This morning (Sunday 6th September 2026) I had the privilege of leading worship at Sherbourne Community Church in Coventry.
Below is the text of my sermon (this is essentially the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments).
The sermon followed two Bible readings, and focused mostly on the first of them:
Can you stand on one leg without falling over? Don’t worry: I’m not going to test you! It doesn’t matter whether you can or not. I can just about do it, but not for very long. But one person who could stand on one leg – at least briefly – was Rabbi Hillel. Hillel was a leading Jewish scholar who lived shortly before Jesus; well, he died a few years after Jesus’ birth.
Hillel was challenged to recite the whole Jewish law, the Torah, while standing on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah. The rest is explanation. Go and learn.”
What is hateful to you, do not to do to your neighbour. Of course, Hillel also valued the rest of the law. But he believed that it was an explanation of that core principle about how we treat each other.
As Christians, we are familiar with a similar teaching of Jesus: “Do to others as you would have them do to you”. This is often called the Golden Rule, which exists in many other faiths and traditions. Lao Tzu, whose teachings form much of the basis of Daoism, said, “Regard your neighbour’s gain as your own gain and your neighbour’s loss as your own loss”. Muhammad, regarding by Muslims as the final prophet, said, “Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself”.
Earlier we heard a passage from Paul’s Letter to Romans. Paul is said to have been taught by, or at least influenced by, Rabbi Hillel himself. So perhaps it’s no surprise that he offers his own summary of the law. He effectively quotes Jesus saying that all laws are summed up in the commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. And then he says – in what I think is one of the most important lines in the New Testament – “Love is the fulfilling of the law”.
Love is the fulfilling of the law.
It’s a shocking statement. Here is Paul, a righteous, Torah-observant Jew. He’s just written, only a few lines before this passage, about the governing authorities having a legitimate role. He’s emphasised his respectability. And then he says, “Love is the fulfilling of the law”.
As many of you know, the New Testament was written in Greek. Ancient Greek had several words for love. The one that Paul uses here is ἀγάπη (agape), which refers to unconditional love offered to others.
According to Paul, we don’t fulfil the law by a checklist of rules. We fulfil it by love. And we might say, is that it? Is that all we have to do, to love? But perhaps we’ve misunderstood love. Love isn’t easy. Love is a behaviour more than a feeling. Love is active.
Living in love does not mean that we can just do anything we feel like doing and then claim that we did it lovingly. I can’t kill someone while loving them. I can’t abuse someone while loving them. I can’t commit adultery while living in love.
In Paul’s Letter to Galatian Christians – written a bit earlier than his Letter to the Roman Christians – Paul wrote about how Christ sets us free but insists that we should not use our freedom as an opportunity for selfish indulgence. Instead, we should serve one another in love (that’s Galatians 5,13).
Both Jesus and Paul make clear the dangers of legalism, of trusting in rules instead of trusting in the love of God. Jesus said, “the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath”. The wider principle is surely that rules were made for people, not people for rules.
Some years ago, I came across a booklet that argued that Britain’s problems were down to what the author regarded as the abandonment of Chrisitan values. He argued that the value of marriage had been undermined in the UK. And among the many points that he made, he criticised the change in the law in the 1990s that banned rape within marriage. He claimed that prosecuting men for raping their wives undermined marriage.
This is an argument that most people today will, rightly, find morally repugnant. It was justified by a narrow and partial interpretation of selective biblical passages while making no allowance for the need to build relationships on love.
In the same booklet, the author criticised the legalisation of sexual relations between men in the 1960s. Men who had sex with other men, he suggested, should be in jail.
So he wanted not only to legalise an act of sexual violence, but to ban a consensual act of love.
How could he justify all this? By appealing to lines from the Bible with no context, as if it were simply a list of rules. But in doing so he was ignoring the very gospel, he ignored Jesus Christ, through whom the Bible must be interpreted. There can be a place for rules, but rules are made for people, not people for rules. Love is the fulfilling of the law.
But hang on, you might be saying, how does all this help us to discern what is and isn’t loving in any given situation? Of course certain actions can’t be loving, but that doesn’t mean we always know the right thing to do. It is often unclear what is the most loving thing to do in any given situation.
