"One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
Rennie D on the second commandment.
I do work at this diligently. But the old adage, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak!" often comes into play!
ReplyDeleteI know who my neighbor is, but who, or what, is the "Lord your God?" And where does this character Jesus get the authority to tell me I should worship him, or it? (Let me guess, from the "Lord your God.")
ReplyDeleteThanks very much, but I think I'll trust my own judgment.
Odd, Noel, but you have misread the text. Jesus is enjoining the scribe to love God, not worship him, and certainly not to worship Jesus himself. It is always important to get straight what a text says before expatiating upon what it means.
ReplyDeleteWe're testy this evening, Frank. ;)
ReplyDeleteYou're drawing a distinction between loving and worshiping. Okay, but I don't see much of a difference, especially not when it is termed so strongly:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Sounds like worship to me, worship being "the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity."
If Jesus really claimed to be the son of God though, doesn't it follow that in that text he was by implication wanting us to love (or worship) him? Since he instructs us to do that for his father, God, wasn't he instructing us to do the same for him, being divine and all?
It is possible of course that Jesus never claimed to be the son of God which would suggest his divinity is a fable, invented by Lord knows who. :) Or he might have been saying that we're all sons of God and that we should love and worship ourselves, as well as our neighbor. Who knows what he was really saying, or even what he really said, since as far as we know he never wrote a line of his own, no books, no pamphlets, nothing. We could all be reading him wrong. It's not like he penned his words himself and we can go to the library and read them, or was quoted in this morning's Wall Street Journal and we can phone him up for clarification. The story is a couple of thousand years old for heaven's sake, written and rewritten by Lord knows who!
And you haven't even tried to answer my question - who, or what, is the "Lord your God?"
By the way, you might be misreading what I wrote. When I asked "where does Jesus get the authority to tell me I should worship him, or it?" I meant the "Lord your God," not Jesus himself, though if he did claim to be the son of God, the intimation is that he was telling us to love (and worship) him too.
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