Description
These readings bring our month towards a great conclusion. Across them, faith is not something we possess or keep for ourselves. It is received, embodied in our lives and passed on. Jesus draws everything back to love of God and neighbour. Paul describes a tender and self-giving leadership. In Deuteronomy we reach the end of Moses’ life and are reminded that God’s story has staying power beyond any one person or generation.
In Matthew 22:34–46, we reach the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Once again Jesus is being tested by religious leaders, this time with a question about the greatest commandment. His answer draws directly from Israel’s Scriptures: love God with your whole being, from Deuteronomy, and love your neighbour as yourself, from Leviticus. What is striking is the way he brings these two ancient commands together: love of God and love of neighbour belong to one another. Our relationship with God cannot be separated from how we live with other people.
Love With Your Whole Self allows the congregation to hear these familiar words differently by involving the body in the reading. The words Heart, Soul, Mind and Neighbour each receive a simple action, speaking together and physically enacting what will be for many people a very familiar reading. The conversation afterwards deliberately remains open: What might it actually mean to love God with our whole selves? What changes when love of God and love of neighbour are tied together?
The second Matthew activity pushes that question further: what does love actually look like? Christian language about love can become so familiar and general that it loses its specificity and power. But the love embodied by Jesus is concrete and costly: serving, welcoming, forgiving, making room, giving ourselves for others, and sometimes simply doing the ordinary things that make another person’s life better. In Love Looks Like…, people write or draw their responses onto individual hearts and bring them together into one large communal heart. The result makes an important point itself: none of us embodies the fullness of Christ’s love alone. We need the small loving actions offered by many people, hearts and hands.
1 Thessalonians 2:1–8 gives this love a particularly tender shape. Paul describes his relationship with the Thessalonian Christians as being “gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” This is a relationship of deep care, to the point of sharing his own life with them.
The passage holds a tender and gentle image of Christian community and leadership.
The Breath Prayer takes that tenderness and turns it outwards towards the world. The congregation breathes in, “God of tenderness…” and breathes out, “…hold your world in love.” This makes intercession less about producing a long list of concerns and more about holding the suffering of the world before God. We pray that God would deal tenderly with the world, and that we might learn to do the same, receiving God’s gentleness and becoming people through whom that gentleness reaches others.
Finally, Deuteronomy 34:1–12 brings us to the death of Moses. After everything Moses has done, he will not be the one who leads Israel into the promised land. The text honours his extraordinary place in Israel’s story while also making room for Joshua and what comes next. It is amazing, humbling and hopeful that even Moses is not presented as being indispensable. God’s story does not belong to one leader, one community or one generation. We receive something from those who came before us, carry it for a time and eventually entrust it to others.
Pass It On makes this insight physical and playful. A table-tennis ball must keep travelling through a continuously moving line of cardboard tubes. Nobody can carry it all the way themselves: people have to watch, trust, communicate, receive and pass on. After hearing Moses’ story, the congregation can wonder together: What have we received from those who came before us? What might we have to pass on to those who come after us?
The thread running through the week might be expressed as love received, lived and passed on. We receive a faith and a story that began long before us. Jesus calls us to embody its heart — love of God inseparably joined to love of neighbour. Paul shows us something of the tenderness with which that love can be lived. And Moses reminds us that we are important but temporary participants in God’s big story.
How can we receive God’s love, live it together, and pass it on?
