“What's The Greatest Commandment?”
It is who you know not what you know
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Text: Matthew 22:34-40
We were four very enthusiastic young teenagers and for months we had been rehearsing on our guitars and drums, for we were convinced that we were the Next Big Thing on the music scene. We rehearsed in basements, on back patios, on lawns and in gardens. Anywhere on the island of Bermuda where we could sing our songs we sang them. We even went down to the beach to entertain the sunbathers (you would have to ask them if they considered it entertainment). We finally decided that the world was now ready to know how wonderful we four were. We had rehearsed. We were ready. Our guitars were strung and tuned, our voices were crystal clear, we had memorized our lyrics and we made the phone call.
We called the biggest record producer in Bermuda (in fact there was only one) and said that we would like an audition so he could benefit from hearing the Next Big Thing in the music industry. Off we went, expecting a great and warm reception. We were beginning our adventure to greatness. We went in and met the producer who very kindly sat us down, four eager 16-year-old boys. His first question was: “Who wrote your songs?”
We all looked at one another and said: “Well, we did. Stirling and Gunther.”
“Never heard of them,” he said. “Who is your manager?”
We looked at each other, wondering who would step forward and proclaim themselves manager. “We don't have a manager,” we said.
“Oh,” he said. Then he said: “Who is your connection?”
Connection? We thought. We don't have any connections, we're 16 years old, we don't know anybody. We said: “We don't have any connections.”
“Oh,” he said again. “Well, in that case I think you'd better come back another time.”
He didn't even want to hear us. Then, as we were departing he said those words that you have heard a thousand times before but in this context hurt like a burning poker: “Boys, it's not what you know in this world that counts, it's who you know. That's what matters.”
We went home dejected and sad. We tried to rehearse our way out of the depression but it was going nowhere. It hurt to hear that it's not what you know, it's who you know. Very often that's such a negative phrase, for it implies that it is not your ability that gets you ahead, but rather who you know and the contacts that you have. It's not whether you have knowledge or are able or well-prepared. It is whether you will find someone who might exercise his or her noblesse oblige and show you kindness and give you a helping hand. It is often what is very wrong with the world itself: It's not what you know, it's who you know. It has depressed thousands over the years.
But when you look at it from another side, there might be something positive here as well. For if one interprets “not what you know but who you know” in terms of the positive nature of relationships, of the importance of knowing and being known, of the importance of being co-operative, of the fact that the person is more important than simply the profession, then you can turn the tables. Who you know actually is as important as what you know. Relationships are as important as abilities. And, connections with others matter as much as professional acumen.
If we look at this phrase: “It's not what you know but who you know that counts,” I think we can apply that positively within the terms of our relationship with God. Let me explain. We're living in an age where many people are what are known as “seekers.” This whole sermons series has revolved around people who are trying to find a religious foundation for their lives. Very often, they approach life like a smorgasbord. They are trying to find someplace where they, themselves are affirmed, where their spirits are lifted and where their psychology and their thoughts can mount to higher things. It's a worthwhile process.
The problem often is that when people embark upon such a journey, they are more interested in looking at religion and faith from a distance, with the what rather than with the who. Now, for a while this might seem very palatable - a religion that's just a set of principles or laws, just a group of nice ideas or philosophies to live by, simply a book to read or a tape to instruct you or a message to inspire you to higher thoughts. It might on the surface seem to be a very worthwhile exercise. A God that makes no demands, a faith that really has no revelation, just simply a higher plane of spiritual being. It seems good. Once you have found out what you want to know then you can relax. You have sought and you have found.
The problem is that in life that is not enough. Seekers who merely want the what of faith rather than the who of faith find that after a while, although the what might not make any demands, might seem very seductive, it does not really bring the essential thing that they are looking for. The essential thing that they are looking for, in my opinion, is love. You can have all the what of love that you want, but ultimately love boils down to the who. It boils down to a relationship.
This was abundantly clear in our text today. In a passage that has been recounted as one of the greatest of all time throughout the centuries, we have a scribe, an interpreter of religious law, coming to Jesus to test Him. Whether he is testing Him to catch Him out or is simply trying to find out what He really believes depends on which gospel you read. In Matthew the scribe comes to Jesus and asks Him: “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law?”
Now, in the mind of the scribe who was asking the question the law consisted of some 613 commandments in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Two-hundred and forty-eight of these are positive commandments to do positive and affirming things. But 365 of them are negative, they are prohibitions trying to stop people from doing bad things. Jesus hears all this and knows that within the scribe community and within the Sadducee community, different people want to put emphasis on different laws. Some laws are heavier and some are lighter and some mean more than others, and they want to draw Jesus into this debate.