So let’s go back to the worlds of Rabbi Hillel, when he was asked to recite the Torah while standing on one leg. As we saw, he said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole law.” He then said, “The rest is explanation. Go and learn”.
In other words, yes, the rest is explanation. It is not central, but it still requires study and prayer if we are to live out the core principle.
As Christians, we are not bound to follow the Jewish law. But we can learn from both halves of Hillel’s comment. Treating others as we wish to be treated is what matters. Thinking around this is still, however, important. We need both to observe the Golden Rule and be prepared to “go and learn” how to do so.
So how do we observe the Golden Rule?! Well, here I have to say that I don’t have any easy answers for you. I know that I frequently fail to treat others as I wish to be treated, and I am frequently asking God to forgive me – and to keep on guiding me.
But I think that Paul gives us some clues in this passage that we’re looking at.
Paul writes, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires”.
So what does he mean? “Make no provision for the flesh”. We have to be careful here! Paul can be misunderstood because of this word, this Greek word “σαρξ” (sarx), which is usually translated as “flesh”. The New English Bible translates it as “the lower nature”. Paul is not saying that our bodies don’t matter. He’s not saying that we should ignore our physical needs and he’s not condemning physical desires. This is quite clear from Paul’s other writings.
When Paul uses the word “flesh” like this, he’s talking about a focus on things that are earthly and human and perishable, with no reference to God. If we enjoy ourselves with no thought of others, we are trusting in the flesh. If we believe that we must control our bodes through excessive asceticism and that we can be saved through a list of rules and laws that humans have created, we are trusting in the flesh. To Paul, the alternative is to trust in the Spirit, to seek God’s guidance, to rely on the grace found in Jesus, to live in love.
It is so hard to trust in love. It is so much easier to fall back into trusting the idols that dominate the world – idols of money, of power, of military might. They won’t save us.
When we struggle to see what love means in practice, our starting-point is to trust in God. We can look to the teachings of Jesus and pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance. That does not mean we will always find the answer! I know how hard I find it, so often, to make ethical decisions. And I know that praying doesn’t always lead to an answer. But if I don’t even seek God’s guidance, I make it so much harder for myself.
Remember that Paul is not just speaking not only to individuals but to communities. Churches, and other Christian communities, are called to seek to live by the Spirit, remembering that love is the fulfilling of the law. In the other passage that we heard earlier, from Matthew’s Gospel, we heard how a situation of conflict and injustice within a Christian community can be addressed. We don’t need to follow that passage legalistically, but we can follow the general principles it outlines – the involvement of several people, listening to each other, making decisions collectively, not allowing a powerful person to overrule others and so on. It is an example of a practical way of seeking to live by love.
We cannot live entirely morally in an immoral world. I can try to be ethical when I go shopping, but many of the products will have been produced by people exploited on the other side of the world. I may wonder how to help when I meet a homeless person, but it is a sinful society that leaves anybody to be homeless in the first place. So decision-making is messy and confusing. Living by God’s Spirit is not about a selfish desire to be personally pure, but about seeking God’s guidance within the messiness.Trusting in love – the love revealed in Jesus – is not a recipe for easy success. We need to trust in God’s strength, not our strength, asking
forgiveness however often we fail to love others, and praying for God’s guidance in all circumstances.
In raising Jesus from the dead, God made clear that the power of love had triumphed over all the powers of sin and injustice and oppression that were at work when the Roman Empire crucified Jesus. Trusting in this love gives us hope – not a shallow, trite hope but a deep hope that recognises the suffering and evil in the world and puts faith in the God whose love overcomes it.
That is why following Jesus, and seeking to live by love, is not about withdrawing from the world but about being more equipped to live in the world and to change it. In the passage we’ve been reading, from Romans 13, Paul says it is time to “wake from sleep”. He adds, “The night is far gone, the day is at near”. Looking at the state of the world, it is tempting to give up, to go back to bed – either metaphorically or literally. But Paul reminds us that in Jesus we have the hope of the triumph of love.
Love is the beginning, the middle and the end of the Gospel. The rest is detail. Now we must learn it.
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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.
