He asserts that He’s both a bar-enosh, a Son of Man, and a Son of God. He asserts, alluding to Ezekiel 34:10 to 34:15, that He has come to “seek and save the lost.”
He asserts that we love God best by loving our neighbor, and that this ‘love’ is seen in concrete helpful actions, not in mere pity or emotion.
He gives us two commandments that sum up all commandments (Matthew 22:39), and then tells us that the second of these two “is like” the first. To “love God” and to “love your fellow human” are not two different things, but rather two similar things.
To love God is to love your neighbor, and to love your neighbor is to love God. This ‘love’ is again no mere emotion, but rather ahava: a combination of the will and the conduct.
This same ahava appears as ‘love’ in Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:4 and 6:5. This analogy – this appearance of a key word in other verses – gives us an interpretive key. ‘Love’ is a key term in these verses.
If we are told to love our neighbor, then the question, ‘who is my neighbor?’ quickly arises (Luke 10:29). In the broadest sense, every human is my neighbor. I’m obliged to help and care for everyone. But being finite, humans cannot simultaneously demonstrate help and care for the seven or more billion people on the planet.
So some manner of sequence arises. If I live in the context of a family, my primary neighbor is in my family – parents, siblings, or children. If I’m married, if I have a living spouse, my primary neighbor is my spouse.
Adam and Eve began as equal and mutually adequate partners: a covenanted interdependence.
In a complicated bit of Hebraic interpretation, the letters of the Hebrew words for God, man, woman, and fire are examined. If one subtracts the letters found in the word for God from the letters found in the words for man and woman, only two letters are left, and they spell the word for ‘fire’!
This is easier to picture if one sees it written out in Hebrew characters. But lesson is simple enough: together, man and woman need God as the third partner in their relationship. If you take God out of the relationship, then what is left is ‘fire’ – i.e., destructive.
The centrality of God in human life is seen in His mysterious name. Philologists have had a field day for several centuries as they’ve examined the mysterious name of Yhwh.
Among the dozens of proposed interpretations are ‘the One who causes existence to be’ and ‘I am, I was, I will be that I am’ and ‘I will be what I will be.’
The riddle of God’s name will probably never be solved in this world – and will probably be solved in the next one. But whatever it may be, it is clear that God is not aloof from His creation, but rather is intricately involved and intertwined in the very existence of this world.
[These thoughts loosely based on a talk given by Dwight Pryor on Saturday, October 01, 1994]
