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OpeningWell, we have some wonderful Scriptures today, but I would like to make some comments on only the first part of the Gospel reading, just because it is such an important passage of Scripture.The Greatest CommandmentA lawyer comes to test Jesus and asks him, “What is the greatest commandment in the law? What is the great commandment in the law?” He is essentially asking Jesus: What is the most important thing to do in this world, in life?And Jesus’ answer is, as we have just heard: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And there is a second commandment like it, interestingly: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets, he says. In other words, the entirety of what we would call the Old Testament is summed up in these two commandments.Attention: Spotlight, Daylight, and StarlightI recently read a very interesting book about how the modern world is making it harder and harder for us to pay attention to anything for a long period of time. Our attention spans are shrinking, apparently. Towards the end of this book, the author talks about an interview he had with a former Google strategist whose name is James Williams. James Williams has apparently done some thinking about the nature of attention, and he has developed a metaphor for the different kinds of ways that we pay attention to things.To begin with, he says that attention can be like a spotlight. When we are really focused on something in particular, everything else is filtered out and our minds are fixed on one thing only—the kind of attention you may be paying to this sermon right at this moment, I hope anyway.Attention can also be like daylight. Daylight is a slightly more zoomed-out form of attention that helps us to take in information and gives us the capacity to make decisions about how we are going to order our lives in a practical way.And the third thing that he says attention could be like is starlight. Starlight is the kind of attention that helps us to make ultimate decisions about the nature of life and of our lives. It is not about daily choices as such, or specific things, but about the kind of attention that we are going to pay to life in general. And the author of this book writes: it is called starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars and you remember the direction you are travelling. If you become distracted from your starlight, you start to forget where you are heading.I would suggest that today’s passage invites us to this kind of attention. It invites us to consider the ultimate nature and purpose of human life in the most general terms. Who are we, and what are our lives for? What are they about? How should we order our lives? What should be our ultimate direction? Where are we going?Loving God with All That We AreAnd Christ’s answer, in a way, is very simple—but when we start to think about it, it is also very challenging. He says that the first commandment is to love God with all one’s heart, one’s soul, one’s mind—in other words, with all of our self. And this, of course, means to attend to God, to worship God, to obey God, to commune with God in prayer, and to draw closer to God in the spiritual life. It means to orientate one’s existence towards God as we recognise him as the source and the end of our entire being. It means that God is, in a sense, the highest value that we possess. And it means that to put anything else first—whether that is money or relationships or family or career or work or pleasure or anything—is to make a kind of mistake. It is to put something that is not ultimate in the place of the one who is ultimate. And this is surely why Christ says that this is the first and great commandment: to love God.Loving Our Neighbour as OurselvesBut in itself this commandment is not complete. And this is why Christ says that there is a second that is like it. And that commandment, as we