TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST/REFORMATION SUNDAY
Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, you are the holy lawgiver, you are the salvation of your people. By your Spirit renew us in your covenant of love, and train us to care tenderly for all our neighbors, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“’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.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
This Sunday is celebrated as the Sunday of the Reformation by many protestant churches. I have chosen not to focus on the appointed texts for that day, though the readings for this Sunday point, I believe, to the continuing need for reform within the church. Jesus calls us once again to the pivotal role of love in reading and interpreting the scriptures. Given the way the Bible is frequently misquoted, misinterpreted, coopted for political agendas and employed as a club to intimidate, wound and exclude, Jesus’ reminder that the great commandments are at the heart of all preaching and teaching is more than timely.
Love as Jesus uses it is not without content. To love God is not some mystical, abstract spiritual attachment to an amorphous deity. The God to which Jesus refers is the God of Israel; the God who chooses and liberates the enslaved; the God who is referred to throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as “father of the fatherless,” “protector of widows,” “rescuer of the weak and the needy.” To love this God is to share God’s fierce, passionate and empathetic solidarity with the most vulnerable among us. “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40. That is why Jesus can say that the second commandment is “like” the first and greatest commandment. In fact, the two commands are actually one.
The most powerful expression of that love is the Incarnation in which God puts God’s “skin in the game” of creation. The strength of that love is God’s determination to keep God’s skin in the game even after experiencing the full fury of humanity’s hatred and violence. God’s Resurrection of the crucified Son and his being offered once again to the world that rejected him demonstrates that God will not be drawn into the vortex of retribution that characterizes so much of human history. God meets all human resistance with undying love. To meet your enemies with love and prayer, to turn the other cheek when stricken and greet the stranger with kindness and hospitality is to be “perfect” as God is perfect. Matthew 5:38-48. To love God is to love the neighbor and loving the neighbor is the only way to love God.
The scriptures, of course, speak in many different voices. Some call for genocidal war against the inhabitants of Canaan. Some relate stories of vengeance, rape and bodily mutilation. Deeply wounded and persecuted people and groups cry out for revenge in the Psalms. Even the devil has a word or two to say on the pages of the Bible. The Bible has given rise to numerous bizarre and dangerous religious movements. It has been used as a club to bludgeon, wound and exclude. The Bible has become in our own time a virtual gold mine of rhetorical ammunition for all sides of the “culture wars.” I would be the last to say that any of the voices within the Bible should be ignored or disregarded. But it must be understood that the Bible is a human book wrought from human experience. We dare to call it God’s word because we believe that God in God’s love is at work in the midst of its messy, difficult and fraught narratives accomplishing God’s own redemptive purpose for creation. When the great commandments are ignored, trivialized and displaced from their central importance, the scriptures can very quickly unravel.
Jesus concludes his discourse by pointing out that on these two commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbor, “hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 22:40. The import of this is hard to miss. Every interpretation of the scriptures must finally serve the aim of testifying to God’s love for all creation. Disciples of Jesus are to read the entire scriptures through the lens of the two great commandments as they are enfleshed in the obedient life, faithful death and glorious resurrection of their Lord.
Here is a poem by Wendell Berry reflecting on the transformative power of meeting hostility with forgiveness. It is, I think, a fitting image of the love called for in the great commandments.
Enemies
If you are not to become a monster,
you must care what they think.
If you care what they think,
how will you not hate them,
and so become a monster
of the opposite kind? From where then
is love to come—love for your enemy
that is the way of liberty?
From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go
free of you, and you of them;
they are to you as sunlight
on a green branch. You must not
think of them again, except
as monsters like yourself,
pitiable because unforgiving.
Source: Indivisible: Poems for Social Justice (Norwood House Press, 2013). Wendell Berry (1934-2026) was a poet, novelist, farmer and environmental activist. He was an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He was also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. You can read more about Wendell Berry and sample more of his works at the Poetry Foundation website.
