Tuesday of Holy Week, April 4. BACK TO BASICS

Prepare to Listen.  You shall love the Lord your God.  You shall love your neighbour as yourself.
 
Prayerfully Read Matthew 22:34-40
34When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  36‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’  37He said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  38This is the greatest and first commandment.  39And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
 
Prayerfully Wonder
A pastor was asked her views on the church and homosexuality.  She replied, ‘I’m called to love God and my neighbor, and that keeps me very busy.’  And she’s right.  When a lawyer, hoping to trick Jesus, asked for the greatest commandment, Jesus gave a thoroughly traditional response.  He told the lawyer to go back to basics—love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.  It may be basic, but it’s also so “deeply searching that everyone else would be challenged by it.”[1]  It’s the only way to live as followers of Jesus.
 
Many of us live in a very divided society and this has affected our churches.  I know people who left a church over its political views, treatment of LGBTQ, women in leadership, and more.  We disagree on much that it seems, as Brueggemann wonders, whether “we have to some extent in the church forgotten the ties that bind us in the gospel to the living God and each other.”[2]  He suggests that the way to truly live the gospel and move beyond our differences, is to go back to basics, that is to these two commandments about loving God and loving our neighbor.  In the biblical tradition neighbor always includes the outcasts, the marginalized, the despised.  This dual love is the mark that will set us apart from the world.  When the church chooses whom to love and whom to exclude, it has given in to the world.  We need to go back to basics and learn what it means to be different from the world by truly loving God with all we are and have and loving our neighbor, regardless of who they are or how they live.
 
Prayerfully Reflect
Commit to living these two basic but great commandments.
 
Respond in Prayer
Lord Jesus, help me heal the divisions in my society by going back to basics, loving you and loving my neighbor.  Amen.
 
Live Obediently.  Go back to the basics.
[1] Wright, N. T.  Matthew for Everyone Part 2.  Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.  2004, p. 93.
[2] Brueggemann, Walter.  Tenacious Solidarity.  Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.  2018, p. 401.