On the Love of God

 

On the Love of God

October 24, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

A great many Christians in our country today love the Ten Commandments, or at least they profess loudly that they do. Whether or not they live by them may be another matter, but conservative Christians (that term is an oxymoron, but never mind for now) are forever telling us that the Ten Commandments express Christian morality, never mind that they were originally Jewish not Christian. People want to display them on public property like courthouses, never mind that doing do would be obviously unconstitutional. I don’t mean to dismiss the Ten Commandments altogether, though they are actually a lot more complex and problematic than most people think they are. They do contain some basic moral rules—don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t covet, and so on.

Here’s the thing though. We Christians have a commandment that isn’t in the Ten Commandments at all. We call it “the Great Commandment.” One version of it or another appears in all three synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s not in the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments aren’t in it, at least not expressly. Here it is in the oldest version of it we have, the one in Mark. When a scribe asks Jesus which commandment if “first of all” Jesus answers:

 

The first is this, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these. Mark 12:29-31.

 

We see that when asked which commandment is first Jesus quotes Hebrew scripture. The “love the Lord your God” part is from Deuteronomy 6:4-6 The “love your neighbor as yourself” part is from Leviticus 19:18. To answer the scribe’s question Jesus did not raise the Ten Commandments. He raised the great “Shema,” “Hear, O Israel,” that is the creedal statement of Judaism. He also quoted a much more obscure commandment from the priestly book of Leviticus, raising it to equal dignity with the Shema. You’d think that would be enough to get Christians away from the Ten Commandments, but for a great many of them it isn’t. It is however enough to get me away from the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments aren’t the most foundational statement of Christian ethics. The Great Commandment is. Here I want to consider what the “Love your God” part of the Great Commandment actually means.

The Great Commandment is of course about love. People often say it is about two loves, love and God and love of neighbor; but it’s actually about three loves, love of God, neighbor, and self. It says more about love of God than it does about the other two loves. It says we are to “love” God with “all” of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. To understand this Commandment I’m tempted to start with the meaning of love, but love doesn’t stand by itself here. It is with “with,” and it occurs to me that loving God with each of the four parts of our being that the Shema and Jesus mention means something different for each of them. So I’ll look at all four of them separately in the order in which they appear in Mark.

 

Loving God With All Your Heart. Now, a heart of course is a bodily organ, and surely both Jesus and the authors of the Shema and the Gospel of Mark knew that it is. Yet heart has often been used as a metaphor in many different cultures. It is used as a metaphor for a particular kind of love—romantic love, emotional love, the kind of love we mean when we “fall in love.” What would it mean for us to love God that way, if not romantically then at least emotionally? I think it means that we should know God’s presence with us and rejoice when we discover it. Talk to God. Listen to God. Laugh with God. Cry with God. Turn to God as one you trust unconditionally because you know that God will never fail you. Loving God with all your heart means sharing everything you feel, all your joys and all your sorrows, all your successes and all your failures, all your courage and all your fear with God as an always reliable friend and counsellor. It means relate to God as your best friend, and celebrate that you have such an eternally reliable friend as God.

 

Loving God With All Your Soul. I believe that to love God with all your soul means you turn your soul over to God and God’s grace and stop worrying about its eternal fate. You recognize that your soul longs for connection with God, so you are intentional about seeking—becoming aware of actually—that connection. You do that by finding one or more spiritual practices that bring God’s unfailing presence with you to your awareness. Every spiritual practice is, I think, a form of prayer. It can be talking to God, but sometimes it’s more powerful to sit in silence and listen for what God is saying to you. Whatever spiritual practice you adopt you must do it consistently. Keep at it. The spiritual benefits of spiritual practices don’t usually come as soon as you begin the practice. You don’t have to stick with a spiritual practice that clearly isn’t working for you, but if you keep at most spiritual practices over time you will come to know those spiritual benefits.

 

Loving God With All Your Mind. This one really hits home for me. My return to the Christian faith decades ago after many years away from it began when I experienced the coldness and harsh reality of a militantly atheistic state when I spent an academic year in the USSR doing dissertation research. It began to pick up speed, however, when I developed an interest in good Christian theology. One day quite by accident—or perhaps quite by God’s providence—I bought a used copy of Paul Tillich’s little book Dynamics of Faith. Reading it changed my life. I learned that one need not, indeed must not, accept all of the biblical literalism, end times nonsense, and Victorian social conservatism that the religious right spews all over the media in this country. I learned that symbol and myth necessarily are the language of faith, with myth understood properly as a story that connects us with God and God with us, not as something people think is true that isn’t true, it’s most common definition these days. There’s a straight line in my life from that little book to ordained Christian ministry and writing a good deal of theology myself.

That journey began with head work, and head work has remained a foundational part of my faith ever since. It is powerfully true that the heart cannot love what the mind cannot accept. Eventually I enrolled in the Master of Divinity program of the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University (now sadly being shut down as so many seminaries are). All through my 3+ years there I was told over and over again by many different people, “Get out of your head!” When I did my ordination interview in the United Church of Christ I was asked, “We know you’ve got the head stuff. Where’s the heart stuff?” The genuinely good people who said those things to me had a point. I am a 5 on the Enneagram scale, the thinker. I became convinced, however, that my teachers at Seattle University and many of my colleagues in the United Church of Christ do not sufficiently value the life of the mind as an entry point into the Christian faith. Yet the mind can be precisely that. It was that for me. To love God with all your mind is to apply your mind to understanding and being able to defend the great mysteries and teachings of the faith. Faith is a commitment of the whole person, and the whole person includes the mind. I think I still love God with my mind more than I do in any other way. Jesus knew that faith includes the workings of the mind. More people should recognize that thinking the faith is a valid way of loving God.

 

Loving God With All Your Strength: For me this is the most obscure of the four ways Mark’s Jesus names of loving God. What does strength mean here? I can think of a couple of things it can mean. It means that loving God and living a life of faith isn’t always easy. You have to commit your whole self to it. You have to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. To love God with all your strength means that the commitment you make to God cannot be easily assumed and just as easily discarded. To love God truly you must so with spiritual strength.

Strength is however also a physical quality. When we call a man strong we may mean that he is emotionally strong, but more likely we mean that he is physically strong. The true commitment of faith is a commitment of the body as well as a commitment of the heart, soul, and mind. While we are physically able there is much we can do with our bodies to express and develop our love of God. Former president Jimmy Carter is 97 years old, and he still builds houses for people through Habitat for Humanity. That’s loving God with his body. To love God with your body means to get up, move, reach out, and get to the work of ministry in the world and to do it with all your strength.

 

We see that the love of God to which the Great Commandment calls us is neither easy nor superficial. It is actually quite complex, and it can be very difficult. It requires a strong commitment not a weak one. It requires persistence not merely occasional attention. Going to church on Sunday certainly can and should be part of that commitment, but praying on Sunday and oppressing your employees or despoiling the earth on Monday is really no kind of faith at all. The love of God requires follow through, and follow through can be a lot harder to do than is speaking pleasant words in church on Sunday.

And here’s another truth about the love to God to which the Great Commandment calls us. None of us will ever do it perfectly. We are, after all, not Jesus Christ. We will all fail at it to a greater or lesser degree. That’s where God’s grace comes in. God knows we aren’t perfect and never do much of anything of real value perfectly. The great good news is that God has already forgiven our shortcomings and our failures. That’s what grace is. We don’t love God to earn grace, we love God in response to grace. So yes, God and Jesus Christ call us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We must all respond to that call as best we can. As we do we can rest secure in the knowledge that God accepts whatever we do and has already forgiven us for what we fail to do. Thanks be to God!