On Which Everything Depends

 

Love of God and love of neighbor.  All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments. The Pharisees were drawing Jesus into a complex situation to try to get him into trouble.  Jesus was not willing to dismiss any of the religious laws, rather he said all the other laws and the messages of the prophets were dependent on those two commandments.  The reality is not just the laws and the messages, but rather everything in life depends on those two commandments.  It all depends on love of God and love of neighbor.  It seems so simple, yet it eludes us.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when we think nothing depends on love of God and love of neighbor.  As a society, we have relegated God and especially the worship of God to a hobby for those who might be interested.  For so many of us, God is one choice among many.  He, for some, is just a choice on the self-help shelf of the bookstore.  Certainly, God is there to help us in time of need, but he is not meant to be a first responder, waiting on the sidelines for some emergency to arise. He is meant to be on what all else depends.  And so, we have distanced ourselves from that first commandment.  We don’t depend first and foremost on God.  We depend first and foremost on ourselves.  We think that all things depend on us.  And when that fails, and it always does, we turn to the God, the first-responder.

In a sense, without the first of Jesus’ commandments, there is no chance that the second one even has a shot.  If we are not dependent on God, who is love, we will never be able to love others. And so, we continue on this dangerous path of egoism, love of self.  It is a path that just naturally leads us to chaos.  And so, as of this writing, we find ourselves in deep chaos.  We have groups of people committing atrocities against innocent people.  We have someone apparently suffering from some sort of mental illness, taking the lives of over at least a dozen people, perhaps acting out of how he perceived being treated by others.  These are all complex issues.  And so, we find ourselves asking Jesus:   What are the answers to our challenges?  And he gives the same response he gave to the Pharisees – we need to love God and love neighbor.  Everything else depends on those two things.

This really is at the heart of the Scripture, at the heart of the Bible.    Both Testaments call us to a dependence on God and to live in right relationship with him and with one another.  And yet we fall away from it.  But this is nothing new.  Throughout salvation history, we have seen people commit to the covenant and then fall from it.  They became dependent on themselves and on their own misconceived idea that they could go it alone.  The truth is without him and without each other, we can do nothing.  Everything depends on love of God and love of neighbor.

- The Servant