Sermon: 24 Pentecost (26 October 2008)
(Deuteronomy 34:1-12/Psalm 1/1Thessalonians 3:1-8/Matthew 22:34-46)
Love and Orthodoxy
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I took an online quiz this past week to see if I am an orthodox Christian – orthodox with a small o. The quiz really just checked my understanding of the most fundamental tenets of the faith as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, and my willingness to affirm them as true. Do you know the Creed and do you believe the Creed? These were the questions. You should be pleased to know that I passed: fully orthodox with respect to the Creed.
I followed that quiz with another one – this one a bit more thoughtful and challenging – a quiz to see if I am a heretic. This quiz investigated my understanding of the natures of Christ (two natures – human and divine – in one person) and the natures of sin and salvation. According to the results I am 98 percent Chalcedon-compliant. That means I strongly agree with the Fourth Ecumenical Council of the Church, the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.), which defined such things for the church and which condemned several heresies. The other 2 percent doesn’t trouble me: more than 2 percent of the church doesn’t agree with Chalcedon and more than 2 percent of the quiz questions were poorly written anyway. So, it seems that I am walking the right path of the true faith, and leading us all in that direction together.
All my life I’ve been given quizzes to check my orthodoxy; you have, too, if you have grown up in the church. The questions differ from denomination to denomination, but the intent is always the same: to determine if you are one of us or one of them. Maybe you’ve been asked one or more of these questions in one form or another.
1. Do you acknowledge the infallibility of the Pope and the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church?
2. Do you believe one is saved solely by grace, solely through faith, and solely in the name of Jesus Christ?
3. Do you regard baptism as essential for salvation?
4. Do you accept the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist?
5. Do you hold Scripture to be the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God?
6. Do you pray to Mary and the saints?
7. Do you employ musical instruments in worship?
8. Do you smoke, dance, drink, or chew – or run around with girls who do?
The list is seemingly endless – some of the issues essential and some less than trivial. People of faith tend to be suspicious of one another. I guess it’s only natural; we are dealing with ultimate issues of life-and-death importance. We want to be right. I suspect it has always been this way; it certainly was for Jesus.
Today the Pharisees come to quiz Jesus’ orthodoxy: Is this rabbi from Nazareth a good Jew or not? So, they ask him, “Rabbi, what is the greatest commandment?” Well, this isn’t a difficult question – certainly not compared to many that Jesus has been asked recently. It’s a test, certainly – a test of orthodoxy – but not really a trap. What is the greatest commandment?
To answer this question, Jesus has only to remember his prayers: practices and words he learned as a boy from Mary and Joseph. Twice each day, every orthodox Jew of Jesus’ day – almost certainly including Jesus, himself – recited the shema:
Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!
And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your might (Dt 6:4-5, NAS).
This is the beginning of the Law and everything flows from it down to and through the prophets’ message. What better candidate for the greatest commandment? And so Jesus responds to the Pharisees: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment” (Mt 22:37-38, NIV). But Jesus doesn’t stop here: he adds his own twist to the shema by linking this absolute love for God with a derivative love for those created in God’s image.
“And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Mt 22:39-40, NIV).
Perhaps commenting on this very exchange with the Pharisees some decades later, St. John the Apostle writes:
If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother (1 John 4:20-21, NIV).
I’ve heard it said that true love is cross-shaped: it stretches vertically upward toward God – the first and greatest commandment – and it spreads its arms horizontally to embrace neighbors and even enemies – the second, related commandment. To say that love is cross-shaped gets it right on many levels.
So it would seem that Jesus passes this test of orthodoxy. The parallel account in St. Mark’s gospel makes this explicit when one of the Pharisees responds: “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mk 12:32-33, NIV). It seems that not even the Pharisees can quibble over the orthodoxy of the shema.
I’ve seen – perhaps you have, too – Jesus’ answer used today as a test of Christian orthodoxy, as a very concise, summary of the essentials of the faith. At the home of an excellent campus ministry at The University of Tennessee, I once heard a guest speaker tell the gathered students that the gospel boils down to loving God and loving people. Judging by the nodding heads and the hands raised in agreement – hands raised at the prompting of the speaker – it seemed that love was the primary test of orthodoxy on that night, in that place. And, of course, love is also what the non-Christian world says it wants from us: not myths, not faith, not doctrine – just love that goes along, and gets along, and mainly lets people alone to do as they please.
