1 John 4:7-21; Matthew 22:34-40
April 19, 2009: Second Sunday of Easter
It is Easter! Christ is risen and we celebrate the resurrection. But what is the resurrection? Well, if you are wanting a one word answer, you will be disappointed. For that matter, if you are looking for a definitive answer at all, you will be disappointed. But, if you want to explore during this Easter season what the resurrection might mean for how we live our lives, then you have come to the right place. You see, the resurrection is better lived than articulated.
In the resurrection, the human Jesus becomes the living Christ. And Christ is not a person somewhere, or even an idea. Christ is action…Christ is a verb. Christ is what we are doing when we are living out our faith in accordance with God’s call and commandments. Together, we are Christ in this world, moving about, loving, healing, sharing, eating with sinners, daring, stirring things up. Each of these is Christ…each of us is a part of this Christ.
Each week in the Easter season, we will look at a verb that defines what it means to be Christ in this world; verbs like sharing, feeding, forgiving. But this week we start with the verb Jesus calls the greatest commandment: Love.
Surely this is the basis for all other Christian actions. Love. There are many Churches and Christians who attempt to express the message of the gospel in specific, particular rules and behaviors, creeds and doctrines. In the interchange between Jesus and the lawyer in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is given the opportunity to do just that; to name specific laws that require particular behavior. But he refuses. “Love Yahweh with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself”. Love of God and love of others – on this hangs everything else. In Jesus’ time, everything else could be found in the law and the prophets. Love of God and love of others leads to the kind of world and community supported by the laws of the Torah and the visions of the prophets.
The greatest commandment cannot be found in one of the detailed 613 laws in the Torah. The greatest commandment is one that transcends these particularities. Notice, Jesus does not say that these love commandments replace the torah or the prophets. Instead, he indicates that when we love God and love our neighbor, we simply will be faithful to God’s laws and led to just behaviors. Love is the key; love is the starting point; everything else flows from that.
The author of 1 John points to love as the key as well. He elevates love as the highest purpose. He actually names God “love”; equates God with love. He doesn’t say that love is one of many attributes of God. Rather love is the very essence and being of God. They are one and the same thing.
So, if love is the key – the highest purpose upon which everything else hangs, what is it? What is love? That may seem like a silly question. Of course we know what love is. We say it all the time: “I love you.” We feel it toward our spouses, children, family, friends. But, it’s this “all the time” aspect that I think actually diminishes our understanding of what Jesus and the author of 1 John mean when they say “love”. In our use – or rather overuse – of the word love, we have watered it down to a sentiment, a feeling. We toss it about as if it is easy to love someone or to live out love in general. I don’t think that fits with the gospel message of love.
The Onion is a satirical newspaper that, through fake and humorous news stories offers parodies of our lives. It’s incredibly popular – and I have to admit that I am a fan. They wrote an article this week titled “Concerts Held to Wish Poor Good Luck”. “More than 40 artists,” the article says, “performed at six simultaneous concerts across the globe as part of a new benefit show to wish the world’s desperately impoverished the best of luck.” It goes on to quote Al Gore as saying, “I hope you will join me in extending a hand of friendship to the have-nots, shaking their hand once and then walking away.” I think the best articles in the Onion are both funny and have a twinge of painful truth to them. Too often we think the sentiment is what counts when it comes to love. But if this is true, then wishing someone good luck could be the same as love.
There is a common assumption in our churches and culture that spirituality, and Christianity in particular, is primarily about interiority -- about feeling a certain way about God, about other people, and about one's self. Our texts point out the lie in that. In the first-century Mediterranean world, "love" was not a vague warm feeling toward someone, but a pattern of action -- attachment to a person backed up with behavior. Interior emotional states just weren't a focus of the first followers of Jesus. One early Christian wrote about this in a letter to his fellow believers:
“If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” This comes from the New Testament book of James, but I think if the author of this passage lived today, they could be a staff writer for the Onion.
Another early Christian, the author of 1 John, was writing in response to a division that had arisen within his Christian community. What began as a unified movement founded by the beloved disciple in the gospel of John had become a church with deep rifts and disagreements about what it meant to be Christian. As always, in our bible we only have one side of the disagreement and have to infer what was going on, but it is safe to say these two groups had different interpretations of what the Christian life looked like. It was not merely a doctrinal dispute – although that was there too. It was a dispute about what those doctrines implied.
The author of our passage was concerned that part of the Christian community believed it was ultimately the sentiment that counted. He said the Christian doctrine of love always implied action. There was no such thing as just a feeling of love. If all you have is a feeling, but don’t act in love toward others, you really don’t understand love and you really don’t know God – the very definition of Love.
