The question Jesus answered for the lawyer that day was “Who is my neighbor?” But an equally important question, and one that doesn’t get asked nearly often enough, is “What is love?”
Some enchanted evening you will meet a stranger across a crowded room. Neither of you has a clue what the other is like. But your heart rate goes up and your imagination goes into overdrive and, well, you know how it goes, right? Happily ever after is just around the corner. Is this love?
On her thirteenth birthday Lisa’s mother takes her to the gynecologist to get fitted for a diaphragm. “You’re a woman now,” she says, “I want you know that you can tell me anything.” Is this love?
“I’m sorry, honey,” says Brad as he picks Nancy up off the floor and gets some ice to bring down the swelling along her jaw where he hit her. “But you know what it does to me when I see you having fun with someone else. I just lose it. You matter so much to me.” Is this love?
Tony says to Sharon, “We’ve been going out for weeks now; everybody does it. If you really loved me, you’d have sex with me.” Is this love?
“My son will never leave me,” says Alice smugly, “no one else will ever take care of him like I do. He knows what’s good for him.” Is this love?
What is love?
“If we do not have love, we are nothing,” [1 Cor 13] says the Apostle Paul.
But what is it, that we should know when we have it? Being human, and infinitely capable of self-deception, we are capable of giving the name of love to things that are pale imitations at best and grotesque mockeries at worst. Is love a feeling? Is love a right? Is love an instinct? What is love?
“God is love,” [1 Jn 4:8] says the Apostle John. Many good people who aren’t Christians think that God is an idea of love, an ideal state of being, an abstract state of positive energy, as it were. But that cannot be. Because love is personal, it cannot exist in the abstract. Love cannot be separated from people.
That’s the first thing to remember. Love is personal.
What is love?
“This is love, that he laid down his life for us,” [1 Jn 3:16] says the Apostle John. That’s the second thing to remember. Love is action. Love involves doing something. Doing what? Giving. Giving what? Giving self. Giving why? For us. Because we needed help. Love involves the giving of self for the sake of another.
What is love?
Love stands in contrast to hate, which twists, makes ugly, and kills. Love cleans, and heals, and brings life. Love is creative. “When we love one another,” says John, “we pass from death to life.” [1 Jn 3:14]
Love is personal. Love gives itself away. Love brings life.
Most of us, I think, have grasped that love of God must necessarily be followed by love of neighbor. It is, for one thing, the subject of John’s first letter. “Whoever does not love does not know God.” [1 Jn 4:8] “Those who do not love their brothers and sisters are not from God.” [1 Jn 4:20] “Whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go on, because the darkness has brought on blindness.” [1 Jn 2:11]
But the religious leaders who opposed Jesus had forgotten this. The commandment to love God wasn’t new with Jesus. But it wasn’t as clearly linked with the commandment to love others - even foreigners - until now. It’s there, of course: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself...” and a couple of verses later, “...you shall love the alien as yourself.” [Lev 19:18,34] But the major emphasis in the Old Testament about how you should treat other people was on justice. It’s easy to convince yourself you’re being just, though, when you act strictly according to the letter of the law without thinking or caring about the people the laws are supposed to protect. And that’s what had happened to the religious leaders who opposed Jesus. They claimed to love God but ignored the poor and needy at the least excuse. So Jesus made a point of rubbing this in whenever he had the opportunity.
Not too long before Jesus came on the scene, the famous Rabbi Hillel told an inquirer that the whole law was summed up in the saying, “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to another.” In a slightly different form, this has come down to us as the Golden Rule. And many people think that this is the be-all and end-all of Christ’s teachings. But it is only a half. You see, you cannot truly love your neighbor if you do not love God, any more than you can truly love God if you do not love your neighbor.
And since our society is no longer sustained by the faith that generated them, the love we are supposed to have for our neighbor is no longer grounded on God’s wisdom, but only on our feelings of compassion. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we salivate - or pull out our wallets - every time a politician uses the word compassion, and “follow your heart” is the ultimate trump card. But having a good heart is not enough. Rabbi Wolfe Kelman years once said to columnist Dennis Prager, “I pretty much have my bad inclination under control; it’s my good inclination that always gets me into trouble.” As the prophet Jeremiah famously said, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse-- who can understand it? (v.17:9)
Most sermons on this famous passage on “The Greatest Commandment” focus on how genuine love for God must necessarily be lived out in loving your neighbor. And that is important. But in our society, where people think that just “being a good person” is enough for salvation, we’ve completely lost sight of the fact that loving your neighbor has to be grounded in love for God.