But here I remember Einstein who once said that everything should be made as simple as possible – but no simpler. I fear that when we have simplified the gospel to love for God and neighbor we may have made it too simple and lost some things essential in the process. Without the fullness of the gospel – the proclamation that through his life, death, and resurrection Jesus is declared Lord and God of all creation, and has begun to put that creation to rights – without this fullness of the gospel, I suspect that love for God and neighbor fails at two essential points:
(1) We don’t really know what love means, and
(2) Even if we did, we are really unable to pull it off, to love as we should and must.
Imagine Moses, following the Exodus experience, coming down from Mount Sinai with tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God. He announces to the people gathered below: “Behold, the 2 Commandments of God! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and soul and might, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. To live this law is blessing; to disobey is curse. Go and do.” There is a pause; no one moves. Then, Shlomo, in the front row, raises his hand. “Uh, Moshe…I’m not quite clear on all this. The love God thing – what does that mean, what does that look like?”
“Well, you’ve got a wife and kids, Shlomo: I know your beautiful Miriam and little Yitzak. You love them, don’t you? You know what love is. Now go and love God, only much better – with all your heart and soul and might,” Moses says.
But God didn’t leave the Hebrews to figure out this love on their own or to reason by analogy to human love. How did God really tell the Hebrews at Sinai to love him? Let’s scan part of the record.
1 When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you- 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession (Dt 7:1-6, NIV).
Any chance Shlomo would have come up with that on his own? No? Well, what about the dietary laws: kosher and treif – clean and unclean? What about prohibitions on mixing fabrics or shaving forelocks or planting two kinds of seed in one field? What about the requirement to have tassels on your undershirt or to camp out in shelters made of branches during Sukkot – the Feast of Tabernacles – or to clean leaven out of your home in preparation for Pesach? What about the mandate to circumcise males on the eighth day or to redeem the family’s firstborn child from God? What about resting on the Sabbath and making it a day of rest for slaves and animals, as well? Would Shlomo – or any good Hebrew – intent on loving God with all his heart and soul and might have come up with any of these things? I doubt it. And that is the problem with fuzzy statements like, All we need to do is love God: we do not know what love for God looks like until God tells us. It took the Law of Moses, the leadership of Joshua and the Judges, the priesthood of Samuel, the Psalms of David, the words of the prophets – it took all these revelations from God to even begin to unpack that greatest commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. We dare not depend upon our own feeble, selfish, wholly inadequate notions of love.
Even the Law and the Judges and the priests and the kings and the prophets were not enough to teach us to love God. It took God himself, in the form of man – a Galilean, peasant rabbi named Jesus – to teach us what love truly is. St. John, that great evangelist of love, puts it this way:
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:9-10, NIV).
Only in Jesus do we come to know what perfect love – love with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – really looks like. Only in Gethsemane when he cries out to God in anguished surrender, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done!” do we come to know what perfect love – love with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – really looks like. Only at the cross, where a God-forsaken criminal bears the sin of all creation and yet surrenders his spirit in trust to God, do we come to know what perfect love – love with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – really looks like. It is simply not enough to say, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – unless you also say, Jesus. Love as Jesus loved; that’s what love looks like.
And the second commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself? Do we really have any better idea of what this means? Would the Hebrews have guessed that neighborly love required them to leave the borders of their fields unharvested, or to give slaves and animals one day of rest each week, or to charge no interest on loans, or to return all property to its original owners every Jubilee year, or to build railings around the roofs of their homes, or to obey any of the scores of other commandments meant to ensure equitable, loving treatment for all God’s people? Without the revelation of the Law, the Hebrews simply could not have known what neighborly love is.
Even that revelation is incomplete; once again, it takes Jesus. The leitmotif – the recurring theme of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – is “You have heard it said [in the Law], but I say to you…” The Law – a necessary first step – was itself inadequate to define true neighborly love. We have not said “love” until we have said “Jesus.”
