As you know, the first verb, the first action, of the Holy Scriptures is to create, revealing profound truths about our God. All life on earth has being. God alone is Being. The earth is covered with creatures. God alone is not a creature. He is the Creator. He alone possesses that inimitable magic, that holy stirring and thinking we call life.

The Holy Scriptures are like this: trenchant beyond our comprehension. This quality leapt out at those who studied them first: how few words are used to say so much.

The greatest verb in the Holy Scriptures is to love. It is the only verb, the only action, in each of the Two Great Commandments. The Two Great Commandments both share a striking feature: their only verb is to love. This too reveals profound truths about God.

You know that in the comic-book version of Christianity, it is claimed that the New Testament is the "book of love" while the Old Testament is the "book of wrath." Perhaps these people have forgotten that when Jesus lovingly quotes the Scriptures, the New Testament has not been written yet.

Sometime during the 20s A.D., decades before the first books of the New Testament were written, a duel arose between two great teachers, Shammai and Hillel. The latter, Hillel the Elder, had claimed that he could recite all the Law (the five books of Torah) and the all the Prophets (major and minor) while standing on one foot. And now he must make good on this claim. So he assumed the crane-like posture and said,

Hillel, of course, implies another love, which is God's unsurpassable love for us, which we must requite .... as any child instinctively is driven to requite the love of mother and father.

So this is our religion: from its roots, it is the religion of love. Unlike philosophy or logic or mathematics or even cooking, you cannot learn our religion from a book. Our religion is rooted in the heart, "the holiness of the heart's affections" (to borrow Keats' phrase). Or as Pascal wrote, "The heart has its reasons which reason cannot comprehend."

It is only in loving that we might begin to speak God's language and understand God's ways and mind. It is not a training of our puny min, in the sense of engineering or science, leaving the rest of yourself — your body, your feelings, your likes and dislikes — to do with as you please. No. It will calls all of you to attention. It requires an all-encompassing transformation of life touching every part of your person and the living of your life. Isn't this the power of love? What else could transform every part of your life? It is an almighty power .... as anyone who has been in love can tell you. Everything else in your life becomes ordered to this love.

The holiness of our sacred books lies in their capacity to reveal the dimensions of this power. And we remember that the God of Love revealed His ways, wrote His Laws upon the fleshly tablets of our hearts before He etched them in stone (2 Cor 3:3).

Singling out these essences from the thousand-page odyssey which is the Holy Scriptures, might seem to make easy what otherwise would be laborious. But the unexplored and vast oceans which we call love — with its many dark moods and bright, it gray colors and vivid, its tempests and its calms, — call us into the deepest depths of the human experience. Each of us is born with this instinctual reverence for love.

Let us begin our meditation on love by noticing the phrase "great hearted" or "big hearted" are synonymous with "brokenhearted." The broken heart gives rise to the great heart. And only a great heart can truly become brokenhearted. A small heart does not become brokenhearted. The great heart becoming brokenhearted moves us from the every day to the epic. Heart-broken is a word we reserve for things deserving the greatest reverence, the deepest and gravest mourning and grieving. And it raises our minds to the level of Heaven. All meaningless noise ceases at the sound of this word: broken-hearted.

You see, this a word calling upon the immediate attention of God. Indeed,

Yes, brokenheartedness occurs in the neighborhood. Casseroles are dropped at the doors of those who are grieving. But God's response is different .... when our hearts break.

We have reflected many times on the mystery of God's gift of love to the Earth in the form of His Son — His Son, Who broke Himself, setting aside His infinite Heavenly glory to enter the horrible straits of our narrow humanity; Who had nowhere to lay His head; Who was mocked and scourged and spitted on and nailed to a cross: utterly broken .... in the cause of love.

On the night He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus revealed more. He took bread. And when He had given thanks, He broke it. "This is my Body," He said. Likewise, after supper He took the Cup. "This is my Blood," He said. He had also told Zebedee's son John and James, in a mystery, that the chalice represented a baptism of fire.

Broken. God has revealed His love for us to be brokenhearted. When He speaks to us in the language of love, these are the plaintive tones He voices.

Why should this be? Why should it be that the love of God and our love of Him should be touched by heaviness? "Why art thou so heavy, O my soul?" Why art thou so disquieted within me?" (Ps 42:5), writes the Psalmist. What is this "still sad music of humanity" (to borrow Wordsworth's phrase)? Joseph Campbell wrote, "Love in the burning point of life. And because love is sad, life is sad."

Let us go back to first things. We are family. This is the basic truth of our life in God. But is it so that we are a happy family? We might say that we participate in the marriage of Heaven and earth. But is this marriage not marked by tragedy, by infidelity, and in that sense, rooted in grief?

God's nature is Relationship. Our part in Him, in the Kingdom of Heaven, must also participate in relationship The great question, then, is what is our relationship to God and to each other (recalling the Two Great Commandments of love)? What is it like?

