Last Sunday after Trinity by Fr Jack

Deuteronomy 34.1-12
St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians 2.1-8
St Matthew 22.34-end

Intention matters. That’s one of the key principles of the Christian faith. And not in a ‘its the thought that counts’ kind of commiseratory way, but it is a theological and philosophical statement that intention is powerful and important. Sometimes these principles get obscured in our culture nowadays in the west, when we instinctively lurch to only giving credence to that which can be measured, bought or sold.

But when we stop to think about it, when we consider life more holistically… (and that’s one of the gifts of being Christian, sacrificing time to pray in daily life and coming to the Eucharist Sunday by Sunday includes that space and framework to pause and consider life (ours and others) more holistically). When we stop to think about it, the spirit and intention of our actions is very powerful indeed.

Moses goes to his grave in today’s first reading. A flawed man, a complex character, but right the way through Moses’ guiding star had been God’s plan, and the good of God’s people. If anything his flaws make him more useful to us, because we can both sympathise with him, and be inspired by him. Moses is an image of someone who both listened to God (and continually learned how to listen to God, and went on growing in that), and allowed that listening to God to make him a blessing to all those around him.

His intention was to serve God and God’s people, and by and large he did. What more can we ask?That is a good parable for prayer and action for us in our lives in the office, in church and community and home.

Likewise St Paul talks about intention to the Thessalonians today. Many religious movements have made many men (and they usually are men) fabulously wealthy and powerful. I don’t know if it’s true but L Ron Hubbard is quoted just a few years before he founded scientology as saying ‘You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion’.

It is a source of great comfort to me that neither Jesus nor any of the apostles got fat, rich or powerful (in worldly terms) thanks to the Gospel; most of them just got tortured and killed for their trouble. That tells us everything about the value they placed on the message they carried, of course; and just what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus means for them and for us.

To return to intention, their intention was what Jesus talks of in today’s Gospel: love. God’s love, given to us, and for us to share.

That is not the intention of the pharisees who come to Jesus today. They come to trip Him up, to succeed where the Sadducees have failed. But this mean and stupid ambush leads to Jesus uttering one of the most amazing collection of words ever spoken.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

Jesus subverts their bad intentions and makes this moment one of divine revelation. God’s purposes and patterns, God’s intention is love. What is the point of existence? What is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything? (Apart from 42) Love. Love of God and love of neighbour as self.

Intention matters. God’s intention is love. God’s recipe book, God’s architectural drawing, God’s KPI, God’s colour palette, God’s SOP, God’s law, God’s musical idea, God’s choreography and theoretical principle, God’s Logos, all that the Scriptures, all that all the prophets and patriarchs since Moses himself have been leading up to is this: Love. God made us from love, to love Him back, and to share His love, to live in His love, within ourselves and between ourselves.

He may not be an obvious latter day Moses, but Ru Paul (the TV Drag Queen) is fond of saying “If you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen? Well, Jesus got there first. Love your neighbour, as yourself. So if you can’t love yourself, and know yourself loved of God, the love you will be able to share will be tragically limited.

This love commandment goes in every direction; of course it does, because it is the meaning - the intention - of life itself. And this isn’t soppy or sentimental love. Nor is this hippy dippy love.

Love is tough. Ultimately, it is love that will take Jesus to the cross and hold Him there as He dies. It is love, that will hold His mother Mary standing there as she watches the one she loves most in the world suffer so terribly. All of us in our own way will know the cost, the sacrifice, the loss and pain of love.

What do you think those other great modern prophets Nat King Cole and Aretha Franklin have been singing about all these years?! But even in the cost and reality of love, there is our humanity finding the truthful expression of who we are, and who we are made to be.

Which is why it is so annoying, that in the second half of today’s Gospel, it is only their linguistic game playing that shuts the pharisees up. Jesus is saying that the Messiah (He Himself) is both a descendant of King David’s line and also God Himself. And that this is prefigured in the psalm He quotes that God says to the Messiah (Jesus), come and sit at my right hand, and that David despite being a great King calls this Messiah (Jesus) Lord.

Its needling and tongue-lashing. And this is what silences the pharisees, not the earthquake of the two great commandments of love?

The pharisees were experts on the law, but so fixated were they on the detail, that they missed the point, by missing God’s intention. They had hundreds of levitical laws of course. They had the ten commandments, which still stand as excellent building blocks for a young desert society like Moses first gang setting up shop in the shadow of Sinai. But here, we have from Jesus all that distilled into not good fences making good neighbours (not don’t covet, steal, murder etc), but the command to realise that love is the fulfilling of the law (Romans 13:8–10, Galatians 5:14), that love is the meaning, the intention, of everything. Today is an invitation to recognise God’s intention in us being here at all, and to join in with that purpose, to discover (like Moses did by growing into relationship with God, like St Paul and the twelve so heroically, like all of us sat here today) to discover in God’s intention for us something worth living for with all our hearts, and soul, and mind:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’