43"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:43-48, NIV).
Only in Jesus do we come to know what perfect love for our neighbor – And who is not our neighbor? – really looks like. Only in Gethsemane when he cries out to God in anguished surrender, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done!” do we come to know what perfect love for our neighbor – And who is not our neighbor? – really looks like. Only at the cross, where a God-forsaken criminal bears the sin of all creation – all neighbors, all enemies – and yet surrenders his spirit in trust to God, do we come to know what perfect love for our neighbor – And who is not our neighbor? – really looks like. It is simply not enough to say, Love your neighbor as yourself – unless you also say, Jesus. Love as Jesus loved; that’s what love looks like.
And even if we gaze on Jesus and come to know what it means to love God wholly and to love our neighbor truly we find another, deeper problem lurking: we are really unable to pull it off, to love as we should and must. World history is testimony to our inability to love. War is testimony to our inability to love. Greed – of which we have seen so much lately -- is testimony to our inability to love. Borders are testimony to our inability to love. Divorce courts, and civil courts, and criminal courts are testimony to our inability to love. A wife’s tears and a husband’s anger and a child’s worry are testimony to our inability to love. Homelessness is testimony to our inability to love. Every five ticks of the watch’s second hand – five seconds that marks the needless death of a child due to hunger related illness – is testimony to our inability to love. The darkness of my heart – and dare I say yours? – is testimony to our inability to love.
What is the answer to my inability to love as I should and as I must? Jesus. His words to Nicodemus are his words to me and to you and to the world: You must be born anew. You must be born from above. Love doesn’t rise from the earth; it descends from above – from the Father, in the person of the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit. St. John again –
1Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. 2This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. 3This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, 4for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. 5Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God (1 John 5:1-5, NIV).
Through the grace of God, the Spirit gives us new birth in Jesus. This is true love for God: to give ourselves – heart, soul, and mind – to Jesus, and then, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to love as Jesus loved. Is it a struggle? Of course it is. But only in Jesus, only in following him, do we come to know what love is and are we empowered to love God wholly and love our neighbor as ourselves. And that is, after all, the greatest commandment. Amen.
(Deuteronomy 34:1-12/Psalm 1/1Thessalonians 3:1-8/Matthew 22:34-46)
Love and Orthodoxy
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I took an online quiz this past week to see if I am an orthodox Christian – orthodox with a small o. The quiz really just checked my understanding of the most fundamental tenets of the faith as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, and my willingness to affirm them as true. Do you know the Creed and do you believe the Creed? These were the questions. You should be pleased to know that I passed: fully orthodox with respect to the Creed.
I followed that quiz with another one – this one a bit more thoughtful and challenging – a quiz to see if I am a heretic. This quiz investigated my understanding of the natures of Christ (two natures – human and divine – in one person) and the natures of sin and salvation. According to the results I am 98 percent Chalcedon-compliant. That means I strongly agree with the Fourth Ecumenical Council of the Church, the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.), which defined such things for the church and which condemned several heresies. The other 2 percent doesn’t trouble me: more than 2 percent of the church doesn’t agree with Chalcedon and more than 2 percent of the quiz questions were poorly written anyway. So, it seems that I am walking the right path of the true faith, and leading us all in that direction together.
All my life I’ve been given quizzes to check my orthodoxy; you have, too, if you have grown up in the church. The questions differ from denomination to denomination, but the intent is always the same: to determine if you are one of us or one of them. Maybe you’ve been asked one or more of these questions in one form or another.
1. Do you acknowledge the infallibility of the Pope and the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church?
2. Do you believe one is saved solely by grace, solely through faith, and solely in the name of Jesus Christ?
3. Do you regard baptism as essential for salvation?
4. Do you accept the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist?
5. Do you hold Scripture to be the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God?
6. Do you pray to Mary and the saints?
7. Do you employ musical instruments in worship?
8. Do you smoke, dance, drink, or chew – or run around with girls who do?
The list is seemingly endless – some of the issues essential and some less than trivial. People of faith tend to be suspicious of one another. I guess it’s only natural; we are dealing with ultimate issues of life-and-death importance. We want to be right. I suspect it has always been this way; it certainly was for Jesus.
