Today's passage is Matthew 22:34-46.
When the Pharisees ask Jesus what the greatest commandment is the tells them what the first and second greatest commandments are: Love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Then Jesus asks the Pharisees two questions: Whose son is the Messiah and How can the Messiah be the son of David if David calls him Lord?
Although Jesus is quite clear about what the greatest commandment is--Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind--he ties it to the second greatest commandment--Love your neighbour as yourself--and then concludes that these two commandments summarize the Bible.
Jesus always gives his questioners more than they want or expect. I think this is because their questions aren't enough. It's as if he hears an unasked question lurking in their minds and answers it too.
It's Jesus' uncanny ability to go beyond assumptions and expectations that makes him who he is, both attractive and frightening.
CS Lewis captured this perfectly in his Narnia Chronicles where everyone is attracted to Aslan--the lion Jesus--but warned that he is not a tame lion.
Jesus is not tame either.
He will not be put in anyone's cage. He won't be limited or circumscribed.
He was incarnated for a mighty purpose that the Pharisees just don't want to see.
So he frightened them. Me too.
Jesus tells me to do what I don't want to do. He tells me to love my neighbour as myself. If I don't do it, I defy God's commandments and I defy what the Bible is designed for: to interpret my redemption history.
Today I had to love my neighbour, a student I dislike intensely because he's a liar and so wrapped up in his victim mentality that he insists he does nothing wrong, that there is nothing wrong with him or his life and the problems he seems to be perpetually involved in are everyone else's fault.
Among his sins of lying, stealing, underage smoking and drinking, not doing his schoolwork, a far more serious one of sexual harassment came to light when he had to report to me for an instance of verbal and physical bullying.
His father, the ultimate author of his behaviour, is worried that his son will drift into professional criminal behaviour if he is expelled from school because he is already skirting the edge of criminal life by hanging out at clubs and selling tables.
The father desparately wants the school to care for his son for the next two weeks after which he will go to a foreign country.
But every day the boy seems to find something new to cause himself and others problems.
Today I wanted the boy to leave now, not in two weeks, because I was angry, judging and dismissive.
I had no love for him.
The father came to school today and pleaded his case yet again to my assistant principal and then to a board member.
Because they were well aware of my anger, they asked me to stay out of the discussion.
All day I was meditating on the Bible verses in today's passage.
I knew I had no love for the boy.
But he was a student in my school and therefore my neighbour.
Jesus had given me no option but to love him.
When my assistant principal came to me hours later to argue for keeping the boy but giving him punishment for his transgressions, I demurred, even though God's words to love my neighbour as myself echoed in my head.
The assistant principal pressed her case.
She concluded by reminding me that I had repented of expelling a boy last year and brought him back to the school with a number of conditions attached, and the boy was doing so much better.
I knew I was simply being stubborn, that God today had ordered me to love both a misbehaving boy and a father who had failed his son and didn't really know what to do.
So I laid down my anger and dismissing mind and agreed to keep the boy for two more weeks, administering an appropriate punishment and arranging for seven days of psychological counselling that the father had previously refused to consider.
God turned my mind to love today, to loving this boy while he's in my care for the next two weeks.
His father wants the boy to have time to apologize to all he's offended and wronged before he leaves.
I pray God will touch the boy in such a way that he can make sincere apologies.
Lord, thank you for your word to guide me in my trials. I pray that your Spirit will always be with me to encourage, nudge and command me to do your will in my little sphere of responsibility. Help me love this problem boy more than I do now. Help me love him as myself.