So love is an action. That is clear. But it doesn’t stop there; it is even more than that. It is more than a feeling and it is more than just acting kindly toward others.
I have heard many people say – both to me personally and in the media and popular culture – that Christianity can be summed up in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And it is certainly a great starting point and a concept Jesus embraces: Love your neighbor as yourself. But it is not the same thing as the love Jesus was talking about here. He is quick to relate this Golden Rule to the law and the prophets. And the law and the prophets were about justice – about community and how we care for the most vulnerable among us. The Golden Rule gets at love as action, but it does not necessarily include justice: the goal of all the law and the prophets.
Paul Tillich was a theologian in the middle to late 20th century. He was struggling against a liberal tide that wanted to reduce the gospel to just being kind toward others. A message not unlike what the mainline churches espouse today. In a sermon he gave, Tillich said, “The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the tremendous assertion by John that God is love infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. The measure of what we do to [others] cannot be our wishes about what they do to us. For our wishes,” he writes, “express not only our [best selves] but also our [worst selves], and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule.”
We might, for example, forgive something prematurely out of our own interest in being forgiven ourselves before we have been held truly accountable. Think about the news this week. President Obama released the infamous “torture memos”. At the same time, he promised that no CIA operatives would be prosecuted if they tortured people under the legal guidance of these memos. “Let’s not dwell in the past,” Obama said. This is not love. It may be the golden rule: forgive those who were only following orders just as we would want to be forgiven in the same situation. But it is not just and love without justice is not love.
You see, the Golden Rule is about me and my wishes, whereas the love of Christ is about the vulnerable. Love in the bible is action, but it is also preferential. The Golden Rule does not include the preferential nature of Christian love. We are to love those who are victimized and poor, those who are outcast and oppressed. That is love that includes justice. When we love God with all our hearts, souls and minds – when we worship the God that is love itself, our love of neighbor will include justice for the vulnerable.
One writer put it this way: “Where does one get the idea that worship is unnecessary and that faith is an easy matter of being kind and believing in God? I fear that the progressive Christian church is suffering from …a kind of lawless love.” This author acknowledges that there is a huge problem with only seeing faith as a list of rules and creeds. That is a loveless law. But too often our reaction to this is to forget that the law has a loving purpose when it is properly understood not as a prescriptive list, but rather as the system that orders a just community that loves the vulnerable first and acts to protect the stranger, the orphan and the widow.
As we explore the nature of Christ as verb, the nature of Christ as love, and contemplate what that means for us as the body of Christ acting in this world, we will see how Jesus practiced love. We will see that Jesus loved the least and sought to reorder the world in terms of justice and righteousness.
I often wonder why we have to be told to love? Why is it that often we don’t love God and neighbor with our whole hearts, souls and minds, living toward others out of a love that leads to faithfulness and justice? Well, first, it’s really hard, and it’s certainly complicated. As we have seen, it is not the same thing as being nice, as much as we would like to think it is. This kind of love is about courage and standing with those that others despise and ignore. This kind of love, this preferential, active love, means taking sides when it is unpopular to do so. It means doing things, not just feeling things. And for most of us – at least I know it is true for me – when we realize this, we get afraid. I am afraid of the risk involved in taking sides, I am afraid of the judgment of others, I am afraid of being wrong, I am afraid of what it will cost me, I am afraid I won’t have the energy or the time, I am afraid I won’t be good enough. Fear. And this fear is the barrier to living love.
It is a barrier because fear prevents God’s love from penetrating our souls and our beings. We love – we are able to love – only because God loves us first. This is what John is talking about. We have to receive before we can give. God’s love will cast out the fear if we let it. God’s love will give us the energy and courage and wisdom if we let it. God’s love will enable us to stand with the very people Jesus chose to stand with. God’s love will change us. Cut off from God’s love, we actually can’t love.
Without God’s love, we act out of obligation to the law, and out of fear of the condemnation of the prophets. This is what Jesus frees us from in his commandment. Love is first and primary. Love does not happen because we do what we are told by God – certainly not in fearful obedience. While love does not replace the law and the prophets, it is the only way to really understand the law and the prophets and to embrace them with joy; not live in fear of them.
God loves us first. If we are cut off from this, we will tire out and burn out and be drained to our core. Jesus says love God with all your heart soul and mind and your neighbor as yourself. John says this is only possible because God first loves us.
Love is not just a feeling and it is not just the Golden Rule. It is active and it is preferential. And it can only be lived out because God first loves the world in this way. If we let our lives be filled with the love of God – the love that casts out all fear – we will be love. Or, to put it in resurrection terms, we will be the resurrected body of Christ: a community of verbs living out Christ in our world. Amen.