Today the Pharisees come to quiz Jesus’ orthodoxy: Is this rabbi from Nazareth a good Jew or not? So, they ask him, “Rabbi, what is the greatest commandment?” Well, this isn’t a difficult question – certainly not compared to many that Jesus has been asked recently. It’s a test, certainly – a test of orthodoxy – but not really a trap. What is the greatest commandment?
To answer this question, Jesus has only to remember his prayers: practices and words he learned as a boy from Mary and Joseph. Twice each day, every orthodox Jew of Jesus’ day – almost certainly including Jesus, himself – recited the shema:
Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!
And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your might (Dt 6:4-5, NAS).
This is the beginning of the Law and everything flows from it down to and through the prophets’ message. What better candidate for the greatest commandment? And so Jesus responds to the Pharisees: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment” (Mt 22:37-38, NIV). But Jesus doesn’t stop here: he adds his own twist to the shema by linking this absolute love for God with a derivative love for those created in God’s image.
“And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Mt 22:39-40, NIV).
Perhaps commenting on this very exchange with the Pharisees some decades later, St. John the Apostle writes:
If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother (1 John 4:20-21, NIV).
I’ve heard it said that true love is cross-shaped: it stretches vertically upward toward God – the first and greatest commandment – and it spreads its arms horizontally to embrace neighbors and even enemies – the second, related commandment. To say that love is cross-shaped gets it right on many levels.
So it would seem that Jesus passes this test of orthodoxy. The parallel account in St. Mark’s gospel makes this explicit when one of the Pharisees responds: “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mk 12:32-33, NIV). It seems that not even the Pharisees can quibble over the orthodoxy of the shema.
I’ve seen – perhaps you have, too – Jesus’ answer used today as a test of Christian orthodoxy, as a very concise, summary of the essentials of the faith. At the home of an excellent campus ministry at The University of Tennessee, I once heard a guest speaker tell the gathered students that the gospel boils down to loving God and loving people. Judging by the nodding heads and the hands raised in agreement – hands raised at the prompting of the speaker – it seemed that love was the primary test of orthodoxy on that night, in that place. And, of course, love is also what the non-Christian world says it wants from us: not myths, not faith, not doctrine – just love that goes along, and gets along, and mainly lets people alone to do as they please.
But here I remember Einstein who once said that everything should be made as simple as possible – but no simpler. I fear that when we have simplified the gospel to love for God and neighbor we may have made it too simple and lost some things essential in the process. Without the fullness of the gospel – the proclamation that through his life, death, and resurrection Jesus is declared Lord and God of all creation, and has begun to put that creation to rights – without this fullness of the gospel, I suspect that love for God and neighbor fails at two essential points:
(1) We don’t really know what love means, and
(2) Even if we did, we are really unable to pull it off, to love as we should and must.
Imagine Moses, following the Exodus experience, coming down from Mount Sinai with tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God. He announces to the people gathered below: “Behold, the 2 Commandments of God! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and soul and might, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. To live this law is blessing; to disobey is curse. Go and do.” There is a pause; no one moves. Then, Shlomo, in the front row, raises his hand. “Uh, Moshe…I’m not quite clear on all this. The love God thing – what does that mean, what does that look like?”
“Well, you’ve got a wife and kids, Shlomo: I know your beautiful Miriam and little Yitzak. You love them, don’t you? You know what love is. Now go and love God, only much better – with all your heart and soul and might,” Moses says.
But God didn’t leave the Hebrews to figure out this love on their own or to reason by analogy to human love. How did God really tell the Hebrews at Sinai to love him? Let’s scan part of the record.
1 When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you- 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession (Dt 7:1-6, NIV).