Jesus responds in the most unconventional manner. He does not simply pick out one single commandment. Rather, He goes to almost a super-commandment, He goes right to the heart of the Sh'ma of Israel - something that Jews recite both in the morning and the evening: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
In other words, He repeats back to the questioner the very foundation of the faith. Then He goes on, He wasn't willing to give one answer, He gave two, but conjoined them. The second was from Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Jesus brings these two commandments, the Sh'ma of Israel and the commandment of Leviticus, puts them together and forms them into one. Then He says, “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
In other words, the entire faith of the Old Testament hangs on these two commandments. Jesus is not talking about the what, He is talking about the who. He's not talking about the commandments by picking out one that tells you what you should do, He is talking about commandments that are based on a relationship - on love. You should love the Lord your God. You should love your neighbour as yourself. It is relational. It is personal. It is not what you believe. It is whom you believe that really counts.
Jesus goes beyond just a fairly conventional response. What makes His words so appealing and so dynamic is that He gives us a high view of love. By a high view of love, I mean Jesus doesn't just say, “Love the Lord your God.” He says loving the Lord your God is the first thing, the first principle upon which everything else is to be based. Everything you do, all the other commandments, are contingent upon loving God first.
That's one of the problems that the seekers find. The seekers want a smorgasbord religion, they want to pick and choose from an eclectic mix and put it all together themselves. Jesus would say to those who are seeking such a faith, “Stop, for a moment. The Sh'ma of Israel is the Lord your God is one. You start first and foremost with faith and then you move to finding out where your spiritual life is to be found.” You start first with an affirmation of the love of God as being the most important thing. Everything else is contingent upon it.
Not only is this the first thing, it's the complete thing. Jesus says, as does the Sh'ma of Israel, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” But Jesus adds the words “with all your mind.” It's not as if Jesus is saying you can cut up the human life into different compartments - I love God with my mind, I love God with my soul, I love God with heart. What He is doing is talking about the completeness of the human being, that the whole of one's life is to be lived in and through the love of God. The first thing but the complete thing.
The problem is that so often when we interpret these passages we reduce them to something less than that complete entity. We do this very often. Sometimes we reduce love to just a sentiment.
Walt Whitman once wrote: “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral dressed in a shroud.”
In other words, sympathy, fellow-feeling, that sense of understanding someone else, is important. Walt Whitman is right. There needs to be the emotive nature of love. There needs to be the compassion and the sympathy and the fellow-feeling. But in and of itself that is not enough. Sometimes my friends, we mistake love for sympathy or fellow-feeling. We reduce love to sentiment rather than to a commandment, a commandment that is altogether greater. Sometimes we reduce love to a contract. It's as if somehow our love of God is a contractual thing, something we take for granted.
I was reading in a Lutheran magazine not long ago a story, which I'm sure some of you have heard, about a couple named Olé and Olga, who lived on a farm in the Midwest. They had worked this farm for 40 years and in all that time not once had Olé ever told Olga that he loved her, and Olga was getting tired of it. One winter's day Olga decided she was going to confront Olé. Wasn't it time he came forward and told her that he loved her? So she took him to one side and said: “Olé, I want you to tell me now that you love me. All these years, side by side we lived and worked together and never once have you told me, even at low moments in our lives, that you love me. I want you to tell me now that you love me.”
Olé said: “Well, why do I need to? After all, 40 years ago at our wedding I told you I loved you and until I change my mind I won't tell you otherwise.”
In other words, somehow a contractual agreement is all that love really is. We do this with God. We say we love God but we have no relationship with God. We say we believe in God but we don't live it as a breathing and vibrant thing. It's a contract we've made and we simply sit back and rely on it. What kind of a relationship is that? What kind of a relationship is it if all we say that really pertains to love is that we just “get along.” Sometimes getting along can be devastating and cannot be affirming.
There is in England a road between Leeds and Manchester that I drive on quite frequently whenever I'm there. It is the M-62. When they were preparing to build this motorway a number of years ago, they had a problem. In the middle of the planned road was a farmhouse. The farmer was refusing to give up his property. He decided that under no circumstances was he going to allow the government to take his property. The government, not knowing what to do because they did not have the power to take his land from him at that time, and knowing the road had to go through that particular valley, divided the highway and built it around his farm.
