Grounded in Love
Matthew 22:34-40[1]
I’ve mentioned before that one of the challenges we face
these days is that there are so many people who believe they can live their
lives without any need for God. The fact is that this isn’t a new development.
It started over two hundred years ago, in the age known as the “Enlightenment.”
For centuries the church had focused so exclusively on God as the only “true”
reality that it stifled most of what we would see as a healthy appreciation of
what it means to be human. That may be hard for us to grasp because the shift
that took place then has become the foundation for our way of life. Most of
what we occupy ourselves with these days focuses on some facet of human life. It’s
hard for us to imagine that being any different.
To some extent that shift was a good thing. The repressive
policies of the church in the Middle Ages made God out to be someone to be
feared, not loved. We needed to rediscover a healthy appreciation of who we are
as human beings. Unfortunately, as with many good efforts to effect change, the
shift of attention from the creator to the creature as the measure for how to
live opened the “pandora’s box” of problems we’re dealing with now. In a very
real sense, what we are seeing today is the unintended result of well-meaning
efforts by thinkers like Immanuel Kant to locate our motivation for living
within ourselves. And the result is that we live in a time when generations of people
exclude God from their lives altogether.
We’ve all heard the rationalization: “Church people are all
hypocrites. I can be a good and kind person without the church.” It’s true that
those of us in the church fail to live up to the faith we profess much more
frequently than we would care to admit. And it’s also true that there are
people in the world who have become good and kind human beings without any
significant influence from organized religion or even a belief in God. I would
say, however, that in my experience that is the exception. For many people, what
they call “love” is motivated by what they can get out of it, not by what they
can give. In my experience, for us to become truly loving human beings, our
love has to be grounded in God’s love.
I think that’s one of the lessons from the interaction
between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders in our Gospel reading for today.
At the end of a debate that the religious leaders had been carrying on with
Jesus, hoping to make a fool out of him in front of the people who followed him,
one Torah scholar asks him which of
God’s commands was “great,” or most important. The first part of Jesus’ answer
would have come as no surprise to anyone present. The commandment Jesus
identified as the “first” came from the Shema,
which was and still is the heart of the Jewish faith (Deut 6:5): “You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all
your mind” (Mt 22:37). What may have been surprising to those who were
questioning Jesus is the fact that he added a “second” commandment that he said
was “like” the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:39; Lev
19:18). It’s very likely Jesus was the first one to bring these two commands
together and link them to one another in this way.
These days, we assume they go together. Since the time of
the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago, we’ve been taught that the command to
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart” summarizes the first part of the
Ten Commandments. And we’ve been taught that the command to “Love your neighbor
as yourself” summarizes the second part. And I would say this is consistent with
the general framework of faith in the Bible: everything begins with God’s love
for us. We who have the joy of experiencing God’s unconditional and irrevocable
love for us respond by loving God with all our hearts. And we demonstrate our
love for God by the love we show others, treating them with respect, fairness,
and kindness. For those of us who have been raised in biblical faith, this is
the bedrock of our lives: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love
your neighbor as yourself.
Unfortunately, in practice it’s not as simple as that. So
much of life these days revolves around “self.” In fact, many people write an
orientation toward “self” into these two “great” commandments. The line goes
something like this: “You can’t love someone else unless you love yourself, so
‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ means you should love yourself first.” While
it’s true that we can only give love to the extent that we have a healthy sense
of self, that is most definitely not what Jesus was talking about here.
And in practice, while I know this point of view is well-meaning, and there is
some truth to it, I’m afraid that all too often it becomes just another excuse
for making our lives all about getting what we want.
That’s not what Jesus was talking about. He was talking
about a way of life that involves caring for the “least of these,” even (and
especially) when it means going out of your way or stepping outside your
“comfort zones.” If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve actually done
that, you know that it takes more than a “healthy sense of yourself” to
motivate you to make the sacrifices it takes. Most of us in this culture have
very little firsthand experience with helping people living in the crushing
poverty that oppresses so many people in this world every day. Those who do have
such experience know that it involves exposing yourself to disease, unsafe
drinking water, the danger of theft or even kidnapping, not to mention the
exhausting pace of trying to do all you can for so many needy people in a
relatively short time.
“Loving yourself first” can’t motivate you to love others
like that. Only God’s love for us can do that. I’ll be the first one to admit
that the church is an imperfect place to learn about God’s love. And the way
some churches operate can leave you wondering whether God is loving at all. But
churches full of flawed but caring people are the places where most of us come
to experience God’s unconditional and irrevocable love for us. In my
experience, only God’s love has the power to motivate, and keep on motivating
us, to love the people around us in the way that Jesus modeled for us. And not
just the people who are like us, but all the people around us. Particularly the
ones who are difficult to love. And even more so those who push us outside our
sense of safety or comfort. We need a way of life that’s grounded in God’s love
for us to be able to love other people the way Jesus taught us to love.
[1] ©
2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by
Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/29/2023 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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