Any chance Shlomo would have come up with that on his own? No? Well, what about the dietary laws: kosher and treif – clean and unclean? What about prohibitions on mixing fabrics or shaving forelocks or planting two kinds of seed in one field? What about the requirement to have tassels on your undershirt or to camp out in shelters made of branches during Sukkot – the Feast of Tabernacles – or to clean leaven out of your home in preparation for Pesach? What about the mandate to circumcise males on the eighth day or to redeem the family’s firstborn child from God? What about resting on the Sabbath and making it a day of rest for slaves and animals, as well? Would Shlomo – or any good Hebrew – intent on loving God with all his heart and soul and might have come up with any of these things? I doubt it. And that is the problem with fuzzy statements like, All we need to do is love God: we do not know what love for God looks like until God tells us. It took the Law of Moses, the leadership of Joshua and the Judges, the priesthood of Samuel, the Psalms of David, the words of the prophets – it took all these revelations from God to even begin to unpack that greatest commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. We dare not depend upon our own feeble, selfish, wholly inadequate notions of love.
Even the Law and the Judges and the priests and the kings and the prophets were not enough to teach us to love God. It took God himself, in the form of man – a Galilean, peasant rabbi named Jesus – to teach us what love truly is. St. John, that great evangelist of love, puts it this way:
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:9-10, NIV).
Only in Jesus do we come to know what perfect love – love with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – really looks like. Only in Gethsemane when he cries out to God in anguished surrender, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done!” do we come to know what perfect love – love with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – really looks like. Only at the cross, where a God-forsaken criminal bears the sin of all creation and yet surrenders his spirit in trust to God, do we come to know what perfect love – love with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – really looks like. It is simply not enough to say, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind – unless you also say, Jesus. Love as Jesus loved; that’s what love looks like.
And the second commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself? Do we really have any better idea of what this means? Would the Hebrews have guessed that neighborly love required them to leave the borders of their fields unharvested, or to give slaves and animals one day of rest each week, or to charge no interest on loans, or to return all property to its original owners every Jubilee year, or to build railings around the roofs of their homes, or to obey any of the scores of other commandments meant to ensure equitable, loving treatment for all God’s people? Without the revelation of the Law, the Hebrews simply could not have known what neighborly love is.
Even that revelation is incomplete; once again, it takes Jesus. The leitmotif – the recurring theme of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – is “You have heard it said [in the Law], but I say to you…” The Law – a necessary first step – was itself inadequate to define true neighborly love. We have not said “love” until we have said “Jesus.”
43"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:43-48, NIV).
Only in Jesus do we come to know what perfect love for our neighbor – And who is not our neighbor? – really looks like. Only in Gethsemane when he cries out to God in anguished surrender, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done!” do we come to know what perfect love for our neighbor – And who is not our neighbor? – really looks like. Only at the cross, where a God-forsaken criminal bears the sin of all creation – all neighbors, all enemies – and yet surrenders his spirit in trust to God, do we come to know what perfect love for our neighbor – And who is not our neighbor? – really looks like. It is simply not enough to say, Love your neighbor as yourself – unless you also say, Jesus. Love as Jesus loved; that’s what love looks like.
And even if we gaze on Jesus and come to know what it means to love God wholly and to love our neighbor truly we find another, deeper problem lurking: we are really unable to pull it off, to love as we should and must. World history is testimony to our inability to love. War is testimony to our inability to love. Greed – of which we have seen so much lately -- is testimony to our inability to love. Borders are testimony to our inability to love. Divorce courts, and civil courts, and criminal courts are testimony to our inability to love. A wife’s tears and a husband’s anger and a child’s worry are testimony to our inability to love. Homelessness is testimony to our inability to love. Every five ticks of the watch’s second hand – five seconds that marks the needless death of a child due to hunger related illness – is testimony to our inability to love. The darkness of my heart – and dare I say yours? – is testimony to our inability to love.
What is the answer to my inability to love as I should and as I must? Jesus. His words to Nicodemus are his words to me and to you and to the world: You must be born anew. You must be born from above. Love doesn’t rise from the earth; it descends from above – from the Father, in the person of the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit. St. John again –
1Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. 2This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. 3This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, 4for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. 5Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God (1 John 5:1-5, NIV).
Through the grace of God, the Spirit gives us new birth in Jesus. This is true love for God: to give ourselves – heart, soul, and mind – to Jesus, and then, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to love as Jesus loved. Is it a struggle? Of course it is. But only in Jesus, only in following him, do we come to know what love is and are we empowered to love God wholly and love our neighbor as ourselves. And that is, after all, the greatest commandment. Amen.
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