It all begins with God.
In the beginning ... God. Creation begins with God. Who God is, and how God has created us and the world, is the foundation on which everything else rests. And so of course morality also begins with God. It’s just as much part of the created order as the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. It is because we are made in God’s image that murder is forbidden. It is because God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt that we are to give the weak and oppressed just the same respect as the rich and powerful. And I think most people understand that. That is why “compassion” has such a powerful hold on our political imaginations, why it has been so easy for us as a country to fall into the “entitlement” trap. . . We feel that it is morally right for society to care for the poor, and of course it is.
But without God’s law to ground us, all the good feelings and wishful thinking in the world cannot create justice.
The reason that both communism and socialism have such a powerful hold on people’s political imaginations is precisely because people want to create a just society; we see the rich getting richer by exploiting and mistreating the poor, and believe that if only the state would require everyone to share equally in both the work and the rewards, then everyone could reach their full potential and paradise would be just around the corner. But it doesn’t work, because the truth about human nature isn’t figured into the equation.
One of my personal clichés is that compassion that is not grounded in truth is merely laziness or sentimentality. Passing a law that requires someone else to feed the poor and visit the lonely shows the same kind of laziness that leads busy parents to shower their children with toys instead of spending time with them. It may be superficially generous, but it’s impersonal and ultimately destructive. Unfortunately, most of the things we do - or are asked to do - in the name of compassion are more about making our feelings of discomfort at the suffering of others go away than it is about doing the hard work of actually loving - one at a time - the people who are suffering.
I heard a great lecture a while ago on post-modernism, the very thing that no doubt gets your heart pumping in the mornings, just like mine. At any rate, the speaker identified the first 1500 or so years of Christendom as “the age of faith,” the next 400-500 the “age of reason”, and the time we are presently in as the “age of emotion.” You can hear it everywhere you go: “follow your heart,” “do what you feel is right,” “I know it because I feel it,” etc. And it’s taken hold in our religious life, as well.
Among the fastest growing churches in our country and around the world are the Pentecostals. And I can see the attraction. Pentecostals really get into worship. When they say, “Let us pray,” they do, out loud . . . and sometimes accompanied by piano, guitar, and drums as well. During the sermons, you hear responses from the whole room: “Amen . . . Hallelujah. . . Preach it, Brother!” In fact, they get their hearts into loving God maybe a little bit better than we Presbyterians. After all, they don’t call us the Frozen Chosen for nothing. The first part of the commandment is, “Love the Lord your God with all your HEART,” and we could all do a better job of it.
The next part says, “. . . with all your soul.” The Greek word is psyche, from which we get our words like psychology. It’s sort of what we think of as personality. It really means “Love the Lord your God with whatever makes you YOU. The message here is one of authenticity. There is no such thing as cookie cutter discipleship. One size does not fit all. Love the Lord your God with all YOUR soul, not someone else’s.
Then, the “mind.” Here is where we Presbyterians used to shine. We have as systematic a theology as anyone could ask for. Pastors, at least, are more than willing to spend hour upon hour in conversation about it. Ever since Calvin, we’ve been very cerebral in our approach to faith. We’ve never taught that anyone should take their head off when coming to church. God’s grace in the gospel may be beyond rational, but even with our limited resources, we will use all our brain power to make sure everyone understands as much as possible. Presbyterians have always been people of the Word, loving the Lord our God passionately with our minds. But we’re losing that emphasis, in this new 21st century, as we become more and more infected by the fuzzy emotionalism and lack of critical thinking that pervades the culture around us. And yet it is that very commitment to intellectual integrity that gives Presbyterians a unique advantage in this age - because it is in loving God with our minds that we become able to love our neighbors as God would have us do.
Now, let’s go back and remember the context that Jesus was speaking to. He was engaging in a very tense debate with people who thought that keeping the law was the be-all and end-all of their religious observance. The Pharisees who were trying to trap Jesus into saying something shocking or blasphemous would have nodded solemnly at what he was saying; they’d recognize the quote about loving God from Deuteronomy. Nothing surprising here. After all, love for God was a given (even though it might regularly need a bit of fine tuning). Jesus’ response to their question about which commandment superseded all others was the Jew’s normal call to worship: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God . . .” etc. But then Jesus added the words from Leviticus about loving your neighbor as yourself, saying that there is an inseparable relationship between all our piety, all these high-sounding things we attach to our worship of God, and the way we treat those around us.
