The Gospel for this Sunday is very short, but of great
importance. When people are asked to summarize the Christian faith, they often
say that there are two great commandments – to love God with all your heart,
and to love your neighbor as yourself, because Jesus is recorded as saying this
in three Gospels -- Matthew, Mark and Luke. However, to think that this
summarizes the Christian faith, is an important mistake. That is not what is
going on.
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| Churches in the New Jerusalem Aristarkh Lentulov (1882-1943) |
Jewish scribes asked Jesus to pinpoint the crucial
commandments among all those that were to be found in their scriptures –
several hundred in fact. He picks just two – one from Deuteronomy, the other
from Leviticus – and declares that everything else in the Jewish law and prophets hangs on these two commandments. He does
not say that they summarize his own faith. In contrast to the other three, John’s
Gospel does not record this episode. Rather, he tells us that Jesus offered his
own disciples a third, and new, great commandment – ‘that you love one another’.
As faithful Jews, their love of God and neighbor should be something that could
be taken for granted. What marks them out as followers of Christ is that they show a special love for each other.
Given the divisions, persecutions and mutual contempt that
have so often marred the Church – and still do – it is this third,
distinctively Christian commandment that has proved very much harder to live by,
virtually impossible in fact. That might seem to make the Christian faith a
hopeless undertaking. But the reading from Revelation
reminds us to place our hopes in a future world that God has promised, not a
world that human beings, however well intentioned, will make. It is God who
makes all things new -- in ways that we find hard to discern no doubt – so that
we must wait until ‘the home of God is among mortals’ before we can expect ‘a
new heaven and a new earth’.
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