10-27-21 - The One-Ness of God

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

When Jesus is asked, “Which commandment is first of all?,” he doesn’t have to reach far for an answer. The Shema Yisrael would have been on his lips and in his heart from his earliest youth. The Shema is considered the most important part of a Jewish prayer service, and observant Jews recite it at least twice each day as a mitzvah, or commandment.

The heart of this prayer, drawn from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41 (thank you, Wikipedia…) is “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.” “Lord” is rendered as the tetragrammaton, the four-character symbol that spells what we transliterate as “Jahweh.” This emphasis on God’s nature as one Almighty God, not many lesser gods, will cause some trouble for early Christian theologians when they are driven, in reckoning with other things Jesus says, to affirm God’s three-ness as well as God’s one-ness.

But Jesus doesn’t stop with affirming who God is. He commands us to love this Lord our God with every fiber of our being, breaking it down: 

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” I don’t know if we’re capable of doing anything with a whole heart and mind, let alone soul and strength. How might we go about living into this seemingly impossible command?

Let’s start with love. Do we love God? How can we love someone we can’t see or touch, who has ultimate power over life and death, whose ways are utter mystery, who blesses us yet allows us so much pain and suffering? So much of our interaction with God is rooted in asking for provision or protection, healing or forgiveness – the relationship feels too one-sided, too contractual, to be truly loving. Yet I have known moments when my heart was so filled with blessing – on a gorgeous day, in a wonderful encounter, when a ministry is firing on all cylinders – that I could say to God, to Jesus, to the Spirit, “I love you.”

If love is a choice, not a feeling, we can cultivate that awareness of loving God at moments when it hasn’t hit us in a blinding rush. We can learn it, as we learn to fully love a spouse once the flush of in-love-ness has abated. We can make some time and space in prayer and say with intention: 

“God, I love you with my whole heart.” And pause; reflect on that. What else does our heart love?
Then, “God I love you with my whole soul.” Pause, reflect – can we control our soul?
Then, “God, I love you with my whole mind.” Pause, reflect – what does that mean? How might we bring our whole mind into the act of loving God?
Then, God, I love you with my whole strength.” Pause, reflect: Our whole strength is a lot of strength.

God is one, and God is love. When we love God we are simply responding to love that surrounds and supports us like water. Learning to live into this commandment will make us better at loving everyone. And ourselves.

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