Homily for Proper
30, Year A, 2014
Sunday, October 26th,
2014
Trinity Anglican
Church, Bradford, ON
The Rev. Daniel F.
Graves
Text: Matthew
22:34-46
“Love the Lord your
God with all your heart, soul, and mind; … and love your neighbour as yourself.”
As usual, the adversaries of Jesus were trying to trip him
up. In this particular instance, it was
a lawyer, that is, someone trained in the intricacies of the Torah, the Jewish
law. And so he asked Jesus which one of the commandments in the law is the
greatest. Now there are some 613 commandments
in the Jewish Torah. This expert in the law listened patiently and waited to
see how Jesus might make a statement by which he would convict himself. However, Jesus was just about as tricky as
the lawyer, and he responded with the traditional Jewish daily prayer, the
Shema, an acclamation of faith in the oneness of God and our obligation to
worship him alone. “Hear O Israel, the
Lord your God is One and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and soul and mind.” How could this be
argued? And then Jesus further added, “You
shall love your neighbour as yourself” which echoes everything we hear in the
prophets about the sort of worship God desires, which is a compassion for those
around us and justice for the poor.
This silenced his opponent, for the lawyer knew he could
argue neither of these points. What is
very interesting about this is that it is not the law itself to which Jesus
turns, but rather to a prayer; which always reminds us that our prayers inform
and shape our theology. Theology is the
art of interpreting, and reflecting upon our relationship with God and God’s
world. It is not the other way around. We do not start with a law, or a
theology, or a set of beliefs and then shape our relationship with God out of
them; rather, we start with a relationship with God and we build our theology
out of that relationship. The rule of prayer is the rule of faith, or
belief. This is precisely what Jesus
did. He started with our relationship with God, and then moved to our
relationship with God’s creation in our fellow creatures and then proclaimed, “all
of our theology hangs on these two things.”
I find this a very comforting thought. And when you think about it, all of our
Christian theology revolves around this very simple truth, that in Jesus
Christ, God is reaching out to you and me for a relationship. We might even say it more simply, that Jesus IS
our relationship with God. Jesus makes God’s love known to us. All of our
theology about the Incarnation, the Cross and Resurrection, the Ascension, his
coming again – all of these things point to the one essential fact that in
Jesus God reaches out to us in relationship and invites our response. Each aspect of our theology attempts to
explain this relationship. In the
Incarnation, in the Cross, God seeks to be with us in poverty, in humility, in
vulnerability. In the example of his birth in the stable, and his death upon
the cross God is reaching out to us. He
is with us in our humility, in our pain, in our vulnerability, and bears those
things with us and for us. In the Resurrection and the Ascension, God draws us
into his divine life. We embrace his
risen body and his risen life and we embrace God, and thus share in his glory. It
is all relationship. And it is a relationship of love.
And what of our theology about the Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem,
the Church Militant, and the Church Triumphant? These are ways of talking about
our relationship with each other, both now and in the age to come. When we speak
of the “kingdom” we are speaking about a newly ordered community in which all
our relationships are seen in light of the relationship we have with God in
Christ. It is through God’s Spirit who
animates our relationship with God in prayer that our relationships with each
other will find new hope and joy.
Thus, it seems to me that when Jesus is asked which law is
the greatest, by responding with a prayer, he in essence is saying, no law is
the greatest. He rather is changing the conversation and asking do you believe
God loves you? Do you love God? And if these things are true, do we recognize
that love in the love of our neighbour?
Is this not what really matters? To know that we are
loved?
This week we heard the powerful story of another lawyer,
this one a woman named Barbara Winters, who upon hearing gunshots near the
national war memorial ran toward those shots. What she encountered was a dying
solider, Cpl. Nathan Cirillo. And what were her words to that dying man? “You
are loved… your family loves you… everyone loves you… we are all so proud of
you… You are so loved…” And when later asked
why she said what she said, she responded simply, “When you are dying, you need
to know how loved you are.”
This is the entire theology of the Gospel wrapped up in a
single sentence. “When you are dying, you need to know how loved you are.” To a dying race, to a people who constantly
hurt each other, who sin against each other, who make terrible mistakes trying
even to do the best, God comes to us in Jesus with the words “You are so loved…
I love you … you are so loved.” God believes that we need, more than anything
else to hear these words from him: “I
love you.” And he speaks these words to us in Jesus Christ. We are further called to speak these words to
each other, to run toward the fire, toward the gunshots, toward the tragedy,
towards death and proclaim life in the words “I love you” to those who desperately
need to hear that they are loved. To know that we are loved by God, and to
share that love with one another in the midst of forces that attempt to drive
us to hatred, upon these two things hang all the law and the prophets.
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