Jesus Loves God – and Us Too!
Pentecost +19, October 23, 2011
Years ago, Bonnie Raitt sang a song
lamenting an unrequited love, and the chorus went like this: “I
can't make you love me if you don't. You can't make your heart feel
something it won't...” It's a beautiful, moving song – I liked
it a lot, but it reveals a pervasive belief or opinion about love –
that love is all about how you feel, that love is primarily an
emotion. And not only that, but that it is an emotion you don't have
any power over it – you can't help yourself when you are in it, you
can't manufacture it if it isn't there - “You can't make your heart
feel something it won't,” after all.
And while that may be true of the
emotion that we call love, when that's the main thing we think or
believe about love, it makes hearing and understanding the gospel
lesson for today quite a challenge. Because we hear the lawyer
question Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the
greatest?” - the most important. And Jesus replies, “'You shall
love the Lord your God will all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your mind.' This is the 1st and greatest commandment. And a
second is like it. 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On
these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
So, it all boils down to this: Love
God, and love your neighbor. And we all know that we should love God
with all that we are, and we all know that we should love others –
but our minds protest - “Have you met some of my neighbors, God?”
Could be our literal neighbors, the ones we may or may not
appreciate living nearby, or it could be the mouthy kid at school or
your co-worker who always tries to make himself look good at your
expense, or the stranger halfway around the world who seems to live
in a way completely contrary to our way of life... Jesus considers
everyone our neighbor – And we think about those people we have a
hard time even being in the same room with, and then hear Jesus say,
“Love them as yourself” - and think, “That's impossible!”
But when Jesus talks about love, he's
not talking about the way that we feel. It's not about passion or
warm fuzzy feelings. No, biblical love is about action. Biblical
love is not about the way that we feel, it's about the things that we
do!
Now, I'd bet that the Pharisees
probably knew that already. What Jesus says here about loving God
and loving neighbor was hardly a new concept – you can see it way
back in the lesson from Leviticus. But the Pharisees struggled as
much as any of us do to put those commandments into practice. They
made it their life's work to try to tell people how to correctly live
to show their love for God, but they didn't do so well with loving
their neighbors. We're not gonna get to read chapter 23 in church
any time soon – we have readings for Reformation Sunday next week
instead – but I went ahead and took a sneak peak. (You can too, if
you want!) But what comes next is Jesus just lambasting the
Pharisees and scribes for a whole host of things. You get a whole
series of “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” from
Jesus there. He really goes after them – because they teach the
law, but they don't live it out. They don't love their neighbors as
themselves. Instead, he says, you tie up heavy burdens and lay them
on others, and then don't lift a finger to help them. “You lock
people out of heaven,” he says, and stop them from entering if they
somehow figure out a way in. You focus on the little things of the
law, like tithing mint, and dill, and cumin (have you looked at dill
or cumin lately?) - but neglect the weightier matters of the law –
things like justice and mercy and faith. “You strain out a gnat,
but swallow a camel!” Jesus goes after them, because they hold
everyone else to impossibly high standards, but then don't follow
through themselves. They make it harder for people to come to God,
to love God with all they are, instead of helping them to experience
God's love. They are an example of what it looks like when you are
not loving your neighbor.
And by Jesus' explosion against them
that we start to see what it does mean to love our neighbor as
ourselves. It means extending grace, instead of adding guilt. It
means offering to help, instead of laying on more burdens. It means
attending to things like justice and mercy and faith every day, in
our actions, in our decisions, in our words. It means considering
the other and their needs and giving them at least as much weight as
our own wants and desires. Loving our neighbor is not about a
feeling towards the other, but rather, how we act and live and how we
treat each other – with dignity and respect, striving to see a
child of God in each person we meet, even, and especially when that
is difficult.
Loving our neighbor is also part of
what it means to love God. You can't love God if you don't love your
neighbor, because God loves our neighbor as much as God loves us, and
wants us to treat one another well. And loving God with all we are
and have – with all of our heart and mind and strength – well,
that will help us to become the kind of people who love our neighbor,
because as we draw closer to God, God changes us. We become more
like God – we grow into the love that God shows us.
These commandments aren't easy.
There's so much that would pull us away from these ideals – both in
the world around us and in our own inner lives. So we look to Jesus,
and there we see what it looks like for someone to fully love God and
his neighbor as himself. His whole life was devoted to God, to
loving God – and that love overflows to us. In loving God, Jesus
loves us all, to the very end. He loves us with everything that he
has, loves us so much that he holds nothing back, and he proves that
love by dying on the cross to save us.
May he lead us to love God and our
neighbor in the same self-giving, selfless way.
Amen.
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