The Rule of Love
Matthew 5:21-30[1]
I think many of us have a “love-hate” relationship with rules.
We love rules when they protect our rights. We especially love rules when we
see someone else violating a rule that we think is important. But if a rule may
be too “confining” to us, we can rather easily toss it aside. After all, “Rules
were made to be broken,” right? And the funny thing is that our selective
approach to “keeping” the rules seems perfectly logical. Traffic laws are, I
think, a perfect case in point. If someone else is “riding our tail,” or “cuts
us off,” or is exceeding the speed limit (at least more than we are), we can
become positively indignant. But we barely notice when we break the same rules!
Many Christians have this same approach to the “rules” in
Scripture. We have our favorite commandments, the ones that we scrupulously
observe. The ones we think everybody ought to follow. And we all have those
commandments that we tend to “overlook.” We get scandalized by people who break
the Bible’s teachings that we think define what a “good Christian” should do.
But when it comes to the precepts we ignore, we find all kinds of reasons to
justify why it’s perfectly fine for us to do so. It’s a rather fickle approach
to “following the instructions of the Lord” (Ps. 119:1, NLT).
Jesus took a very different approach to the rules. To him, they
were commands from God, the very “word of God,” and therefore to be fulfilled.
In fact, in last week’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, we heard him say
that he had come not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.
And he went on to emphasize this by saying, “truly I tell you, until heaven and
earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the
law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:18). Jesus clearly did not advocate
ignoring the teachings of Scripture that we have come to think of as obsolete!
There is, however, a difference about the way Jesus approached
the commands of Scripture. The manner of fulfilling them that he advocated was
very different from many in his day. He did not approve of the shallow legalism
that enabled people to “pick and choose” randomly which commands they would
follow and which they would ignore. In fact, he regularly raked the religious leaders
over the coals for “straining a gnat but swallowing a camel” (Matt 23:24) by
doing things like meticulously tithing even the herbs from their garden but
ignoring justice and mercy. This picking and choosing on a whim is not the
integrity God desires.
What distinguished Jesus’ approach to the commands was that he
insisted that true obedience comes from the heart. He emphasized that what is
most important is not just your actions, but your motivations. In our reading
from the gospel of Matthew for today, Jesus gave concrete examples of what this
means. It means that we not only don’t kill as the commandment said, we also
try to make peace with others rather than holding a grudge. For Jesus, keeping
the commands means that we not only avoid cheating on our spouses, we also
relate to others with pure motives rather than using them to satisfy our own
desires. Jesus taught us to follow not simply the “letter of the law,” but also
the “spirit of the law.”
St. Augustine, one of the leaders of the ancient church, said it
this way: “Love, and do what you will.”[2] In
the context, Augustine says that only love can determine the quality of one’s
actions. It seems likely, then, that he is thinking about the command to “love
your neighbor as yourself.” In this respect he is following the example of
Jesus and the Apostles, who spoke with one voice in teaching that loving others
fulfills the whole law. Every command that God could desire us to follow is
summarized in that one command: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Based on this, I think we can say that the way for us to “follow
the instructions of the Lord” as people of integrity is to practice the rule of
love. This is different from the “love” that we associate with infatuation.
This kind of love is what you do when you really care enough about another
human being to set your needs and wants and expectations aside. It’s what you
do when you simply give yourself to others. Whether it’s feeding the hungry, or
clothing the poor, or comforting the sick and dying—or just listening enough to
others to really hear them—to love another person means to give of yourself
without thinking about “what am I going to get out of this?” This kind of love
treats others as “friends” in the truest sense of the word. This kind of love
expresses itself in actions that seek what is best for others. This is the rule
of love that the Bible teaches us to practice.
When we consider the “rules” of Scripture, they can be
overwhelming to us. There are 613 commands in the Torah alone! I would say that Jesus’ approach to the commands of
Scripture both makes it easier and harder for us. It’s easier, because instead
of 613 “rules,” we just need to remember one: the rule of love. If our actions
are consistent with loving others truly, then we don’t have to worry. But Jesus
also makes it harder. The external rules of the law are such that you can
“check them off.” No murder. Check. No stealing. Check. And so on. But you can
never “check off” the rule of love. It will take our whole lives to learn what
it means to “follow the instructions of the Lord” by practicing the rule of
love.
[1]
© 2020 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 2/16/2020 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2]
Augustine, Ten Homilies on the first
Epistle of John, 7.8 (on 1 John 4:4–12); https://ccel.org/s/schaff/npnf107/cache/npnf107.pdf
(p.862).
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