00002 · The Great Commandment
The Bible is so fricking complicated and contradictory it drives me crazy. I am constantly aware of how I and others cherry-pick verses that suit their needs.
We lift up verses and themes that bolster our current personal and institutional survival situation. We ignore obvious calls to change. We weaponize spiritual writings as tools of shame and power.
So grant me a bit of hypocrisy as I cherry pick a Bible verse.
“He 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 neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
I love about these incredibly simple words. It’s my polestar of how to be a fairly decent and harmless Christian.
I also love that it provides an instruction on how to interpret the rest of the Bible. We are to look at the Bible through the lens of loving God and loving others. All the hundreds of laws in the Old Testament and even the fairly simple Ten Commandments get boiled down to one verb and noun: love.
My ex-wife had a great rule for our household: don’t be rude. If our kids were dancing on the table in an act of joy and celebration, well that’s fine, because it wasn’t rude. If they were dancing on the table to deliberately disrupt and destroy, that was rude.
The Great Commandment opens up a thousand paths forward in any moment, rather than provide a series of rules to control ever-smaller actions and behavior. Jesus is giving this commandment for us to live in the affirmative. Is what we’re doing based on love? Then by all means do it.
Jesus couldn’t be more clear that this is the way, stating it again simply on the night of his betrayal: Love on another.
I’ll end it with a nice translation by Eugene H. Peterson.
“Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.”