Linking love for God and love for neighbor this directly was not the usual emphasis in those days. But it’s not new for us is it? We have heard it and heard it and heard it. It’s not rocket science. Of course, we could all do a better job of loving our neighbor. The biggest obstacles are money and time. We worry too much about whether we will have enough, because we think we need to have or do everything. God’s standard for giving money is the tithe ten percent, and God’s standard for giving time is one day out of seven, but most people figure it’s safe to short-change God because God is love, right? And love means no rules, right? Just follow your heart . . . Wrong.
Now, you already know what’s right as far as giving to the church and giving to the poor is concerned, and I trust you all are aware that you miss something important when you don’t come to worship, or don’t spend regular time in prayer and Bible study, or don’t involve yourself in the life of the church. I’m only mentioning these things in passing because I can’t resist the opportunity. But that’s not what this sermon is about. This sermon is about how to discern what the loving thing to do actually is.
The Ten Commandments have long been divided into two sections, with the first four having to do with how we relate to God, and the last five, dealing with how we relate to one another, and the link between them number five, about honoring your father and your mother. It’s really more complicated than that, but the basic division will do for now. Clearly the last five - no stealing, lying, adultery, murder, etc., spell out what “loving your neighbor” means in practice. Especially when you add Jesus’ spin on the attitudes underneath the actions mattering just as much. They’re pretty simple. Most people agree that we ought to keep them, except maybe the last one on coveting. Do we really need the first four to be “good people”?
It all depends on what you mean by love. It certainly doesn’t mean the examples of so-called love I began with. Love is not about indulgence, or smothering, or control. It isn’t even about having warm feelings for other people and feeling bad when you see tragedies on TV. What, then, is this thing we call love?
Our model for loving God’s way is, of course, Jesus Christ. In order to know what Jesus would do, we must first know what Jesus did do. What did he do? He healed people. He fed people. He freed them from demonic possession. We know all this, and we do well to imitate him. But - and this is sometimes forgotten - Jesus fed, and healed, and delivered in order that they might know that he had authority, that he was speaking on God’s behalf, and that what he said was true. He served in order that his teaching might be heard, and followed. And spoke with authority, because he knew both the Scriptures and the Father.
But the kind of love which Jesus models for us takes both discipline and discernment. It takes heart and strength, and mind. We must know the Scriptures, as well as the Father and the Son.
The first four commandments - to have no other God but God, to make no idols, to honor God’s name, to keep the Sabbath - remind us what our priorities should be. If we are not living out these commandments in our daily lives, are we not saying to other people that God is not important? Are we not communicating to our children, our friends, our co-workers that they can live complete and fulfilling lives without God at the center? Are we not “sending the message” that it doesn’t really matter what they put at the center of their lives?
Keeping those commandments reminds us who God is, and who we are in relation to God. Once we stop trusting God, we start thinking that we can make up our own solutions to society’s problems. Peter Singer, the notorious ethics professor at Princeton, believes that infanticide up to thirty days is appropriate. He says, and I quote, “Newborn babies are replaceable.” He also thinks that people who are burdens to society should be eliminated. . . he calls it, “involuntary euthanasia.” Professor Singer’s ideas are simply the natural working out of the abandonment of God as the center of our ethical judgments. The great Russian author Dostoyevsky said that if God does not exist, anything is permissible. Only if human beings are created in the image of God does it make sense to say that a damaged human being is of more value than a pet kitten or a thoroughbred horse. A common saying among those who agree with Dr. Singer is “a rat is a pig is a dog is a child.”
And although we may “feel” that this is wrong when we hear about such things, if we don’t know why, if we don’t know what God has to do with it, we will be unable to hold onto the truths that we once took for granted.
It is because God first loved us, giving us his Son to die in our place so that we might know him personally, that we are able to love God in return. And it is because God loves us that we know that even the tough rules, the ones that require us to say “no” to ourselves, are for our good.
But ignorance of God’s law makes it easy to be nice; we can just tolerate everything. In the same way that ignorance might cause people to give heroin to addicts suffering from the pains of withdrawal, or offer suicide as an option for the depressed, ignorance of God’s character and law often renders our loving feelings toward our neighbors empty or misguided. And if our loving actions continue to leave our neighbor ignorant of God, we are feeding them empty calories. It is only when we know God and respond to his love that we can become the kind of people he created us to be.
And it is only when we love God that we can give our neighbor the greatest gift of all - an invitation through Christ to be adopted into the family of God.
Love God by loving your neighbor. Love your neighbor by living God’s way. You can’t have one without the other.
