According to Jesus the solution for a problem of a Christian life is not 613 but 2 (Love²)

I am a theologian and biblical scholar. And those of us with such education tend to act as detectives. We can look very critically at the Church and t what people say about the Bible. Too often we listen to sermons critically: did the preacher get the Scriptures right, or got it all wrong? Last Sunday we heard a sad example of the brutality of the 3rd century from the people who supposedly represented Jesus. Hypatia, accused of heresy (experimental scientific ideas and paganism) was torn to pieces by "Christians." It is so important for us theologians to "be right” that we can be very cruel in proving our "rightness”.  And stop at this. We prove someone right or wrong and move on. And I'm not proud of how we "experts of the Bible and theology," sometimes behave. After all, there's a huge difference between the desire to prove ourselves being right and the desire to follow Jesus. According to Jesus if one is not soaked with love, one is not even close to what it means to live a Christian life. Our repentance, accepting of Jesus and keeping commandments are all existing to make us the people who love God and love their neighbor. It is such people that are "right" before God.

In Jesus' times every good Jew said the Shema daily:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.[a] 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

(Deuteronomy 6:4-5; NIV)

Jesus, however, repeatedly told His disciples that "love God" only spirituality is not sufficient. And as we soon will see, he expanded this Shema to include "Love your neighbor as yourself." By doing that Jesus wanted to show us what it really means to be "right" in the eyes of God - to be "right" means such reading and understanding the Bible and such behavior in which you love God and your neighbor more and more. If you read the Bible, pray, and go to church, but not becoming more loving, something is not right. The purpose of accepting Jesus, the purpose of personal piety practices and everything we are called to be and do either contains both, or we got it wrong. That is God's vision for His kingdom - the kingdom filled with people who are characterized by one word: love. It's much easier to criticize and much harder to be soaked with the vision of God's kingdom of love. Jesus did both. He criticized, destroying false stereotypes, and then led people to the very center of God's New Society - to a life of love.

SID HUNDRED THIRTEEN

Religious experts of Jesus’ time were known for their knowledge of and ability to interpret Torah and their desire to figure out how to live it out. When it comes to the law, the safer way is always to create additional laws that will help you correctly observe the main laws. We see this everywhere. In some churches in the past (or even now!) the teaching that sex outside of marriage is sin was directly related to the fact that dancing is also sin. If that connection is not obvious to you, I will explain. You can find references in the Bible about sex outside of marriage being wrong, it’s there. But some ministers feel that it’s not "sufficiently emphasized", so to help their youth they go further. Dancing, to begin with, involves listening to and singing along with music written by godless sinners like Michael Jackson or Lady Gaga. Moreover, dancing to this music involves boys and girls touching each other and being very close, thus fueling their passion and thus coming just one step away from sin. That's why in the minds of many dancing and sex are inextricably linked. And before we know it the "do not dance" acquires the same authority as the biblical commandment "Do not commit adultery."

Any religious culture tends to multiply rules and regulations (except for the kingdom of Jesus, which reduces them!) While the Jewish teachers’ had good intentions – to explain God's law so much that even ordinary people can do it - they created more laws to clarify the Torah. In Jesus' day it was believed that the Torah contained 613 different prescriptions and prohibitions to which many others clarifying ones were added. All of this was to help the common person not to break God's law. Well, at least, that was the plan.

But Jesus knew that in this way the law of God will not become accessible to everyone, for it’s not possible to keep absolutely every prescription of it and he said very sharp words to the Pharisees in chapter 23 of Matthew’s Gospel:

4 They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. 15 "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. 23 "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.  29 "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous.

(Matthew 23:4, 15, 23-24, 28-29, NIV)

Such words are unlikely to gain new friends but they clearly show Jesus’ conviction: adding new laws and prohibitions will not help ordinary people to observe God's law. Moreover, even the religious leaders could not keep it all: they did it outwardly but their heart was far removed from God. But the worst thing was that all these restrictions and prohibitions prevented ordinary people from coming to God and kept them at bay, because (even with good intention) they completely misunderstood the point of God's law. So Jesus showed another way, a better way. Instead of trying to perform 613 laws and commands, adding to them a lot of others to clarify these (no matter how valuable those 613 are) Jesus narrowed 613 down to...

