How do we come to love God? How does each one of us come to know what God is like? And since we can’t see God or touch God, how can we be sure that the understanding of God that each of us has is accurate?

These questions aren’t specifically addressed in today’s reading from Matthew, but they’re certainly triggered by it. They certainly flow from Jesus’ conversation with the Pharisees.

The passage we hear today closes a section in Matthew that we’ve been in for the last five Sundays. It takes place the day after Jesus’ triumphant “Palm Sunday” entrance into Jerusalem, so we as the Christian community know that this is the final Monday of Jesus’ life – and a contentious Monday it’s been, because he’s been teaching in the Temple; and his discourses with the crowds have continually been interrupted by confrontations with every segment of Jerusalem’s leadership.

First off, the chief priests and the elders, the Temple leadership, challenged Jesus’ authority to teach – and he responded by putting them on the spot with a question about the authority of John the Baptizer. He then directed three parables against them, parables that were also directed against the Pharisees, who were the experts on the Law in everyday life.

In return, the Pharisees wanted to have Jesus arrested, but they recognized that his popularity with the crowd would make that both difficult and dangerous; so instead, they set about trying to get him to incriminate himself.

As we heard last week, the Pharisees sent a group of their own disciples along with supporters of the Roman occupation, to ask about the legality of paying taxes to Rome. According to Matthew, Jesus’ answer to their question left them “amazed.”

Jesus was later confronted by a group of Sadducees, the Sadducees being Jerusalem’s upper crust socially and the upper crust of the Temple leadership as well. The Sadducees appreciated the benefits of not rocking the boat, of maintaining an uneasy peace with the local Roman officials; and they probably got along better with the Romans than with the Pharisees, because the two Jewish groups disagreed theologically on several points, one of those points being resurrection. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the faithful on the Last Day; the Sadducees did not – and so the group coming to Jesus was hoping to discredit both Jesus and the Pharisees when they asked him a very contrived question about which of her husbands a woman widowed seven times would belong to in the resurrection.

Matthew tells us that Jesus’ answer left the crowd “astounded” and the Sadducees silenced (Matt. 22:23-33) and so the Pharisees, still trying to salvage the day, move in here one last time. Called a “lawyer” – which is to say, a specialist in the Law of Moses – their spokesman asks Jesus, “Which commandment in the Law is the greatest?”

As with the other questions of the day, this one is also a trap.

There are 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law: 248 positive ones, and 365 negative ones. Debate about which commandments are “heavy,” or difficult to observe, and which are “light,” was a standard part of rabbinical discourse and Jesus himself talks about the Pharisees laying “heavier” burdens of observance on others than they take on themselves.

Discussion about ranking the commandments in order of their importance was also standard scholarship, but the lawyer isn’t asking Jesus to tell him which commandment heads up the whole list of 613; he’s asking Jesus which commandment stands alone as the greatest, apart from the others – and the trap here is that in spite of their different weights, all 613 commandments were understood to be equally binding upon the faithful. To elevate one commandment above the others would be human presumption in the face of divine grace, and would disparage God’s gift of the Law.

But Jesus’ answer goes far beyond the Law, because he does two things: first, he takes two distinct parts of the Law – one, from Deuteronomy, the Shema, which is Israel’s most basic statement of identity: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”; and the other part Jesus takes is a portion of the directions in Leviticus known as the Holiness Code, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He puts this Leviticus commandment together with the second half of the Shema and makes them two parts of the whole, saying that the second commandment is “like” the first; and the Greek word he uses for “like”, homoia, doesn’t mean “similar;” but rather means “equal and inseparable.” (Craddock, 426)

Jesus then says that these two commandments taken together as one are the key to everything: “On these two commandments,” he says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” These two commandments taken together as one are the lynchpin of the whole of God’s divine revelation to the people. They’re not just the key to understanding God’s Law; they’re the key to, and the source of, everything God has spoken to Israel through the prophets as well. These two commandments taken together as one are everything.

