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Lawyers get a bum deal from many sides. They get a bad reputation today from the ambulance chasers and the frivolous lawsuits that make the news. Johnny Cochran and F. Lee Bailey and the others in the O. J. Simpson trial ten years ago did not do the profession any favors. When I preached on today's Gospel lesson Wednesday morning at the school chapel service, I asked if any of the students had one or more parents or relatives who were lawyers. Very few students actually raised their hands, which surprised me. I expected more than a handful.
Lawyers, I fear, have gotten it from all sides. Even the Gospels give them small esteem. The “lawyers” in the Gospels are actually religious lawyers, people who studied and ruled on all of the Jewish ceremonial tradition and ritual. The lawyer in Luke 10 to whom Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan repeats out of his own mouth the same two commandments we have heard Jesus speak in Matthew's Gospel today. The lawyer in Luke's account doesn't look or sound all that good when his response to “love your neighbor as yourself” is “And just who is my neighbor?” Luke tells us he was “seeking to justify himself.” That's not a very safe Scriptural position to take.
The lawyers and the Pharisees interrogating Jesus were certainly in that boat. They wanted to justify themselves — they wanted to attempt to show the world they deserved their status as religious elite, and they wanted to show God that they could earn His favor. They had gone far beyond the Scriptures and had long ago stopped studying and truly listening to the prophetic Scriptures and the five books of Moses. They were pretty self–centered. They loved themselves and their religious system above God and certainly above any of their neighbors.
Matthew tells us that the Pharisees and the lawyer were “synagogued together” — plotting under the force and spirit of the Devil himself to trap our Lord. In His Revelation to Saint John, Jesus calls these false believers a “synagogue of Satan”. Jesus is always right on the front lines of the battle against Satan. Satan was working through this lawyer to interrogate and trap our Lord. The lawyer asks Jesus, “Teacher, what is a great commandment in the Law?” They hoped Jesus would pick one from which they could argue that there was one greater.
Yet Jesus gives them what He calls “the great and first commandment” — love the Lord your God with the whole of your heart, and with the whole of your life (which includes both your body and soul), and with the whole of your mind and understanding. Everything of the person who belongs to the Lord is to be subject to and in service to Him — heart, soul, life, mind, reasoning. God is above all else — there is to be no other gods, including yourself. There is only room for one God.
But in addition, just like the first and greatest law, Jesus says, is this too: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Loving God with your whole being means loving those around you whom God has created — your neighbors.
People do not typically love their neighbor as they would love themselves. People love themselves typically more than they love their neighbors. “Me first” is our natural mentality. Yet, with this mentality, you are placing yourself above God and have then broken the First Commandment again and again in a vicious circle.
We are stuck. Jesus has given us an impossibility to follow left to our own devices. We are by nature sinful, unclean, and unable to truly love God in this way, and we certainly are unable to put our neighbors ahead of ourselves. We fail to love and honor our parents, authorities, spouses, friends — we are dishonest to them, we slander them, we show anger, hatred, and judgment towards those around us. We fail all of the time to show grace, mercy, and peace to our neighbor. If someone wrongs us in some way, we will not seek to forgive and reconcile with the person, instead, we'll bear grudges, we'll seek to punish, we'll seek to justify ourselves before God and other people at the expense of the person who has wronged us.
John Lennon was wrong in the Beatles' song — it's not “all about love” with us, and if it is, it is all about the wrong kinds of love. Our way of loving people is to use them for our own pleasure and benefit, no matter how much harm it gives to the other person. Our way of loving people is to attach all sorts of strings and conditions on receiving love back from us. We are pretty good at being lawyers, the rotten to the core type described in the Gospels at least, full of ourselves and beholden to sin. We are truly unable to answer for ourselves before God in any way.
