Without the Freedom to Do Evil There Is No Love: Sermon Preached on 2nd November 2024 (Fourth Sunday Before Advent)

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Deuteronomy 6. 1-9; Mark 12. 28-34

“You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

We all know that Jesus said that the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. We hear this at every Communion service, towards the beginning, when we bring our sins before God to ask for them to be forgiven. But I wonder how many of us have ever asked ourselves whether Jesus was the first person to say this, or if it came from somewhere else.

Our first reading this morning reveals that, in fact, Jesus was quoting from the Hebrew Bible – what we call the Old Testament – and more than that, from the first five books of it, also known as the Law of Moses. The first great commandment, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength comes from the book of Deuteronomy, as we just heard. Does anyone know where Jesus’ second great commandment, to love our neighbours as ourselves comes from? It comes from the Book of Leviticus. It would be fair to say that while few of us have spent much time reading Leviticus, we know enough to think it isn’t our favourite book of the Bible—because most of us associate it putting people to death! Where is the love there, you might wonder! So most of us would, I think, be very surprised to find the command to love our neighbours as ourselves comes from Leviticus.

We need to remember that these were complex pieces of writing, through which God was working his purposes out over many generations, through the failings of human beings and respectful of their free will. These ancient documents have passages that strike us as being horrific. Yet they also contain these ringing declarations of love as the foundation of all true morality.

The encounter between Jesus and the Scribe, when he declared these the two greatest commandments, was part of a sequence of argumentative encounters that Jesus had in the Temple, in Jerusalem, in Holy Week. At first, as one reads the story afresh, one finds oneself wondering if this is a trap. Despite that, there is no doubt and no evasion in Jesus’ answer – to love God and our neighbour as ourselves are the two greatest commandments. All of God’s laws find their summit in the law of love, as stated by Jesus Christ who was God made human or, to put it another way, love personified.

Love isn’t an easy, cosy, thing however. We all know from our own lives that to love can be risky and costly. If we truly love God then we will try to love all of His creatures, without reservation, as much as we love ourselves; including those whom we find difficult to like—and even our enemies. How hard it is to live this out! I certainly don’t manage it very often.

There are also times when it’s hard to love God. I’ve picked up a lot of down-heartedness among you about the state of the world at the moment. It is indeed a worrying time. Although there is nearly always a war as bad as those in the Middle East and Ukraine taking place somewhere in the world, many of which are ignored by the media, there is something about those two, and them taking place at the same time, that is leaving many people particularly distressed and frightened. I think it is a combination of the horrific images of suffering, of children in particular, the way new technology is being used to such devastating effect in them, and the danger of these wars escalating into something even more serious.

Sometimes, we’re left wondering how a God of love could create a world where there is so much suffering and often such a lack of love. I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t one of the eternally difficult questions of faith or that it has simple answers. Let me turn it around, however, and ask what it would be like to live in a world where it was impossible for human beings to harm one another or themselves?

To do that, we would not be able to have any free will. In fact, we probably wouldn’t even be able to have differences of opinion; everyone would have to have the same understanding of what “harm” meant. We would be reduced to being biological robots. There could be no true love in such a world, and no creativity.

I think we would hate to live in a world like that, certainly in our current mortal state. We have faith that in heaven we will live in a state in which, as the Bible teaches us, there is no longer any pain or suffering. But before we enter that we will be transformed into something different than we are at present.

To live in a world without any possibility of evil or harm wouldn’t just be crushing for us as mortal humans. I think it would also say something quite dark about God’s nature.

God is our heavenly father. Any parent must allow their children the freedom to follow their own path in life—and that includes making their own mistakes. Indeed, a good parent understands that their children must be allowed to make mistakes if they are ever to develop the wisdom of discerning good from bad, right from wrong. We don’t admire fathers here on earth who seek to dominate and control their children to ensure they are always ‘well behaved’. We’re more inclined to think they’re hard cases for social services, and the children they raise struggle in the real world. We wouldn’t want our heavenly father to treat us like that.

But even more, we’re definitely God’s adult children: brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, called to be stewards of the Father’s creation and proclaimers of Christ’s Gospel. If parents who over-control their minor children are cases for social services, then parents who seek to dominate their adult children probably belong in a secure unit. There are moments when we think we want God stop all the worst things happening in the world, with thunderbolts and of rains of fire if necessary—but when we think about it, we don’t really.

The consequences of living in a world where God allows us and everyone else freedom of action are at times destructive and depressing but, all things considered, still better than the alternative. The price of a world without suffering, as far as I can see, would be a world where we could never truly be ourselves, where indeed nothing in creation could truly be free. It would also be one where we could never truly love or be loved.

The Scribes are nearly always presented negatively in the Gospels. They’re among the bad guys who don’t grasp the good news Jesus proclaims and, in the end, have Him killed. But this encounter is a rare exception. The scribe instantly understands Jesu’s teaching as correct. Jesus replies that the scribe is “not far from the Kingdom of God”.

The Kingdom of God isn’t like an earthly state. God doesn’t rule it like a Prime Minister with a police force to enforce His laws and an army to defend its borders. Instead, the Kingdom of God exists in the midst of the dark powers and principalities of this age, often unnoticed, in the web of love that connects its citizens. The Kingdom of God is love celebrated in the face of hate; fullness of life in the face of death. When we try to control it or turn it to our advantage, it crumbles in our hands; yet although it is always vulnerable, it can never die. When are close to it in this life, it points the way to the eternity that God wishes to share for us, in a place where we shall not sleep, but shall all be changed.

Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.

Top banner image: An excerpt from the lower section of Nicholas Roerich’s Armageddon (ca. 1935), hangs in the State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow.