Simon’s Reflection for the 21st Sunday after Pentecost
It is said that when the rule to wear seat-belts first came in in Italy, there was a lively trade in the City of Naples in the buying and selling of T-shirts with a black diagonal stripe down the front to fool the police!
Sometimes people resent rules and laws. At the beginning of the Covid crisis, behavioural scientists were concerned that members of the public might not obey the extra rules that were necessary. We have seen recently, the mad dash in some places to have one last night out before new restrictions come into force. People can sometimes become over-focussed on obeying or disobeying rules and forget the purpose they serve; like keeping ourselves and others safe in the current situation.
Sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees.
The question posed to Jesus in today’s gospel story was not an easy question. The scribes of Jesus time counted 613 commandments in the Torah or the biblical law books. Some were regarded as “light” and some as “heavy.” As well as the biblical rules, there were many other rules that had grown up around them, so the question of which was the most important law was a difficult one.
In his answer Jesus gives a lens through which to see the laws of the Old Testament. He goes to the heart of them and tells his listeners what their purpose was. He gives two key commandments which underpin all the rest.
The first part of his answer would have been uncontroversial. No-one would want to deny that to love God was the key purpose of the law but alongside the command to love God, Jesus placed a lesser- known verse from Leviticus; the command to love your neighbour as yourself.
The real originality of Jesus’ teaching is in the prioritising of these two and placing them alongside each other. Jesus links love of God and love of neighbour. The clear implication of this is that you cannot love God if you do not love your neighbour.
In our Old Testament reading from the Book of Leviticus, we can see that love of neighbour seems to be defined as love of kin; i.e., love of your fellow Israelite but Jesus in his other teaching broadens the understanding of neighbour. The parable of the Good Samaritan places a much wider definition on who our neighbour is, as does Jesus’ compassionate attitude to Gentiles in the gospels. Jesus universalises the concept of neighbour.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote….”We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.” If you love your neighbour, you are recognising that the command to love goes beyond those that we might love because they are family or friends. You love your neighbour simply because he or she is a human being, made in the image of God, who just happens to live near you. When we do this we are recognising that we are all called to help one another through life no matter who we are. It doesn’t matter about nationality, race, gender, sexuality or any of the other irrelevant points where human beings carelessly drawn dividing lines. The impulse to look for divisions between human beings is not God-given.
So this is the heart of what God requires of us: to love God and to love our neighbour.
We know how the events of this year have helped us to recognise how important neighbourliness is. Many people have helped or have been helped by their neighbours and maybe even had more opportunity to get to know their neighbours and become friends.
It’s amazing how sometimes you can live in a place for some time without even knowing the names of your neighbours. We can all too easily live in our own isolated worlds. It is so important to relate to our physical communities and to help to make them actual communities where there is mutual care and concern and friendship.
At its best, the internet can sometimes do this through online community groups. It’s good that people help each other online. It’s interesting the way people will post things on online groups asking for advice. Sometimes they are things that they could find out for themselves like “When does Tesco open?” Sometimes though, they are things that the medium is really useful for like – “Were the children supposed to wear their PE kit at school today? Can anyone tell me?” Sometimes potentially life-saving advice can be given. A man in America posted a photo on local network with the question “Is this a dead cockroach – do I have an infestation?” A very speedy reply came back from some caring soul: “No. It is the tail of a rattlesnake! Be careful.” It’s good to see people helping one another simply out of a desire to help another human being; to help a neighbour.
That is our individual calling; to love God by loving our neighbour. It is also our shared calling as Christians to build something together and that is neighbourly, churches which are also neighbourhood churches. Our churches themselves are supposed to be about good relationships where we know and help one another and where the churches themselves are good neighbours to our local community and “stitched into” our local communities.
It is often said that the aggressive individualism of our age undermines community yet in many ways the church can buy into it and we the people of the church can buy into it. Let’s take to heart instead Jesus’ teaching that we are deeply inter-connected with each other and thankfully deeply, deeply connected to our loving Creator God and let us find ways to live out that truth and put Jesus’s teachings into action. Amen.