Sermon Notes Sunday 29th October
Desiree Snyman

One love, one heart
Let's get together and feel all right
Hear the children crying (One love)
Hear the children crying (One heart)
Sayin', "Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right."
Sayin', "Let's get together and feel all right."
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa … (Bob Marley and The Wailers) 

Copyright restrictions prevent us from publishing or playing in full Bob Marley’s anthem “One Love”. “One love, One heart” expresses the type of love that unites, includes, and transforms. To my way of thinking, the reggae beat to “One Love” needs to be heard as an ear worm as one considers the sacred text exhortation today “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love your neighbour as yourself. 

There is a deeper meaning behind the song than a simple call for unity. One Love addresses the repression and violence in the Jamaican 1976 elections and the unrest caused by the hostilities between the national and labour parties. Since then, the anthem “One Love” retains a message of hope and healing in the context of upheaval – a message as pertinent today as it was then.  Bob Marley’s inspiration is also the path into today’s ubiquitous message of Love God, neighbour, and self:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22.37–40.

Before the two great commandments made it onto page 120 of A Prayer Book for Australia, before it was written in Mark 12:28-34, Matthew 22:34-40, and Luke 10:25-28, it was intoned from the Hebrew Scriptures.  

Deuteronomy 6.4-5 and Leviticus 19.18

Believe it or not, Jesus did not invent the Two Great Commandments, he adapted them from two books in the Pentateuch, the Torah.  Deuteronomy 6.4-5, the Shema, asserts:

4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Love your neighbour as yourself is from Leviticus 19.18:

18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.

Jesus combines these two sacred texts, the Shema from Deuteronomy. and a liturgical text from Leviticus into one sentence. The first time the unity of love of God and love of neighbour is noted, is in Mark’s Gospel, written about 30 years after the teaching of Jesus.  

Mark 12:28-34,

28 One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30 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.’ 31 The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” 

When Mark writes his Gospel, the Shema from Deuteronomy is expanded: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Yes, Mark adds “mind” to how we love God. In Mark’s Gospel there is a friendly debate happening, it is a scribe who asks Jesus the question about which law is greatest, and the scribe is very pleased with Jesus’ answer.  

Matthew

In Matthew’s Gospel, the scribe disappears, and an argumentative lawyer asks Jesus for one great commandment, Jesus replies with two commandments: The second commandment is like the first “you shall love your neighbour as yourself”. Notice that the first part of the Shema disappears. Verse 40, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” is significant. The emphasis of the Law is the love of God. The Law expects that we orientate our entire existence towards God at that God is at the centre of all we think and do. The message of the prophets on the other hand is about properly loving neighbour with justice and mercy. Jesus is an evolutionary prophet, seeing beyond either or thinking. For Jesus it is both, and. For Jesus it is not about love of God or love of neighbour, it is love of neighbour and love of God at the very same time, in the very same moment. This is how I interpret the Zen koan type question Jesus throws back at the argumentative lawyer:

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: 42 “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” 43 He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? 45 If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” 46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

For a dualistic thinker the world is divided into black and white, inside, and outside, neighbour and enemy, God and human. Jesus sees the oneness of all reality. When he asks how David can call his son Lord, the lawyers can’t answer the problem. We the reader know that Jesus is the son of David and the Messiah at the very same time. The non-duality hinted at in Matthew reaches full flourishing in Luke.  

Luke

Luke is written by a gentile for gentiles so the references to the Hebrew scriptures are lost completely. In Luke 10 it is not Jesus who gives the two great commandments but a lawyer who gives one sentence. A man approaches Jesus asking a deep existential question and like the good facilitator he is Jesus throws the question back, “what do the scriptures say?” The lawyer replies ““You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” 

Notice how the distance between love of God and neighbour is decreased from being in two separate books in the Hebrew Torah until in Luke’s Gospel the two loves are distilled into a single sentence, rather than two teachings knitted together from two different books of the Bible. The unity of love of God and love of neighbour continues to develop in scripture. For example, in a letter from John: “Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20 NRSV) 

How we love something is how we love everything.

If we take these two commandments and think of them as two steps to a life worth living, we may have missed the point entirely. Some people describe a vertical relationship with God being honour for God and a horizontal relationship of love of neighbour. It’s a mistake because God has never been “up there”, there is and has never been any “vertical” relationship with God ever. At any rate, this has never made sense to me because if we are going to numerate the loves, I notice three, the love of God, the love of neighbour and the love of oneself. Furthermore, any spiritual practice devoted to loving God is more accurately a space to allow God to love us. For all who think the sacred is “up there”, the unity of love of God and love of neighbour redirects, the sacred is not up there but in the neighbour, in you. To come back to Bob Marley, there is only “One Love”. Life is all one love, one love, one love, one love. Love of God, neighbour and self, is deeper than love, it is about union, what Julian of Norwich calls oneing.  

Love means that we are in God

In every moment that we love God, we are loving our neighbour. The best way we can love God and the best way we can love our neighbour is to love ourselves. Lady Julian of Norwich uses the idea of “oneing” to describe divine union that love brings about. In chapter 53 of Revelations of Divine Love, she writes,

“This beloved soul was preciously knitted to God in its making, by a knot so subtle and so mighty that it is oned in God. In this oneing, it is made endlessly holy. Furthermore, God wants us to know that all the souls which will be saved in heaven without end are knit in this knot, and oned in this oneing, and made holy in this holiness.”

Love is more than an action or a feeling, it is a state of being. God or neighbour are not the objects of our love. In any moment of loving, you, God, and neighbour are one. If God makes God’s home in me, and God makes God’s home in you, then it is the God in me loving the God in you.

The place which Jesus takes in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there. . . . And the soul who contemplates this is made like [the one] who is contemplated. 

(Julian of Norwich in “Showings”, Chapter 22 (Short text), trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Paulist Press: 1978), 164).

The point about love is oneing, in any moment of authentic love, we are oned with God, oned within ourselves and oned with creation. I would like to end with a quote from Rowan Williams:

The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.

(by Rowan Williams in an essay originally delivered as the 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in 1989).