This is a sermon preached at St Olave Hart Street.
Jesus said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
This is the greatest 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
It’s sad to say it, but we need to be told to love. It doesn’t come naturally to us. We are made from love. We are created to be loved. We are, when things go right, loved from the very beginnings of our lives.
But we need to be commanded to love, because God knows that we will look to ourselves before we look to others and that, when we do, some will be left behind because we are not all equally equipped to care for ourselves.
So, it is vital that we are told to love, and specifically to love our neighbours.
Not only our personal well-being depends on it, but our communal well-being.
The two cannot be separated because in a myriad of different ways we rely on each other. I went recently to Tolpuddle in Dorset, where in the early 1830s a little group of Christian farm labourers banded together to form a union to seek better wages and were transported to Australia for their actions.
There were two community imperatives at work in that story. The men recognised that they needed each other’s support if they were to speak with a loud enough voice for their demands to be heard, so they acted in community; and their employers recognised that they needed these men to be as powerless as possible if they were to be as fully exploited as possible. So they too acted in community, and it was the interest of the community of power that prevailed.
The law of ancient Israel recognised that entrenched economic power will always prevail and so its laws were conceived and constructed to prevent such entrenchment.
The Law was not delivered to individuals simply to ensure the maintenance of personal, private morality. It was delivered to the nation to ensure justice and equity as they made their way into a new land. It was a law which recognised that for individuals to thrive, their social relations must be regulated so as to prevent the reliance of any one group on the whim of any individual. It was a law that acknowledged no distinction between justice and charity: to be charitable was not an act of personal goodwill to be offered or withdrawn at the pleasure of the individual; it was a necessary component of a just system of regulation that operated at every level – local and national, from the personal to the governmental.
In ancient Israel, the well-being of the nation depended on this maintenance of balance and on regular, thoroughgoing systemic correction to prevent precisely the unjust inequality we see around us in our society, and in our city.
The bulk of ‘the law’ which hangs from the commandments to love God and love our neighbour, therefore, was not to do with food or clothing or the observance of ritual, the things we sometimes imagine Jesus coming to sweep away, but was related to the just division of the land and property; to the regular resetting and restoration of equity between successive generations by the redistribution of land, the cancellation of debt and of bonded labour contracts; to ensuring equality for all petitioners in legal disputes. I could go on. And this was not to be swept away, but to be fulfilled in the Great Commandment, to love God and to love neighbour as self.
So, how does this speak to us? Well, the circumstances of the contemporary world suggest that it has never been so blindingly obvious that the injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves must be read not only as a personal commandment but also a community commandment.
We need to be told to love our neighbour because we inhabit a culture of such grotesque inequality that one man, Jeff Bezos, can earn in a year almost three million times as much as the median salary of his 560,000 employees. He could pay the annual salary of every one of them out of his own pocket and still retain a fortune of $185 billion.
We need to be told to love our neighbour because we live in a world that permits the fear of difference to flourish, and exploits it to enable oppression on the basis of race, faith, gender, sexuality and economic status.
We need to be told to love our neighbour because we elected a government willing to spend billions on the ideological project of diminishing our idea of who our neighbours are and of separating us from them, yet which will nonetheless vote against the provision of food for the children of our closest neighbours, who are unable for whatever reason to afford it; a government which requires the intervention of a 22 year old professional footballer to rouse the nation notionally under its care – both private citizens and local governments – to step into the breach it has left open in the walls of our collective protection.
We exist in a moment of global crisis that requires solidarity, community and shared endeavour, a moment that is the living repudiation of the idea that we can do without each other; and yet, despite praying ‘give us this day our daily bread’, we still see millions, even in this rich and privileged nation, whose daily bread is not given.
When Jesus speaks of the Law and the Prophets hanging from this commandment to love our neighbour, this is what he means. The prophets were clear about the responsibilities of rulers and the ways in which they might breach them. The reason the law and the prophets hang on loving God and loving our neighbour is because when we forget to do it, and when we permit our rulers not to do it (and let us not forget that our rulers rule at our pleasure), we dishonour the God we profess to love and things go very badly indeed.
