Sermon - Trinity XVIII 2023 - Matthew 22:34-46

Moses and Aaron with the Tablets of the Law, 1692

The Summary of the Law is Love.

1. There’s much confusion about the purpose of the law.

2. The law is all about love

1. Love of God

2. Love of Other

3. Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the Law, because of His great love for the Father and for mankind.

“Love is the fulfillment of the law.” Unfortunately, few people understand this important detail. There’s much confusion about the purpose of the law. For some people laws are simply rules which must be maintained for the sake of keeping rules. Doesn’t matter if the law is good or not, it’s just about being a good person by following the rules. For other people the laws are meant to be broken. There’s too many laws and they don’t understand them, so they don’t bother trying to keep any of them.

For both kinds of people the problem is the same: they don’t understand that the purpose of the law is to love God and others. So both kinds of people think the law is ultimately arbitrary, but some manifest as self-righteous do-doogers, and others as unrighteous outlaws. It really is easy to end up thinking this way here in our country today, since our country is somewhat of a nanny-state, with honestly a ridiculous number of laws, which are only arbitrarily maintained. We have speed limits, but not even those who work for the government obey them. We have to pay taxes, but the tax code is so complicated and detailed that it’s very difficult to do it accurately. In most states it’s illegal to sell a haircut or a butchered chicken without a license. In some neighborhoods you can’t even choose the color of your own house.

The result of all of these rather arbitrary laws which are poorly enforced is that people end up thinking that law itself is arbitrary. If laws are just a matter of someone’s opinions, then many people conclude that all laws are arbitrary. Hence, we have things like same-sex marriage or legalized abortion.

So Jesus teaches us the purpose of law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” The purpose of the law is to love God and to love your neighbor. The law is about love.

This understanding of the law as love is, for example, part of the original purpose behind having judges. A judge would determine how the law applies to a specific circumstance in light of the law of love and mercy. The law says you shall not murder, but what about the father who kills the home-intruder? The law says you shall not steal, but what about the mother who harvested a rabbit from the king’s forest to feed her hungry children?

The law of love also applies to the laws a government should establish and enforce. Does this law serve the purpose of loving God and neighbor? Part of the law of love means also respecting the freedom of conscience and not unduly burdening one another with rules which micromanage a person’s life. This is difficult to balance, but parents have to do this with their children even: they must balance justice with liberty.

This balance of love is learned by what Jesus says about loving God and neighbor. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest part of the law, which is to love God. Before we love our neighbor, we must first love God. There’s much to say about loving God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, but for the moment we will sum it up by saying we must love God with all of our being. Thus, all of our actions are first to be governed by our love for God; this is our prime directive, if you will.

Very practically, this means that God and His Word comes first, period. We can’t justify breaking God’s word because we think we’re loving our neighbor. For example, someone might say I love my son, and my son wants to play in a sport on Sunday morning, therefore I will skip church so that my son can play baseball. But this is neither loving to the son, nor God, because it doesn’t love God first and it teaches the son also not to love God first. God must come first. We must love Him more than anything and anyone else. The way that we love God is by putting Him first and keeping His Word.

Secondly, Jesus teaches us: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Here we have something similar to the golden rule, the old adage parents teach their children: treat others the way that you would want to be treated. But what Jesus says here is greater, namely, that we are to love others as ourselves. This love for others isn’t merely defined by what we think we would want, but by what is objectively good. Thus, the scriptures show us most clearly what is objectively good and therefore how to love others.

This means that our love for others isn’t always going to comport with what our society thinks is good or what the person we love wants. We understand this with children: they don’t actually know what is good for them, so parents have to give them rules. The little kid maybe wants to watch TV all day, but the parents know it’s not good for the child to watch much TV, so the parents put strict limits on screen time; it’s loving for parents not to let their kids watch TV all day. Likewise, adults often have a difficult time discerning what is good, so governments make laws to help. For example, humans have a delayed response time, the faster we drive the more distance we will travel before responding to something that happens, so speed limits are in place to help give us opportunity to respond to various situations so that we don’t inadvertently kill each other; it’s loving to drive a responsible speed and not kill each other.

When we understand that the purpose of the law is love, love of God and love of neighbor, then the law is no longer an arbitrary thing. Instead, we learn to love the law of God because we desire to love God and our neighbor. Suddenly the laws in the Bible are no longer mean and hard, but they’re loving and meaningful. Even the Bible’s unpopular teachings about sexuality, divorce, and the order of creation between men and women become loving to us.

What’s more, is once we realize that the law of God is all about love, we learn to see that God really didn’t change between the old and new testaments. The whole Bible is all about love! Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the Law, because of His great love for the Father and for mankind. Jesus asked: “What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He?” The Pharisees said that the Christ is David’s son, and they weren’t wrong, because Jesus is a descendent of David, Jesus is fully human and therefore a lover of mankind. In love for us, Jesus laid down His life for us, forgiving our sins and bringing us into God’s family.

But Jesus is more than a Son of David, as He pointed out. “If then David calls Him Lord, how is He his Son?” The answer is that Jesus is a son of David, but also the Son of God, and therefore a lover of God. Jesus kept the law not only to love us, but firstly to love His heavenly Father. Jesus willingly laid down His own life to atone for our sins before God the Father. Jesus didn’t abolish the law, as if it were something arbitrary, instead He kept the law because it is objectively good, divine, and eternal. In so keeping the Father’s law Jesus loved His heavenly Father.

In conclusion today, let us remember that the summary of all the scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, the law and the Gospel, is love, because God is love. The easy words and the hard words, the words we want to skip because we think they’re boring, the words that we set to memory, all of them speak of love. Be strong in the Lord, then, knowing that God loves us, and with the help of the Holy Spirit we will love Him and each other.