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The Greatest Commandment

I love when religious leaders try to trick Jesus. Either he can’t know anything, so they’ll catch him in a lack of knowledge; or, he’ll say something heretical that they can use to arrest him. Either way, they expect to undermine his credibility and get him out of the way.

He easily sidesteps them when he answers the legal scholar’s question about the Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22)—to love God with all your heart and mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Interestingly, this wasn’t actually a hard question. Just a generation before Jesus, Jewish scholar Hillel had summed up the whole of the Torah as, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow”.* By the time Matthew’s gospel was written in about 80 AD, Rabbi Akiva had already taught that “the Levitical command to love your neighbor [was] the great principle of Torah [God’s Law].” 

So when Jesus answers the legal scholar, he wasn’t proposing a new idea.

But…that was the problem. It wasn’t a new idea, and everyone listening to Jesus answer the question would have already known the answer themselves.

There’s often a wide gap between knowing and doing. 

To love God with all that we are and all that we have, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, requires us to reorient ourselves and to make changes in our lives. 

It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It feels impossible, and honestly, it feels like it’s out of our control anyway so just how does God expect us to do it? How are we supposed to make changes to how we spend each day so we can give more to God? How are we supposed to tell our kids “no” as they add another extracurricular and we just want them to be happy and fulfilled? Do I tell my boss “no” and risk my job for the sake of giving God more time?

Doesn’t God know we’re just doing the BEST WE CAN?!?!?!?!?!

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” 

Attributed to author and Civil Rights Activist Maya Angelou, Oprah—to whom it was privately spoken—said it’s an argument that it’s never too late to change. It’s never too late to do better when we know what that “better” is. 

The entirety of God’s law hangs on the Greatest Commandment, and included in that Law is to give to God what is God’s. Our very breath, our very lives, are a gift from God. If all that we have and all that we are belong to God, keeping the Greatest Commandment includes practicing good stewardship of our time and talents. 

However, making the changes necessary to practice good stewardship of our time and talents—and to then grow our time and talents giving—often feels impossible. Entirely overwhelming. Unlikely to make a difference anyway.

Where Does the Day/Week/Year Go?

They say money buys happiness, but what it really buys is more time to pursue what you want.

We often talk about growing our giving, which is almost exclusively used in relationship to our financial giving. Yet, God invites us to give him all our time and talents too. How do we navigate that method of giving when it feels like the hardest area to give from, let alone to GROW our giving in?

A helpful place to start could be with a personal time audit.

Doing a time audit is a bit like looking at our spending and putting together a budget. We know what items are necessary to buy or pay for, what things are helpful, and what things are just absolutely not needed but oh so fun to buy. 

Our time and talents are like that too. We know where we have to spend our time and our skills. We know what things are nice to do, and are helpful, but not absolute necessities. And we know what things are fun but do nothing beneficial for us.

The next time you’re doom/hopescrolling or vegging out in front of the TV just hoping to shut your brain off for a bit, try this instead.

Start by listing out your most important values and priorities, both individually and for your family. Then narrow it down to the Top 5.

Next, grab a piece of paper and something to write with, and write down as much as you can think of for what you’ve done every day in the last week. Start with when you get up in the morning until you finally put your phone down at night. (If you aren’t glued to your phone, teach me your ways, please.)

Include every internet rabbit hole, every errand, every appointment, every extracurricular for you and anyone in your immediate family. If you’re still working, don’t include the actual work day right now. You can do that later if you’d like to go deeper.

After you’ve done this for at least 5 days, pull out all the things that go together. Dinner with your family, looking at your phone, commuting time, figuring out logistics, running errands, cooking, cleaning, yard work, home maintenance, etc. 

With no judgement—seriously, this isn’t about judging something as “good” or “bad”—notice how you’re spending your time. Just look and see, and sit with it for a little bit.

Then X-out things that you can’t change. You have to commute to work, do pickups and drop-offs, plan meals, do laundry, go shopping, fix the leaky sink, mow the lawn or clear the snow, etc. 

Next, notice the things you have a bit more control over. Do those things align with the Top 5 priorities for you and your family? Could they become more in alignment with the priorities, or are they hindering those priorities?

As your pastor, I of course hope that your relationship with God is a top priority. The Greatest Commandment teaches us that God wants to be our tippy top Top Priority. If God isn’t, a good question might be to ask why. 

If growing your Time & Talents giving feels out of reach, look back at the things you can change. Pick just one area that you can shift to give to God through your time and sharing your talents. 

When you fill out your Time & Talents sheet this fall, let it be an opportunity to grow your giving rather than a guilt-ridden obligation.


* https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-30/commentary-on-matthew-2234-46-7 by Rev. Zina Jacque