TWO

Jesus showed that number 2 is the guide to 613. One of the experts of the law came to Jesus because he wanted to trap him into a theological debate, wanted Jesus to take some theological side. In Mark 12 this scribe asks Jesus (12:28): "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” If Jesus will pick one, he would be guilty of picking and choosing the wrong one. And if he cannot choose either one, then he will disappoint those who looked to him with expectation of a wise answer. But Jesus' response pointed out the inconsistency of this "613 laws" approach and gave the audience what Scott McKnight called the "Jesus Creed” (12:29): "The most important one,” answered Jesus, "is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.[a] 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. 1 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[c] There is no commandment greater than these.”  In Matthew He says: "All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Someone who understood this well, said: "Everything that is not done out of love is a sin", i.e. sin is whatever we do, think or say not out of love for God and for our neighbor.

Jesus essentially said to the religious leaders of those days: "you are so fixed on your love of the law and condemning people for not living up to your standards and statutes that you do not see that God had given us the Law of Love”. What God really wants for us is to love God and to love others, and if we do, everything else will fall into place. These seemingly simple words of Jesus open our eyes to the great vision of what the kingdom of God is like. And when we try to turn these two commandments into 613 by imposing out own standards on other people we belittle the role of love, but if we see these various 613 commandments as an expression of our love for God and others, we are freeing all of them and allowing them to be what they ere made by God to be. And all these commandments are but specific examples of what it means to love God and love others.

Jesus turned number 613 into number 2. That's His mathematics of love – the only two commandments: Love God. Love others. If you love God and love other people, you've done all that he wants from you. No wonder that people were drawn to Jesus from everywhere - he revealed to them the essence of God's will, reducing the endless list of laws to the Creed with two points. And if we carefully read the Gospel, we see how all the teachings of Jesus were permeated with this: Jesus was not satisfied with people "being right” and pushed them to wrap their "rightness” in love. Recall, for example, the parable of the Good Samaritan that we read a couple of weeks ago. Jesus contrasts a priest and a Levite (religious experts, who were doing what the law required!) with a Samaritan whose actions were transformed by the Creed of Jesus. The law says that the priests and the Levites were not to defile himself by touching a dead body, with the exception of the nearest kin. And according to that law both the priest and the Levite were "right" by passing the man in case he was dead. But Jesus showed - they were not "right enough”, while this controversial character, the Samaritan, a half-breed from a religious point of view was right in the eyes of God because he showed love to a man lying on the road.

And all Jesus’ life and ministry was defined by His Creed: Love God and love your neighbor. We all stand up proving that we are "right", we do it so vehemently sometimes that we forget about love, which is the foundation of faith. But what if we put our longing to prove our "rightness” and will start and finish the day by saying the Jesus’ Creed, what will happen if we repeat it every time it comes to mind, even if it is 50 times a day!? I think what will happen is an awareness of how much we are still in need of becoming more loving. As Scott McKnight said, "Believe me when I say this is dangerous to your moral health, because it calls into question bot our attitudes and practices " (53).

Friends, here is what I want to suggest to you, if you want to be a follower of Jesus. Begin and end each day by repeating the Jesus Creed, and repeat it every time you think about it ... and see what will happen in your life. And remember: the first word that should come to mind when you hear the "kingdom of God" is the word love. And when Jesus proclaims that the kingdom of God is near, he says that the society shaped by love is about to appear and show you how to live because:

Without love, society is nothing but chaos of individuals but with love it becomes community.

Without love, society becomes a free-for-all but with love it becomes one for all and all for one.

Without love, society ceases to be society but with love it becomes the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of Love. This vision of Jesus is at odds with our modern society and culture. Jesus wants to have all of our lives that we have dedicated to His Kingdom, that we would see life the way it can be. And Jesus wasn’t worried that His teaching was counter-cultural, or that someone might consider him a madman. He wanted only one thing: to honor God by teaching what God really wanted from the world and from His people. And so to answer a question that we posed a few weeks a go, Jesus would say today: "a Christian is someone who follows Jesus, devoting his or her entire life to the Dream of the Kingdom of God and to the love of God and of other people." But unfortunately, many Christians are cowardly and do not dare to live out this radical love to which Jesus calls and which he himself lived out. Many people say it is not possible, it is crazy because others are going to use you or crush you, or take advantage of you... or ... or ... But if we are serious about Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God, we need to rather ask: what if everybody lived out the Jesus Creed? And let us find out by starting with ourselves.