When the
Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and
one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which
commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’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 neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)
Next Sunday the devout churchgoer is likely to hear about All
Saints Day (November 1), or All Souls Day (November 2), or Reformation Sunday –
and in that respect 2017 is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther
nailing his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church at Wittenberg. It makes a good story… but he did trigger the
vast protestant reformation which took Germany and much of Europe at the time
by storm. Luther said a lot of things,
but his basic message was that
God’s favour is not earned by good
deeds or any other way, but is received as
the free gift of God's grace and love to all, through the believer's faith in Jesus Christ.
In this narrative
from Matthew we learn how Jesus brought the religious practitioners, the
pharisees and the sadducees, to silence.
The sadducces wanted to debate with him about aspects of religious practice,
while the pharisees decided to test him more cunnngly by asking which was the
greatest, the most important religious law.
There comes a time, I think, when there is little energy for this sort
of debate. And indeed, the way many
Christians talk and argue about God tempts me towards atheism. Jesus goes to the heart of life and belief
with two statements, both of them from the Hebrew scriptures – and they are not
about the mind but about the heart: You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, soul and mind… you shall love your neighbour as yourself.[1] In the first of those, about loving God,
Jesus inserts “with all your mind” – but what he was quoting from says not
“mind” but “might”. Jesus amends that,
he says that mind – that is to say, intelligence, intellect, our opinions -- all
that also is brought into captivity to love of God, God’s love and ours. One outcome of that is humility about belief.
The point of
contemplative life and prayer is that it leads us and helps us to put first
things first in our heads and hearts. On
our dying day, if we still have our wits, we will be saying yes to God in love
– despite all that we still don’t understand.
The point is love, and always was.
That is the willingness to set self aside. And
the climate in which love is born, grows and thrives, is silence and
simplicity.
[1] He is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, the central
Jewish cry of faith, “Shema’ Yisrael…!” where we are to love God with heart,
soul and might (Heb: me’od).
But Jesus says: …heart, soul and mind
(Greek: dianoia).
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