One author writes, “To love God is to love in the way that God loves – indiscriminately. To love God is to love what God loves – everything.” Total, indiscriminate love. (Feasting, Mt, Th, 214)

God is the source of all being, and so to love God is to love everyone, and to love everything, that God loves. To love our neighbor as ourselves is to see and to value everyone, and ourselves, as God sees and values each and every one of us.

Needless to say… this is a very, very tall order.

As for how we come to know God, I think this happens in many ways. Some of us may start to find and to know God through nature and Creation, through the wonder of all the things God has made. Some of us may see God’s handiwork in the beauty of mathematics, or in the emotive power of music. Many of us start to know God, and to know about God, through other people, people who not only tell us about God, but who show us God’s grace and God’s love in the way they live their own lives, each and every day.

At some point we start to learn about what God has done for us in Jesus; we learn about the God who died on the cross so that we might have life, the God who was raised on the third day, and who now lives, ready to walk with each of us every day, if we’ll let him. “In this is love,” writes the author of 1 John, “not that we loved God but that [God] loved us and sent [God’s] son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 Jn. 4:10) (emphasis mine)

In the life and the love and the ministry of this same son of God, this Jesus, this visible expression of the invisible God, we see and experience the full revelation of God’s true nature. We see and experience the true nature of God’s love as being love that is “unmotivated and unmanipulated, unconditional and unlimited.” “Such love is not a matter of feeling, which cannot be commanded in any case” writes one author, “but [this love is a matter] of commitment and [of] action.” (Craddock, 25)

This love is a matter of commitment and of emotion.

God is committed to us and is for us, because God has long since chosen to be so.

Chosen to be so.

And so this is how we come to love God: we choose to. We consciously choose to love God, we make an intentional decision to follow Jesus, because we’re told to love God with all of our minds, as well as our hearts and souls. This doesn’t mean that our love for God can’t involve feelings; on the contrary, some of the Christian mystics have written with great passion about their relationship with God.

Choosing to love God simply means that sooner or later, each of us will reach a point of sorrow or of disillusionment or perhaps of intellectual superiority where the whole “God thing” will make no sense to us – and at that point we will need to choose to continue loving God in spite of our inclination otherwise.

As Jesus points out today, loving others as God loves them is part and parcel with our decision to love God, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy.

Loving as God loves means actively seeking the wellbeing of the other; it means treating the other person as we’d like to be treated ourselves, even when we don’t like, and don’t even want to be around, that other person.

Friend or foe, enemy or neighbor – loving all these is the lynchpin of the kingdom as much as loving God is, but the problem for most of us is that we don’t really want to love our enemies and our foes…which is why we ask God in today’s collect to “make us love what [God] commands”!

Unfortunately for us, even though in our eyes our enemies may do a pretty good job of not being at all worthy of being loved, Jesus doesn’t turn them away – and neither can we.

We can, however, start SMALL– please, don’t start with Hitler. Start SMALL, one person at a time; dealing with one person we don’t want to love, or don’t think we can love, at a time – and again I will say, this isn’t “love” as warm fuzzies and pastel colors. This isn’t love as reciprocated feelings. This love is agape -- love as a conscious decision about how to behave, no matter what.

We can start trying to love those we don’t love by praying for their health and wellbeing, by asking that God’s will may be present in their lives. If that’s too much, we can start by asking God to help us want to pray for them, because when we pray for someone, we invest ourselves in them; we come to have a vested interest in their life.

Towards the end of his Gospel, Matthew gives us an “end times” vision of the Son of Man on his throne, judging all the peoples of the nations and separating the sheep from the goats. Interestingly enough…and this is very important…nowhere in this vision does the Son of Man ask anyone what they have believed or what they have said; he only recognizes what they have or have not done, relative to their neighbor. Did they feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, or visit those in prison? Did they see Christ in unlikely places, or did they not?

The irony is that in serving others, the sheep had no idea they were serving Christ; they just did what they thought was right – and just as poignant as it is ironic, the goats had no clue as to what they were missing.

Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

On these two commandments hangs life itself. Amen.