October 20, 2005
Neighbor
Pentecost 23/25A (Mt 22.34-46)
On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets (Mt 22.40).
The Pharisees got testy again and asked Jesus to give them one commandment, said they’d settle for the greatest. No problem. For good measure, he gave them two, said they were both alike, anyway. Love God with all you’ve got, and love your neighbor with anything that’s left over, well, maybe more.
But he didn’t stop there. Not only were these two the greatest. They were the onliest. For all the rest literally hangs on them, he added, the whole complicated Judaic canon and its historic prophetic application.
It was a timely and critical encounter. It remains a timeless and critical encounter. The law is not only what distinguishes us as a nation. It is all over the news, as well.
Take the Ten Commandments. One might well presume they were included as also depending on Jesus’ twofold summary about love. It seems, however, that so far as the courts are concerned, they have a life of their own. There are only ten, but it took the Supreme Court 138 pages of opinion to decide whether displays of these commandments belong on public property. Okay to sit out in the front yard of the Texas state capitol, they said. Not okay in a Kentucky courthouse foyer. Something to do about “borders,” the long decision allowed.
Then there’s Iraq. Like the Victorian father who took his son out behind the barn and said he’d beat the love of God into him if it took all night, we’re standing on one foot and the other, cane in hand. We’ve got Iraq by the scruff of the neck wrestling with how to make a working constitution weave law and religion, sex and ethnic pride into one practical bundle.
But there’s more. Our senate has just confirmed a chief justice who has said the Bible has no relation at all to his reading of the law. And now the same body is wandering the halls of Congress nonplused over Harry, wondering whether she’s ever read much of anything else but the Bible.
Looking around and if we sort of took a poll, we’d find that most of us are probably not all that familiar with either the Bible or the Constitution, anyhow. Even though a lot of us say we believe in God, heaven knows, you can’t just make somebody believe in God, let alone love God. Yet the whole thing still stirs up a lot of folk.
But back to Jesus and the Pharisees and the Great Commandment. Remember, there are two parts, both alike, so even if a body doesn’t believe in God or even whether there is a God, everybody, whether they like the idea or not, must at least acknowledge that there’s such a thing as a neighbor. And then when we somehow find out that to love one’s neighbor doesn’t mean we have to like one’s neighbor at all, just that we have to give a fair shake and to say what we mean and mean what we say and to tell the truth most of the time and be honest and not cheat and to work at all this, maybe we’ll have a leg up on at least one of the Great Commandments, and maybe have a bit more self-esteem ourselves.
God will wait and, I suspect, be mightily pleased to see what could turn out to be a general, and maybe even gradual improvement over how we all over the place suddenly start getting along. And if we begin that in our families and with our kin, then down the street, and even in the churches, it might just take hold.
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