Thus, Ezekiel brings us the word of God:
2 ‘The Lord God says, “It is bad for the shepherds of Israel who have been feeding themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flock? 3 You eat the fat and clothe yourselves with the wool. You kill the fat sheep without feeding the flock. 4 You have not given strength to the weak ones. You have not healed the sick. You have not helped the ones that are hurt. You have not brought back those that have gone away. And you have not looked for the lost. But you have ruled them with power and without pity.
Ezekiel 34, 2-4
And Amos warns that:
7 You who turn justice into bitterness and cast righteousness to the ground…
10 You hate the one who upholds justice in court and detest the one who tells the truth.
11 You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain. Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine.
12 For I know how many are your offences and how great your sins. You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts.
Amos 5, 7 and 10-12
These are the prophets whose word depends on the commandment that we should love our neighbour as ourselves.
What then can we do? Well, we can look to Paul in the first Epistle to the Thessalonians.
When Paul and his companions were in Thessalonica, they didn’t only give the Word to the community that welcomed them.
They loved them truly, as their neighbours.
So deeply did we care for you that we were determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves.
1 Thessalonians 2, 8
Like Paul, we need to share not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because we know that the gospel visibly worked out in the lives of those who love God is the most powerful tool we have to demonstrate the character of God.
But it isn’t enough for us simply to preach a gospel of personal salvation. For me, or for any of us to be ‘saved’ (whatever that means) is only the beginning of the story.
It isn’t enough for us just to deliver the ‘good news’, week after week, and imagine that it exists somehow independently of the political and community responsibilities that are part of our transformed lives in Christ, as members of God’s kingdom.
We have to live it, because it is in our shared lives, our collective existence that we work out those responsibilities.
And we have to share our lives, our selves, in whatever ways we can. That certainly means we continue to support, in the richest city in the land, the poorest people in the city, for example in the projects Nick and others have led us into supporting. This year, churches all over the country and the world have been doing similar things in a thousand practical ways, in food and clothing banks, debt relief programmes, voter registration and the distribution of essential goods to the vulnerable in their communities at a time of extraordinary need.
These are works of the Spirit that reflect the priorities laid out for the people of Israel in the law and reiterated by the prophets, calling the nation to account when they forget them. But it’s not just acts of kindness that are our responsibility in loving our neighbour, that are the ways we reflect those priorites.
It’s also the way we vote; the way we demand that our taxes be spent (and the way we pay our taxes at all); the way we hold to account those who daily parade their venality and corruption, who enrich themselves and their associates from the public purse. These things count because the gospel is not only an individual matter of personal salvation but also a collective matter of right relationships, right social organisation and engagement, and right political leadership.
So, alongside the right conduct of our private lives it’s the way we express our public membership in the wider community that counts, locally, nationally and internationally.
Now it’s not my place to tell you how to vote. But it is my place to remind you that when we vote it is not for ourselves but for the wider good of our community and for the long-term good of its most vulnerable members. It is my place to ask that you see every political choice you make (and in one way or another, every choice is political) through the eyes of those less empowered, less privileged and less secure than you are.
Historically, we have fallen for the argument that the telescope must actually be turned the other way around: that we should consider first the good the rich can do for the poor, if only they are left alone to do it. Time and again we are told that in order for the poor to be raised up it is necessary for the wealthy to create more wealth. And time and again we see the wealthy enabled and permitted to become wealthier without any discernible benefit to the poor whatsoever.
If we are to love our neighbour as ourselves, it is our responsibility to think carefully, prayerfully and practically about those things. Not to do so is to refuse to love our neighbour.
It is to refuse, in Pauline terms, to share of ourselves.
And when we do that, when we fail to love our neighbour, when we refuse to share of ourselves, we make the Gospel we preach worthless.
And, since we know it is not worthless, let us take our responsibility to love our neighbour seriously – for this love is the Gospel.
And on it hangs all the law and the prophets.
In the image at the top, Moses receives the Law from God at the top of Mount Sinai. This version of that scene was conceived, modelled and cast in gilt bronze by Lorenzo Ghiberti, for the East Doors of the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, 1425-52.
The projects we are invested in at St Olave are involved with empowering and enabling some of the most economically disadvantaged and vulnerable people in our city, and developing education and community action for girls and women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Hygiene Bank Dress for Success Suited and Booted Malaika