Holiness Grows Among Our Neighbors
Matthew 22:34–46 / Leviticus 19:1–2, 15–18 / 1 Thessalonians 2:1–8
In today’s Gospel, a lawyer asks Jesus a question. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” There are many commandments. If Jesus chooses one, it may sound as if he considers the others less important. If he avoids answering, he may seem not to know the law. There is a trap in the question.
Jesus does not choose just one. He gives two. The first comes from Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The second comes from Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Then he says, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” These two commandments hold together the whole of Scripture.
On the road of faith, we have to keep both in mind: love of God and love of neighbor. We believe in God. We confess Jesus as the Son of God, the Christ who saves us. But God cannot be seen. The people God made in God’s own image are right beside us. We look toward heaven as we live, but our feet are planted on the ground. What kind of relationship will we have with the people we meet here? A person of faith cannot turn away from that question.
Leviticus begins like this: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” In the Bible, holiness means being set apart, belonging to God. It does not simply mean being clean or without fault. It names an identity: we are people who belong to God.
But the boundary that marks this belonging can harden into a wall between people. We may regard people of other religions or cultures, or people who think differently from us, as outsiders—and then treat them as enemies. Scripture speaks of the Philistines, who opposed Israel. Yet Israel’s holiness did not depend on making them enemies.
Leviticus describes holiness through the way we treat our neighbors. It calls us to judge fairly, not to spread slander, not to hate our kin, and not to take revenge. Then it says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Holiness is not kept by pushing people away and treating them as enemies. If we shut others out in the name of faith and think of ourselves as the good ones, holiness turns into arrogance.
But this does not mean pretending not to see when a neighbor has done wrong. Leviticus 19:17 says: “You shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.” These words come right after the command not to hate. Loving someone does not mean avoiding conflict. To remain in relationship without looking away from what is wrong is also a way of loving our neighbor.
When we try to guard our faith, we may want to make one standard absolute. A clear standard can make it easy to sort people and the world into groups. But if we make a standard absolute without examining it closely, we can easily become dogmatic. We may judge people who do not fit that standard too quickly and label them as wrong.
The two commandments Jesus gives place our judgments before love. Does the standard I hold help people live? As I say that I love God, how am I treating my neighbor? If love is our measure instead of a clear and simple rule, some may call us vague. Sometimes, though, no clear answer is in sight. We cannot understand a human life by applying a single measure, and the way of love is not always simple. At times, we may need to hold back our judgment and consider what our certainty does to the person beside us.
A fingernail keeps growing, but it needs to be trimmed from time to time. Growth alone does not give it the shape it needs. If our relationship with God is alive, it grows through the life we share with our neighbors. As our lives meet, we begin to look again at what we once took for granted. In this way, our faith deepens, and the sharp edges of our thinking are slowly smoothed.
This does not mean erasing ourselves or giving in to everything. It means looking again at what we believe is right and asking how it affects our neighbors. We remain in relationship and wrestle with the questions that arise. In that struggle, we keep searching for the love of God.
In today’s Epistle, Paul says that he treated the Thessalonians “like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” He did not use his position as an apostle to place himself above them. He cared for them. He was ready to share with them “not only the gospel of God but also our own selves.” In Paul’s example, the Gospel does not appear as authority used to press people down. It appears in a life shared with others in love.
Later in the Gospel, Jesus asks the Pharisees whose son the Messiah is. They answer, “The son of David.” Jesus then asks another question, quoting a psalm. If David calls the Messiah “Lord,” can the Messiah be described only as David’s son? The Pharisees cannot answer.
Jesus does not deny that the Messiah is David’s son. He asks whether one familiar answer can tell us everything about who the Messiah is. What God is doing cannot be confined entirely to the frameworks we already know. If we see God only through an image we have already fixed, we can lock God inside our own thinking. The more we insist that the God we have pictured is the only true God, the more God becomes a god who belongs only to us.
Living with ambiguity and struggling with our neighbors can be uncomfortable. But when we look again at our own thinking in the light of those relationships, we can let go of the image of God we have made and learn again before the commandment of love. Seeking God may lead us into a more living encounter than clinging to a clear answer.
Holiness grows in the way we treat our neighbors, not in the boundaries we draw around them. When we examine our thinking and allow it to be shaped through life with our neighbors, love of God and love of neighbor grow together.
Amen.