Loving God, Loving Neighbour

Trinity XVIII (4 October 2026)
BCP Lections: I Cor 1.4-8; Mt 22.34-46

Like the Jews’ before us, at the heart of our faith lies the twin commandment to love God and neighbour. It seems a little peculiar: loving, surely, is altogether too human a business to make any sense when directed at God. Whether one imagines God to be the irascible old gentleman of the Hebrew Bible, or the eternally serene God inherited from the philosophers, one wouldn’t necessarily have thought that love was the thing he wanted. Love is our heart’s currency, to be expended on children and spouses, on families and friends, on dogs and days by the sea!

Yet there it is: ‘Love God. Love neighbour. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ So we must unpack whatever it might mean to love the God who himself is love. And soon enough it becomes clear that loving God must mean concerning ourselves wholly with the things of God, performing the will of God, imitating the ways of God, reflecting the values of God.

This sounds like a prohibitively demanding To-Do List even before the day has properly begun, but take heart. We are not alone! We approach and learn to love God through the life and worship of the Church through which ‘we gain Christ and are found in him’ (Philippians 3.8-9). It may not look much to the untrained eye: half a handful of senior citizens rattling round an empty building to listen to some ancient words and share a morsel of desiccated bread, all in order to proclaim that a long-dead man is supposedly alive again!

But by the grace of God (so says the Epistle) we are enriched in everything by Christ – and our unassuming meeting now is no exception. In this restrained and unfashionable gathering we are loving God; by our assembly we are learning how to love him more. And more.

For the Gospel-text itself teaches us how to carry it out. It is by ‘loving our neighbour as ourselves’ that we express our love of God, and show forth the values of his Kingdom. And because God remains a mystery too tremendous to fathom, then we come in childlike trust to Christ, finding him in Word and World and Worship, and knowing that ‘whoever has seen him has seen the Father’ (John 14.9).

It is his Spirit who will teach us to love God with our whole self, and to love our neighbour with courage and care. And because our human nature leads us into frequent error, it is the Spirit of Jesus who will teach us to forgive one another, so that we may be Christ’s healing presence in the world, and await more confidently our own forgiveness by God the Father.

Loving God is not incoherent, but rather the only truly coherent response to the human condition. To come in our need to God, the source of our life and fount of all our blessings; and to open our hearts to God, through Christ, the guarantor of the new life for which we long; who feeds us here so that we may go back out into the world to serve our neighbours in the power of the Spirit: this is to fulfil the command and to bear the fruit of the Kingdom into which we will be called by the God whom we have loved in time, to enjoy the fullness of God’s love for all eternity.