those who hate you and wrong you.”

The world says: “Love those who have proven their love to you”

Jesus says: “Love those who have betrayed you.”

The world says: “Love those who are attractive.”

Jesus says: Love those who smell and cuss and are rejected for their appearance.”

Jesus love for our neighbor is an impossible love unless we have learned the basics of Godly love. Everything in our prideful heart will rebel against loving someone who has wronged us, unless we have accepted God’s love even when we wronged Him.

There is the beautiful example of Corrie Ten Boom who on meeting years after the war the very man who lead her sister to the gas chambers. Upon hear Corrie speak a powerful Christian message he came forward and offered his hand.  Corrie writes “And I, who had preached so often to the people to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as anger, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed forgive me and help me to forgive him.

I struggled. I felt nothing and so again I prayed. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass that almost overwhelmed me.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness, any more than on our goodness, that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives us along with the command the love itself.”

That is the kind of love Jesus showed us. I doubt that He had warm feeling for us when the crowds were yelling insults at Him. I doubt that he had warm feelings for us when he was hanging on the cross. No, the agony he endured for our sake was motivated by much more than warm feelings.

When we were baptized, we were baptized in the name of a man who not only spoke of love, but also embodied it. God’s love for us and for every one of our neighbors is imprinted on our heart and soul. In this new community called the church, we are drawn into a new way of life. We have a whole new approach for living out the love of God and the love of neighbor.

That doesn’t always make it easy for us. Sometimes we have to struggle over decisions, and sometimes we make mistakes. In Christ we have both the encouragement to love God and neighbor rightly and forgiveness when we fail. Our baptism into Christ gives us the tools we need for deciding how to love, and it gives us a multitude of examples for putting that love into practice. And it makes one thing certain: for us there is no longer any need to wonder whether or not we are loved by God or whether or not we are to love as we have been loved. Let us go forth loving both God and our neighbor.                                                                                                                      

Amen.