Love Your Neighbor

11-4-18 (Proper 26/Ordinary 31 B, Semi-Continuous)

Ruth 1:1-18; Mark 12:28-34

Love Your Neighbor

Suppose someone came up to you and asked you: “Which of the amendments to the US Constitution is the most important?”  What would your answer be?  Of the 27 different amendments that have been made to our nation’s founding document, which one would you say is the most essential?  It’s a tough question, and the answers could vary wildly from person to person.  As a pastor and as someone with kind of a big mouth, I’m quite partial to the 1st amendment, myself.  For others, it’s the 2nd amendment that takes the top spot, particularly as the debate over gun safety continues to be at the forefront.  If you were to ask members of the black community this question, you might hear more about the 13th amendment and the abolishment of slavery, or the 15th amendment and the right to vote.  Many women in this country might list the 19th amendment and the Women’s Suffrage movement as being the most important to them, while generations of immigrant communities who came to this country seeking out the promise of the American Dream might note the 14th amendment that granted them citizenship at their birth.

But as I thought about the readings for this week and considered all of the things that are happening in our own world as well, I came up with what I think might be an even more interesting question: which one would Jesus say was the most important?  It’s this very kind of question, after all, that the scribe approaches Jesus to ask, and one of the few times in the Gospels that Jesus has a conversation with one of the religious authorities of his day that isn’t trying to trap him in a tricky question.  My gut reaction was that Jesus would obviously choose the 1st amendment - I mean, it guarantees us the freedom to worship God and to engage in the important mission and ministry that we do in our communities.

But then, the more I thought about the question and the more I looked at the passage from Mark, the more I realized that my gut was wrong.  If you asked Jesus this question, I don’t think he’d list any of the 27 constitutional amendments at all.  First, I’m not sure that he’d name any part of the Constitution, but if you really pressed him about it, I think he’d recite the preamble - “We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus has this habit of turning questions on their heads and answering them in unexpected ways.  When we hear the term “commandment,” we think of the Big 10 - but the entirety of the Torah contains much more than the 10 commandments.  In fact, it contains closer to 613 commandments that govern the laws and customs of the Israelites.  And yet, of all these 613 commandments, Jesus begins with what is known in the Jewish tradition as the “Shema,” after the first word of the verse: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”  On the one hand, this particular answer isn’t all that out of the ordinary or surprising - this commandment from Deuteronomy is accompanied with the instruction that the people of Israel are to write these very words on their doorposts, to keep them on their heart, to bind them on their hands and wear them on their foreheads.  To this day, many homes in the Jewish community have a small, decorative case attached to their front doors, called a mezuzah, that contains a scroll with these verses written upon it.

But what Jesus does that is more surprising is to clarify further by adding his statement about the second greatest commandment - to love your neighbor as yourself.  As Jesus says “there is no other greater commandment than these,” he does something interesting and unexpected, because he effectively links these two commandments together and makes them one.  It’s a distinction that many of the scribes wouldn’t have made, themselves, as the question this scribe asks was at the center of many a great debate among the religious authorities.  But it’s an incredibly important distinction, nevertheless, because as Jesus connects these two, as he more or less adds the second commandment as a commentary on the first, Jesus lays out the entire foundation of not only the Hebrew faith itself, but also his own ministry and purpose in this world.  For Jesus, love of neighbor is love for God, and if you don’t engage in loving your neighbor, who bears the very image of God, then you cannot fully love God.

This is the kind of love that we see expressed so clearly and profoundly by Ruth in the opening chapter of her story - married into a family that meets with nothing but tragedy and loss, Ruth and Orpah are both given the opportunity, even the order, to abandon the widowed Naomi, to go back to their own homes and, hopefully, to find new husbands there who would care for them since Naomi could not.  Orpah does this, and we should not blame her or look down on her for doing so.  But it is Ruth’s story that we continue to follow and look to as that beautiful example of what love for God and love for neighbor more fully entails.  Ruth clings to Naomi and declares her intentions, not just to follow her mother-in-law, but to live where she lives, to devote herself to Naomi’s God, to make Naomi’s people her own people, Naomi’s struggles her own struggles, even to die with Naomi and be buried by her side.  As a Moabite, who were a race of foreign people who were reviled in Israel, Ruth would have been treated with suspicion and violence by returning with Naomi.  She would be unlikely to remarry for fear that she would lure Israelite men away with her foreign customs and foreign gods.  And yet, Ruth risks all of these things to stay with Naomi, and she does so out of sheer, selfless love.  We’ll hear the resolution of Ruth’s choices in next week’s reading, but for now, we leave her with that uncertainty of what lies ahead, but the dedication to follow no matter what.

Love God.  Love neighbor.  This is what our faith hinges upon.  Victor Hugo writes in his epic novel Les Miserables that “To love another person is to see the face of God.”  In our current environment, filled with messages of fear and hatred, filled with acts of violence that only encourage further suspicion of our neighbors, we need to hear these commandments clearly, and more importantly, we need to strive to live them out.  Jesus tells us to love our neighbor.  It’s easy enough to say, but so many times, it’s incredibly hard to do.  But as we gather together around this table, my prayer is that we can find strength, hope, and encouragement to love our neighbor, not just as we love ourselves, but as Christ has loved us, even so much that he gave his own life that we might live.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.