As with any family relationships, and especially in families that have been broken, the primary question is always engagement — our hearts being in it. Are we in, or are we out? Do we have in stake in the other family members, caring about them, bearing their burdens, understanding their sorrows? Or are we inward looking, mainly concerned with what we "get" while distancing the others .... often mocking them when they are not around or demonizing them, which hardens our heart, distancing them even farther.

We know this subject of narcissism. We have now lived through two generations of articles and books devoted to this subject. I recall Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) a sociological study that noticed the rise of one-person domiciles (you can scarcely say "families"), one-person commuters (you cannot say "car pools"), and one-person diners. A table reserved for one. Yes, even one-person movie-goers with no one sitting next to anyone else. You see, the devolution of mankind was ripe for a MySpace and a Facebook and an Instagram.

On that score, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has warned clergy against social networking as a clamoring for approval that rises to the level of vanity. The Hermitage uses these platforms to invite people into our lives and especially to contemplate Holy Scripture after the mind of the Orthodox Church, but we do not engage in social networking.

We have become governors and sovereigns of our own little kingdoms in our one-person families. Everything is always done my way. We read the Scripture that pleases us, cherry-picking passages. In the Western Church this is already true with lectionary readings bristing with commas: this passage, not that. And when you check the that passages you discover judgment, sin, the need for penitence, and other grave subjects. The Parable of the Good Samaritan we like. The Judgment of Capernaum and Bethsaida we don't like. The Beatitudes on the Mount we like .... at least some of them. The Parable of the Tares and the Wheat we don't like. We like the sending out of the Apostles, but we do not like the judgment of destruction visited upon those who do not receive God's holy messengers. We choose blessings and ignore curses. And we are able to do it all our way, for who will stop us? We have banished everyone we disagree with .... until we die, for God cannot be banished.

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Small wonder the word justify should loom so large. For protesting one's rectitude goes to the very core of the Pharisaic heart. Truly, such a man as this — one-person kingdoms at war with every other petty king — sets the theme and tone for the Gospel stories.

As far as an anthropology of belief, it is surely "me and God" .... involving no others, unless it be to depreciate and finally to dismiss them. Protestantism has dismissed all priests. You see, "It's between me and God."

Think of this in terms of family. Is the Pharisee not a withdrawn and inward-looking son? In the language of our culture, he is the proud son, living outside of town on a hill in a big house. He surrounds himself with fantasy, where he is the hero, the main character, and all things are about him. And is this not a haunting image of our own children so self-absorbed and so obsessed with fantasy, whether in video games or movies or television?

This is the man who is not justified before God. For he has abandoned God. And he most certainly has abandoned all the people around him. Yet, he most certainly would have known of Hillel the Elder and would have heard the story of his duel with Shammai, whose message was this: "Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself."

Not far from him stands a tax collector, a publican. You know, he is not very different from the Pharisee in many respects. He, too, would have been arrayed in fine clothes. He also would have lived in a big house. He was a high-ranking official in Roman Society, of the Equestrian class, just below the Senatorial class.

I grew up hearing that the tax collector would have been an oily, small man, probably not very well dressed, hated by all people. But this stereotype turns out to be false. Augustus Caesar had long ago reformed the practices of tax collectors. The publican would have been respected in general society and influential among other high-caste Judeans, overseeing public works projects and enjoying symposia with other key leaders. Boy in Jerusalem would say, "I want to grow up to be him."

Like the Pharisee, he had abandoned his own community long ago. He chose the upwardly mobile and, therefore, competitive life. He did not get to the top by being a humble helper in his community.

But for all his riches and prestige, he realizes now that his life has turned to mock him. It is an empty life. And he is alienated from others, from God, finally from himself. He does not so much as "raise his eyes to Heaven." He is a distanced son, a stranger to his Father, like the Pharisee, indeed, to his whole family. And he takes in the enormity of all that he has lost, that his whole life has become an offense against God. And he beats his breast. And his heart breaks. He owns his part in the "still sad music of humanity," sobbing in his sleeves.

This is the gist of the entire parable and of his life: a broken heart. But when your heart breaks and your life comes apart, when the grieving period ends, you are then ready to put things back together again in a different order. You are prepared to burn your whole world down, for you see it is valued at nothing. And you are free to begin again.

God always begins in our hearts. He breaks our hearts by confronting us with the emptiness of our lives. And He breaks our hearts by flooding them with love. Have you ever been so filled with love that you thought your heart would burst? Each day swelling more and more until you feared your frame could not contain it?

This is where God begins, and this is where He ends. God breaks our hearts .... with love. Love is the master of all. With love all things are possible. Love conquers all. for we are willing to bear every burden, to walk the last mile, to endure every insult. Do you hear the echo of the Beatitudes? If a man asks you carry a burden a mile, carry it two miles. If a man strikes you on the face, offer him the other side.

The law of love is always being handed down to us from Father to son and to daughter. It was offered first in Eden. It was taught again from the heights of Mt. Sinai. It was decisively preached on the Mount of the Beatitudes.

Today a tax collector receives this gift in the shadows of the Temple. Like His Elder Brother, the First-born of Creation, he has become .... broken and by that same measure tender-hearted. And, in this, a child of God is born. Unto us a son is given. And his name shall be wonderful.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.