Jesus Christ, standing in front of us telling us about these two great commandments, is the only person who truly loves God and neighbor with His whole being, with no strings attached. Why? He is even more than the “Son of David”. Jesus was truly man, descended from David. Yet He is David's Son and David's Lord. He is far beyond anyone else in human history, because He is God Himself come down from heaven, who has united Himself with our sinful flesh to sanctify and purify it by taking on our sinful inability to love God and neighbor, nailing it to the cross, and defeating it there for all time. He is love incarnate — true, pure, whole, and with no strings attached. It is certainly not our love that saves us. It is God's love expressed to us in the person of Jesus Christ that alone saves us.
The love of God in Jesus Christ given to us is not merely an example for us, then. If it were, then Jesus would be just another religious lawyer and lawgiver, He would just be piling onto us some new hoop to jump through. Instead, the love of Jesus actually does something for us and in us. His love saves us from our sins and gives us new life. His love fulfills all things for us, has completed the salvation promised to us from the fall of Adam and Eve, and now enables us by His Holy Spirit to express and reflect that love of God to our neighbors.
God gives His love to us through means. He works through pastors, teachers, parents, siblings, engineers, musicians, even lawyers. God does not need our love given back to Him — He has all things. Better, He desires to express His love through us to the world. With the eye of faith opened up, God's love overwhelms and captures us — and we become the means by which the world hears His life saving Gospel, by which the world is given His forgiveness and love applied through preaching, baptizing, absolving, and feeding.
This means that, as the community of baptized, believing saints in Christ, gathered by the Holy Spirit in His Name around His Word and Holy Sacrament, we will act out of love to our neighbors. This means that we will want to fully and whole–heartedly support and befriend our fellow Christians, forgiving one another in Christ as He has forgiven us, consoling and comforting each other with the peace found only in His Word and sacraments. This means that we will with glad hearts give as we are able to support our neighbors in their needs, to support the preaching and teaching of the Gospel in this congregation, to support the teaching of the faith to our children in our school, and their education that they need to become functioning adults in whatever future vocation God has prepared for them. This means that we will eagerly seek to become immersed in God's Word, seeking out every opportunity available to us to study and become shaped by the Gospel given us in the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures. This means that we will not despise the preaching of His Word in the Divine Service, but rather gladly hear and learn God's Word and encourage our fellow Christians to join us each week. This means that we will give thanks to our Lord for the daily vocations He gives to all of us, and we will gladly attend to them with joy knowing that they are how God provides His daily bread to us and to our families. This means that Christians will be led to do acts of love and mercy for their neighbor without any reservation — and a prime example of that are the many Christian women in our Missouri Synod, and in our congregation, who serve their neighbors through the efforts of the Lutheran Women's Missionary League. For all of these opportunities God gives us to reflect His love to us in Christ to our neighbor, we give thanks, and humbly confess, “we are unworthy servants, we have been privileged to only do what was given us to do.” (Luke 17:10)
Our love for the neighbor is on account of Christ and the love that He pours out on us from His most holy cross. That love, unconditionally given by the Son of God to the point of His death on the cross is how we know what the true nature of love really is. By it, God's kingdom comes, His will is done, His name is hallowed. Sins are forgiven, the evil one is thwarted in his attacks upon this world, God's sheep are gathered into His fold. Here at this altar, in this font, from this pulpit, the perfect incarnate love of Jesus Christ for His Father and for His fellow man is applied to you, given to you, freely, with no strings attached.
A 14th Century hymn in our hymnal says it well:
O Love, how deep, how broad, how high,
Beyond all thought and fantasy,
That God, the Son of God, should take
Our mortal form for mortals' sake!
He sent no angel to our race,
Of higher or of lower place,
But wore the robe of human frame,
And to this world Himself He came.
For us He rose from death again;
For us He went on high to reign;
For us He sent His Spirit here
To guide, to strengthen, and to cheer.(Lutheran Service Book, #544)
By God's grace may we all be continually fed and nourished in His perfect love, so deep, broad, and high, beyond all that we could ever hope for or imagine. For Christ's sake we pray it! Amen.
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