In today’s gospel the Pharisees ask Jesus a complicated question. It is complicated because they have made it complicated over the years. If you think about it, the first and only law was: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” But they couldn’t even get that single law right.
Then, on coming out of Egypt, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and from those 10 Laws, the Jewish leaders had created 613 individual laws. So when they ask this question, they are expecting Jesus to answer with one of those laws.
The laws tell us what to do. “Do this and you will be blessed. Do that and you will be cursed.” It is pretty simple in a way, but then people start splitting hairs and it gets super complicated. If you think about it, laws often take on a negative connotation, usually telling us what not to do. “You shall not” like what we heard in our first reading from Exodus.
But when Jesus answers this question, He goes to the positive side of it, and He actually answers with the positive law from Moses in the book of Deuteronomy 6:4-6. So if you go back to Deuteronomy 6:4-6, in Jewish tradition this passage is called the Shema. The Hebrew word Shema means hear or listen. (sheh-Ma)
And they call this passage the Shema from the very first Hebrew word, because in Deuteronomy 6:4 it says “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
And it goes on to say: “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
You can tell by the language there that’s a pretty important commandment. So that first verse, “you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might,” that verse, the Shema, became for Jews a kind of creed (Latin = Credo / English “I believe”). They would actually recite it three times a day, morning, noon and evening.
Interestingly, there is a prayer that Christians recited three times a day for a long time.
In the Didache, which is an ancient Christian writing from the 1st century A.D., it said to pray the “Our Father” three times a day; morning, noon, and evening as a kind of fulfillment of the Jewish praying of the Shema.
This is something that priests and most deacons do as part of our daily prayers, but I believe it would be a good thing for all Christians to do, to return to that holy tradition, praying the “Our Father” when you wake up, sometime in the middle of the day, and then again before bed.
And the reason why I say that is because, well, it would really help us to fulfill the second part of our Gospel where Jesus said, “The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” A big part of loving our neighbor is found in the Our Father when we say “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
It seems like there are always people in our lives who we are struggling with to some degree, but when we think about loving them, if we were to forgive, if we were to pray for them, if we were to ask God to bless then & not curse them, that would go a long way toward loving them.
See, that second part of Jesus’ answer had a basis in scripture as well, in Leviticus 19:18 we read these words: “You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself…” In order not to seek revenge or not to hold a grudge we have to forgive, right? This is what Jesus was encouraging us to do, positively.
But it is also saying He will only forgive us as much as we are willing to forgive others. It is positive but it is also conditional, we must forgive!
God tried the negative route with us over and over. He punished us by kicking us out of the garden. He tried to scare us into change like at Sodom and Gomorrah. He yelled at us through the prophets. But nothing gets through until He demonstrates exactly what it is He desires from us, love, loving even those who hurt us.
He came to earth and demonstrated this, asking God to forgive His persecutors from the cross, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” Jesus demonstrated this by showing compassion and mercy to each person He met, and by dying for us, an innocent man killed for the forgiveness of our sins. Love is the greatest commandment because it is of God.
In order to love, forgive. Pray the “Our Father” three times a day, and pray it for those who have hurt you. Bless those you struggle with rather than curse them. In doing so, you will grow positively in God’s ways of love.