Love with Our Whole Lives

Proper 25 Year A • Sunday October 25, 2026
Ex. 22:21–27 • Psalm 1 • 1 Thess. 2:1–8 • Matt. 22:34–46

Most of us know what it is to have our attention divided. Someone we love is speaking, and we are looking at a screen. We are present at the table, but mentally still at work. We want to be patient, yet the smallest interruption exposes how little patience remains. We do love. But we also know that our love is scattered, easily frightened, and often governed by what is convenient. When Jesus commands us to love God and our neighbor, he addresses that divided life. He calls us to a love that reaches the whole person — and he brings us to himself, because we cannot make ourselves whole.

A Hostile Question Gets a Transforming Answer

Our Gospel passage takes place in Jerusalem during the days before the crucifixion. The questions are coming at Jesus from every direction. His opponents have challenged his authority, tried to trap him over taxes, and disputed the resurrection. Now a lawyer — an expert in the Scriptures — asks which commandment is greatest. Matthew tells us that he is testing Jesus. A serious question is being used for a hostile purpose. Even the discussion of God’s commandments can become a way of avoiding obedience to God. Jesus answers from Deuteronomy, from the confession at the heart of Israel’s life: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). Heart, soul, and mind describe the whole person turned toward God. Nothing in us is exempt. Our thinking belongs within this love as surely as our feelings. So do our desires, our decisions, and the loyalties that shape us when nobody is watching.

Two Commandments That Cannot Be Separated

Then Jesus joins to that first command a second, drawn from Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). The first commandment remains first — God alone is worthy of worship, and our neighbor must never be required to supply the security or meaning that only God can give. Yet the second commandment belongs inseparably with the first. We cannot offer God a devotion that excuses contempt for someone he has made. The love we profess before the altar must reach the person we encounter afterward and even on the streets. Jesus says that all the Law and the Prophets depend upon these two commandments. He is showing us their unity. God’s commands give love its truthful shape. Love cannot mean whatever our strongest feelings happen to approve. A lie does not become loving because it avoids an uncomfortable conversation. Faithfulness does not become unloving because it costs us something. The God who commands love teaches us what love requires.

The Neighbor’s Cloak: Love That Sees the Person Behind the Need

Exodus 22:21–27 brings that requirement down to earth. These laws belong to the covenant given after God delivered the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The people have already been rescued. Now their shared life must bear the character of their rescuer. They must not oppress the sojourner, because they remember living as outsiders themselves. They must not mistreat widows or fatherless children. In that world, such people could be left without the ordinary protection of family, property, or influence. God places their treatment under his particular scrutiny. Then comes the image of the neighbor’s cloak. Someone in poverty needs a loan and offers his outer garment as security. The lender has a claim upon it, but God requires its return before night. It is the poor man’s covering when he sleeps. The lender may be protecting his money while another human being is lying awake in the cold. God requires him to see the body beneath the debt. The passage closes with God declaring, “I am compassionate” (Exodus 22:27). That cloak searches our hearts. We can insist upon our rights while becoming remarkably detached about what our insistence does to another person. We can speak about responsibility in ways that conceal our unwillingness to help. At work, at home, in the Church — what happens to the person who has less power than we do? Love asks that question before the sun goes down.

Where Love Takes Root

So how does that kind of love take root in people like us? Psalm 1 stands at the entrance to the book of Psalms and presents two ways of living. One person receives the counsel of the wicked and settles among scoffers. Another delights in God’s instruction and meditates on it continually. This is more than a distinction between people who possess a Bible and people who do not. It concerns the voice we allow to form our judgment, our desires, and eventually our conduct. Contempt has a schooling of its own. Spend enough time absorbing mockery, suspicion, and outrage, and we begin to carry them into every room. We may still believe the Creed while learning to regard our neighbors with scorn. The psalm invites us to another school — lingering, saturating, marinating ourselves in God’s word until it begins to govern our responses in the right way. The image is a tree planted beside streams of water. Its fruit comes in season. The tree receives what it needs through roots that cannot be seen. This is how love grows under the care of God. Prayer, Scripture, repentance, and worship draw us into the life he supplies. We cannot neglect those roots indefinitely and expect patience to appear whenever someone needs it.

Courage and Tenderness Together

The Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Thessalonica in 1 Thessalonians 2:1–8, shows us what this kind of love can look like in practice. He and his companions had suffered shameful treatment in the city of Philippi before arriving in Thessalonica, yet opposition had not silenced them. God gave them courage to proclaim the gospel again. Then this apostle describes his care through the image of a nursing mother. The same man who speaks boldly amid conflict deals gently with the people entrusted to him. Courage and tenderness belong together. He writes, “We were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves” (1 Thessalonians 2:8). They had become dear to him. He did not see them as people who could make him look successful. They were people he loved, and he gave himself for their good. Paul gives us a picture of love that does both: he speaks God’s truth faithfully and gives himself tenderly to the people receiving it. Such love seeks another person’s good, even when they do not welcome what we say or thank us for our care.

The One Who Fulfills What We Cannot

By now we may begin to feel the weight of what God asks. Who among us has done this faithfully? We have held on to the cloak while our neighbor lay cold. We have nursed a resentment rather than sought another person’s good. God’s commandments reach beneath our respectable appearance and expose the failures of love we would rather leave hidden. We need to hear that truth. But we also need more than an instruction to try harder. We need forgiveness for the love we have withheld, and grace to grow in the love we cannot produce by willpower alone. Notice, then, where Jesus takes the conversation. After answering the lawyer’s question, he asks his questioners about the Messiah — the promised King of Israel. Whose son is he? They rightly answer that he is David’s son. But Jesus brings them to Psalm 110, where David, speaking in the Spirit, calls the Messiah his Lord. How can David’s descendant also be David’s Lord? Their answer is too small for the person standing before them. Jesus is both David’s son and David’s Lord — the promised King who is God with us. Jesus teaches the commandment, then confronts us with his identity. He is the Lord to whom our love is owed, and the incarnate Son who fulfills the obedience we have failed to offer. His human life is wholly turned toward the Father. His love reaches the unclean, the unwelcome, and the guilty. In these days before his death, he knows what love will cost him. He continues toward the cross — bearing our sins and giving himself for people whose love has failed. By rising from the dead, Jesus brings us into new life with him — a life in which sin no longer has the final word. We receive forgiveness and acceptance through faith in him, on the strength of his saving work. And the Lord who forgives us gives his Holy Spirit to renew us. The commandment now reaches us within that mercy. We can confess the truth about our coldness, ask for a changed heart, and begin the costly act of love we have been postponing.

Putting It Into Practice

Before this day is over, we will have some opportunity to put this love into practice. Here are some honest questions to carry with you:

Examine where love is missing. Where are you professing love for God while withholding patience, mercy, or practical care from someone in your life?

Watch what is shaping you. What voices — newsfeeds, social media, political platforms — are forming you toward contempt for others? How will you give Scripture greater room to shape your words and actions this week?

Take the next concrete step. For some of us, the next step will be an apology without trying to justify what we did. For others, it will mean offering practical help in a way that honors the dignity of the person receiving it.

And for those worn down by caring for everyone else — the faithful step may be to admit that we cannot keep going without help, and to let others care for us. Christ’s command to love our neighbor does not mean we must always be the strong one. We are neighbors to one another. Our place among Christ’s people does not depend on how useful we can be. When our strength gives way, his love holds us still.

We do not go from this week relying on our own strength. Christ has given himself to us, and his Spirit is at work within us. We can trust him with what obedience will cost — and take the next step in love.