Reading Matthew:
22:36 "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
22:37 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.'
22:38 This is the greatest and first commandment.
22:39 And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
22:40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
The last Sunday of October is called the Reformation Sunday in the Protestant tradition, though the event belonging to this Remembrance Day happened on October 31, 1517. According to the tradition, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic Monk of the Augustinian order challenged the Papacy, regarding its tyranny, idolatry, bad conduct, corruption, falsification of documents, distorting Christian faith and oppressing whole countries.
He wrote 95 theses speaking up for those who were not able to speak for themselves, those of the uneducated, the disenfranchised, the impoverished, the oppressed, for all those who had suffered for more than a millennium since the church and the slaveholder state became technically united in ruling over society.
According to the tradition his 95 theses were nailed on the gate of the Wittenberg Castle Church, in Saxonia, Germany. The main cause of his evangelical anger and impetus was that the Vatican began to collect money on an unscrupulous and questionable way in order to cover the costs of the building project of the new cathedral, exactly of the St. Peter Basilica on the very St. Peter square.
Even before that collection, the Vatican pumped out fortunes from the countries under their clerical control, and the major source was of course, Germany, by its geographical, economical and population-wise weight in Europe.
In Luther there had been a lot of resentment already before of this new, business motivated collection, but not only in him, also in the general German society, especially in the German princes, nobles, merchants and traders, city dwelling self-conscious citizenry.
The new collection and the reaction of Luther was the last drop in the cup of resentment, which spread like wildfire. The method of the collection was extremely outrageous for Luther as the Doctor of Theology and the professor of the Bible.
Of course that the highly manipulative collection was based on a false Roman doctrine, namely that the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross was not completely complete. In order to have the full meritorious power of the redemption, what small amount of suffering was missing on the cross, it must be filled by the sufferings of the followers of Jesus. As the body of Jesus suffered on the cross, we the church, as the body of the Christ on Earth must suffer together with him, to make his sacrifice complete.
Of course this doctrine is the denial of the sole redeemer-ship of Jesus, and moreover the church taught that whatever merits the saints amounted in Heaven by their sufferings on Earth, those merits can be used to forgive sins, and those merits belong to the church, and the church has the authority to declare forgiveness to anyone she sees fit.
And the church even went further by stating that this forgiving power of the church is for sale. Anyone who can pay the required silver or gold, can receive a proof of letter of forgiveness from the church, called an indulgence, which declared that x hundred years are waived from the purgatory for the donating persons.
Normally, the income of the indulgences, by the late Middle Ages were supposed to support charities for the public good, including hospitals and orphanages. However the always wider abuse of the system of the indulgences, mainly through commercialization, had become a great scandal for centuries, which the Church recognized but was unable to restrain effectively.
That was the event, the very sale of the indulgence letters was the very point, when Martin Luther said, that was it, we are not going for a single yard further on this path.
Not the first time in history, nonetheless, he successfully emphasized that everything in Christian life, what we do, what we think, what believe, and how we do it, must come from the Bible. The Church has no authority to rewrite the Bible neither to create new rules, new methods, new interpretations of faith and salvation other than written in the Bible. He stated that the purpose of the church on Earth is not to rule but to serve, not to obey kings and Caesars or even Popes but Jesus only.
Thus every single day, especially on Reformation Remembrance Day, we are asked that what is the greatest commandment, the center of life and redemption, the center of salvation and eternal life that we have to follow and embody it?
Jesus was asked too. He answered the question with the Jewish Creed, with the so called Shema, that you shall love the Lord, Your God with all your heart, from all your soul and all your mind and with all your might.
However, Jesus brother, James, Jakov in Hebrew, expressed it well in his letter, writing that “if a man says, ‘ I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who doesn't love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? This commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should also love his brother. ”
However, the other side of this coin is that we are not able to love other people without the power of the love of God, because we are not able to fully overcome our bad inclinations, driving us to oppress, to possess, to conquer, to rule, to be jealous, to be angry, to manipulate, to be selfish. We may overcome our bad inclination only with the help of the Love of God, if we do it for the sake of God.
That is why these two great commandments are not equal to each other. Jesus answered the question again not on a superficial way, but in its complexity, and he answered it fully and in depth. Although the two commandments are similar to each other, kind of also interdependent on each other, still to love God is the unquestionably greatest commandment of all the commandments that can be found in the Five Books of Moses, called the Law, including that you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Only the Love of God empowers us to love others. For the sake of the love of god, in Gospel mode, it can be said that we may have the power to love even our enemies, as king Solomon wrote in the Book of the Proverbs that “if your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he is thirsty, give him water to drink: for you will heap coals of fire on his head, and the Lord will reward you.”
It looks pacifism, but it is not, it is like a karmic strike against the evil spirit, and on the other hand we can follow the lead which is given in the book of Ezekiel, chapter 18 that the Lord asks, himself, that:
“Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked? says the Lord God; and not rather that he should return from his way, and live?” It practically means that we shall not dance on the graves of our enemies, but be saddened because sin and wickedness as a disease killed them.
However we will not be enabled to feel empathy even for the wicked people, if we do not feel the zeal to love God unconditionally. That is why it is the greatest commandment, and we have to keep it in the very focus of our hearts that whatever we do, we speak, we think, we desire, all be guided by the love of the Lord. May be gratitude and adoration be given to God only, through Jesus by the Spirit.
Amen.