The whole farm is actually surrounded by a motorway to the north and south of it. When you come upon it you cannot believe what you are seeing. Here on your left-hand side (remember the English drive on the right) there is this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. They get along all right. The farmer continues to farm and the highway goes where the highway was going, but it is anything but perfect.
Love is not getting along. Love in not an entente cordiale. It is a relationship that is passionate and full. Therefore Jesus, by reciting this passage, is affirming again that love for God is not just a reduced concept. He turns it around and in other texts He points (and this is where you have to appreciate that radical nature of what Jesus said) to Himself. In John's gospel he says: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.”
In other words, the love of God is actually shown through what Jesus Himself is doing and is about to do and, as we look back on the cross, what He has done. The love of Jesus is not an undefined thing that is reduced to sentiment or contract or getting along, but rather is born in the very full sacrifice that He made on our behalf. And, my friends, I think that's part of the reason that there is a debate over the movie The Passion of the Christ.
I think when some people see the movie they are turned off by the horror and the blood. They are turned off by the grossness of it. Others come out in tears. They are so moved by it that they are rendered speechless. I think everything is dependent on what you believe when you see it in the first place. It is all very well to say for example, “Jesus died.” When you look at that it is an historic fact and no matter how many nails you bang into his hand you can't get away from that one central thing. But when you say, “Christ died for me. Christ died for us. Christ died for our sins,” then you have interpreted the crucifixion and it no longer becomes just an historical moment or a symbol of nastiness and sadism, it becomes a matter of faith. It becomes a relationship.
And that is what Jesus is saying the love of God is like. It's not just a matter of cold contract, it's a matter of personal relationship, it's a matter of love. It's not what you know, it's who you know that counts.
Jesus does something else that widens our definition of love. Jesus understood that among the people of Israel, among the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the rabbis, there was a debate around the interpretation of Leviticus 19: “Who is my neighbour?”
Now, it might seem unequivocally that the neighbour is in fact another member of the covenant community. In other words, my neighbour is a person of my fellow-faith, part of my community, the one who is nearest to me. But Jesus defines the neighbour in a more radical way. He enters into this very debate and in a unique way talks about the neighbour as something more. He talks about the neighbour as the person who is in need. He talks about the neighbour as being the enemy. He talks about the neighbour as being His persecutors. He talks about the neighbour as being the person on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. That's who the neighbour is.
The neighbour is not just the person who is near to me in terms of my culture or my faith. The neighbour is whoever might be in need. Jesus therefore defines love not just by looking inwardly within the people of Israel as if somehow that is a contained unit, He looks outside to the world as a whole. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it as follows: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
That's how Jesus defines the love of neighbour. In so doing He is radical, because He understands that the neighbour is anyone in need. The neighbour is the enemy who must be loved. My friends, if you don't think that is a radical statement just look at the world around us. If you don't think that is a transforming thing then all you need to do is open your newspapers, for the world around us has turned its back on that very idea. It looks at love in some dispassionate way or else it looks at love of neighbour as just the love that we have for our own. Jesus says it's not what you know about love, it's who you love that matters and who you love is the other and the neighbour is always the one you look out to rather than in at.
I say to seekers, “You want to find fulfilment in your life? You want to find love and joy in your life? You can look inward all you want, you can try to appeal to all the sentiment that you want, you can fill yourself with all the higher thoughts that you want, but it's the word of Jesus and His interpretation of the great commandment that really is the thing that changes you.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there was a great conflict about what to do with those who had run the East German regime. The leader of that regime was a man named Erich Honecker. In the East German context in 1989 I read a story of a Lutheran pastor named Holmer. He had pastored in East Berlin throughout the reign of the communists. He had eight children who had been deprived of university education even though every one of them had succeeded in their schoolwork. The reason, it was found out later, was that the minister responsible for education was no less than Margo Honecker, the wife of Erich Honecker, and because Holmer and other Lutheran pastors had spoken out against the tyranny of the East German regime, his children were deprived of a university education.
In 1989, when Honecker was finally banished from his lovely house in one of the posh areas of Berlin and had nowhere to live, he received a phone call from Pastor Holmer, inviting him and Mrs. Honecker to come and live with him and his eight children. Margo and Erich Honecker accepted that invitation and sat down at the table with the children that they had deprived of education and broke bread with them and stayed with them.
When asked why he did this, Holmer said, “Well, I'm just thinking that if Jesus ever found a homeless person and He had a home, what do you think He would do? He would bring them in.” My friends, that is the power of the way that Jesus interpreted the great commandment. He understood it's not what you know, in faith it's who you know, for that who is the relationship that is love, and He showed it for all it was worth. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.