Loyal Love

Matthew 22:34-46

I am indebted for this sermon to the work of Robert Alter, particularly his translations of Deuteronomy and Leviticus and commentaries therein. I am also grateful for the teaching of the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Abts Wright, who first lifted up for me the rich symbolism of the Hebrew scriptures and how it affects how we read and teach scripture, and Dr Kyle Saunders, my Greek professor who was incredibly patient with me for a year of Biblical Greek. I doubt he realizes just how often his work has impacted my ministry, but this sermon is a particularly prime example.

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.”

These may be some of the most familiar words of Jesus, and most beloved. The commandment to love God and neighbor was so central to the teachings of Jesus, and so precious to his earliest followers, that these words can be found in three of the four Gospels, as well as the letters of Paul, James, and John. And yet, we almost never talk about the fact that Jesus is simply repeating well-known prayers and passages of Hebrew scripture. Jesus did not make up these commandments- he is reminding his audience that they already know the answer to their own questions. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” comes directly from Deuteronomy 6, and is the foundation of the Shema, the basic affirmation of Jewish belief. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is a quotation from Leviticus, right there in the middle of laws about justice and fair treatment of employees and accommodations for people who are disabled. Jesus is not saying anything new, but rather reminding us of something ancient and foundational. On these hang all the law and the prophets, the scriptures that shaped Jesus’s culture, his prayer life, his family structure, and his preaching. Without the Old Testament, without the Hebrew scriptures, we would not have our greatest commandments. Without those ancient and incredibly complicated books of history and poetry and allegory and folklore, we cannot know what it means to love God and neighbor.

First, we need to recall that the metaphors and symbols we know and love today have not always meant the same thing across time, languages, and cultures. Let’s take the heart for example. When we talk about our hearts, what do we usually mean? Sometimes we mean the miraculous muscle that keeps us alive, but not always. When we are speaking metaphorically about our hearts, we usually mean our emotional center, the part of us that hurts when something bad happens to us or someone else, the part of us that warms when someone is kind and breaks when we encounter loss or suffering. We mean a fragile thing somewhere at the center of us, and sometimes we mean the part of us that is ruled by passion instead of logic or reason. Mostly, when we talk about our hearts or depict them in art, we are talking about love. So when Jesus tells us to love God with all our heart, that makes sense to us, because loving is our heart’s job. But the heart meant something slightly different to the societies in which Jesus lived and taught.

In biblical Jewish thought, the heart is the center of understanding, the place where logic lives and where comprehension occurs. It is the place of decision-making and planning and morality. Emotions live in the heart too, but they are not the sole function of the heart. So to love God with our heart was not simply to feel affection for God, or to encounter God with our emotional center. To love God with all our heart is to love God with our decisions, with our thinking and our logic and our understanding. To love with our heart in a biblical sense is to make every choice with God at the center.

Next we have the soul, that complicated and constantly misunderstood philosophical concept. In the Greek, Jesus uses the word psyche, from whence comes our word psychology, the study of the mind. Translating this word as soul is confusing for a lot of reasons, and if I spent my whole sermon explaining what a soul means in Greek I think we’d all be very late for lunch. So for the sake of brevity, we’ll go back to the Hebrew from which Jesus is quoting. Love God with all your nefesh, your “life-breath,” “your essential self.” We are to love God with all our nefesh, the thing that makes us alive, the literal breath in our lungs and the figurative spark in our selfhood. We fulfill the greatest commandment when we love God with the thing that makes us, us. As Robert Alter, a great Hebrew scholar, translates it- we are to love God with all our being. Everything about us must be about God.

And finally, the mind. The word Jesus uses in Greek, dianoia, is found in another important place in the New Testament. Jesus’s mother uses this word in her Magnificat, when she sings that God has scattered the proud in the dianoia, the thoughts of their hearts. Dianoia, thoughts, intellect. We are to love God with our thoughts, our critical thinking, and our perception. We are to love God with all that makes up our narrative and interpretation of our experiences. In Deuteronomy, we are commanded here to love God with all our might. The word in the Hebrew is me’od, very. Basically, we are to love God muchly, verily, with our every thought and feeling. To love God with our mind, God’s presence permeates our entire reality.  

            The word that Jesus uses for love is probably one Greek word we all know. We are, according to Jesus, supposed to agapeseis God and agapeseis our neighbor as ourself. Have you heard the word agape before? This is usually described as unconditional love, the reciprocal love between God and creation. This is a good and useful definition, but there’s a little more to it. The Hebrew concept of God’s love is khesed, the loyal love of God, the covenant love between God and God’s people. Khesed is a promise being kept, a fealty and a loyalty between two parties sworn to take care of one another in particular ways. Jesus commands us to an unconditional, loyal, reciprocal love. This is not romantic love or platonic love or even familial love. This is chosen love, active and constant and enacted through choices and behaviors. The love God has for us is a love that permeates every part of us, a love that is not transactional but neither is it passive. The greatest commandment is to love with all that we do, all that we have, all that we are, all that defines and sustains us, because this is the love God has for us.

            So what happens when we dedicate our reasoning, our emotions, our decision-making, our very being to the God of khesed?

            “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” You shall agape your neighbor, you shall khesed your neighbor, you shall be loyal and unconditional and constant toward your neighbor. This commanded love is not a feeling- we do not have to feel warm and fuzzy about our particular neighbor or even really like them at all. But when we are steeped in the knowledge of God’s unfailing love for us, it becomes impossible to ignore one another. It becomes impossible to look away from the things we know break the heart of God, because they start to break ours too. It becomes impossible to forget that just as we are beloved, so too is the person on the other side of the street, on the other side of the aisle, on the other side of the world. And so we begin to love them, really love them, with our actions and our choices and our way of being in the world. It is on this kind of love that everything else hangs.