12th Sunday after Pentecost 3.8.08 Loving God (and neighbour)
The first and most important commandment is this: love God with your whole heart and soul and mind...
We find this one hard because God is invisible, and inaudible, and intangible... and we are creatures of flesh and blood and we find it hard to love in the abstract.
So God, knowing this, comes to our help. He sends us countless blessings and good things which He hopes will remind us of what He is like and in turn will lead us to love Him.
Things like food, wine, music, sunshine, life itself, sport, sleep, fishing ... not everyone enjoys all these things, but everyone enjoys at least some things that God provides.
Trouble is, that we enjoy these things so much we may become attached to them and not do the extra bit of thinking to follow through to where the blessings come from.
These things are just ‘messengers’, signs and glimpses of a much greater glory beyond. Whether we look beyond is another and crucial matter.
We love the blessings of God but not the God of blessings.
God wants us to love Him for His own sake, and not just for what He can do for us. He wants to give us good things, but that we would still be able to see beyond them to Himself, and be happy with just Him even if there are no obvious blessings.
Thus the true Christian can love God in a rat-infested dungeon, facing execution the next morning! Only God is the possession at that point. There are no frills, no comforts, but God is enough.
To help us along this path of discovering Him, God makes sure that our possessions will not satisfy us completely. Sometimes they are removed from us; sometimes we become bored and restless with them. We never feel completely right if we focus just on earthly things.
This is for the good reason that we are designed to love God and without Him there is always a void, a yearning. God’s command to love us is also a teaching about how we are put together.
If we get this first commandment right the other ones will fall into place.
We break all the commandments (between us) but the others all come down to this one, that we do not love God enough, if at all.
Many will say – when they lose their possessions or similar setback – that there is no God. Precisely the opposite. The fragility of earthly delights proves there is something more solid behind it all.
So we seek out that which is solid, immoveable, unchangeable – how we long for happiness which cannot be taken away. We have it in God (and nowhere else).
When He has brought us that far we have the key to everything. Ultimately Heaven itself is the possession of complete union with God. We talk of getting to heaven as the end of our journey, but we really need to get to heaven in our hearts before we can go there when we die.
We go there in our hearts when we give first place to God. We love the God of blessings more than the blessings of God.
And what of the love of Neighbour? It is the second command and flows from the first. If we love God we will automatically love neighbour because we will be thinking as God thinks. We will value what He values, and we know He loves the neighbour in question, so we must also.
The selfishness, laziness, greed or whatever prevents us from loving neighbour are all in their way a denial of God. Affirm Him and those things disappear. We cannot fail to keep the other commands which include all our obligations to other people.
What God commands He also enables. He enables us to love Him and Neighbour.
