WHICH is the GREATEST?

Do you ever feel overwhelmed with all of the information that is coming to you through the cable news networks, or the all news radio programs, or newspapers and magazines, or the biggest one of all - the internet? It is a lot to try to take in. It really can be too much.

A man named Jack Dorsey had an interesting idea - cut through all of the information and get right to the point. So he decided that if you want to communicate something on the internet you had to say it in 140 characters or less. He made an allowance that if a person reading the short statement wanted to know more about the information you could follow a link, a pathway to a further explanation. But Dorsey's key point was short and to the point. Thus twitter was born.

I think Jesus was way ahead of his time, way ahead of twitter. In yet another challenge from the leaders of his time a scholar of the law tested Jesus by asking,

"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

Now there were over 600 laws, that's a lot of information, and Jesus was asked to pick one. Impossible, this was yet another impossible request from the leaders of the time.  YET, in a twitter kind of way, a short and to the point response,  Jesus responds:

"You shall love the Lord, your God,

with all your heart,

with all your soul,

and with all your mind.

This is the greatest and the first commandment.

The second is like it:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

Jesus gets right to the point, he identifies the greatest commandment - it is all about LOVE. Jesus combines the great Shema, a prayer that devout Jews recited every morning and night. A prayer that was a command to love God absolutely, a prayer that was to be written on their very hearts. He combined that prayer with a  familiar passage from Leviticus -

“You must love your neighbor as yourself”.

Now Jesus, mind you, was not asked for two great laws, but he gave two as one. The entire will of God and purpose of our life is to love God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus understood the interlocking of the two commandments in a new and quite radical way.

You cannot have one without the other.

Without the love of neighbor, the love of God remains a barren emotion; and without the love of God, love of neighbor is but a refined form of self-love. The combined command teaches us to strive for humility before our gracious God and obedient service to others, especially the poor.

Loving our neighbor means more than being kind to our friends and relatives, or to the person who lives next door.

Loving one’s neighbor means:

doing right by any widow or orphan

seeing that the hungry are fed and the homeless sheltered

that the poor have their basic needs met

that the unemployed do not suffer from want

that the young are educated and the old are cared for.

To do less is to fail in our love for neighbor.

To do less is also to keep us from fully loving our all-loving God.