All You Need Is Love – Yes, or No? Defend.
This was one of the essay questions on our Christian Ethics final in Seminary. After the events of the last several weeks, love seems more in short supply than ever. There was already the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now an attack on Israel by Hamas from Gaza, and the Israeli retaliation with air-attacks on multiple targets in Gaza. Followed by the 565th mass shooting in the United States this year in Lewiston, Maine. The most-deadly such attack this year, 2023.
As the reporting from Israel and Gaza unfolded, I found myself feeling despair. I’ve spent much of my adult life and ministry combating anti-Semitism, fostering Christian-Jewish dialogue, teaching World Religions with special emphasis on the relationships of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all from a perspective of mutual respect and love. And now this. Then after hours of watching reports from Lewiston it struck me: I used to travel with a group of musicians up and down the Maine coast, often stopping at a particular diner in Lewiston for a rest stop and a bite to eat. At another time and place, we could have been sitting in the very place this Reservist opened fire with an automatic weapon. Since those days I’ve been the survivor of a smaller shooting event, putting me in a national fraternity of survivors, for whom an event like this brings it all back as if it was once again happening here and now. I cannot get the number 565 out of my head. All you need is love. Yes, or No? Defend with examples from scripture was the question.
It seems that when put on the spot to answer the question: which commandment in the law is the greatest, Jesus answers with two. From Deuteronomy 6:5, the great Schema Yisrael, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” The passage goes on to say you shall teach it to your children, place a tiny scroll with this command at the entrance to your house. And it is traditional to pray this passage from Deuteronomy three times a day. Jesus’s interrogators should know it by heart.
Then from the very center of Torah, Leviticus 19:18 he quotes: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The passage in Leviticus goes on to define neighbor as especially including widows, orphans, and resident aliens – foreigners in the land who are fleeing danger in their own country, or simply looking for work, usually to send something back home where there may be a famine, a drought, or other disaster, natural or human. When asked, Who is my neighbor? Jesus replies with a story that says even Samaritans, an enemy people, can be our neighbors. All you need is love. Yes or No? Defend.
The story of the Good Samaritan illustrates that the agape love the Bible speaks about is not affection, not brotherly love, not romantic love, but simply putting someone else’s needs ahead of your own. The old King James translation of “charity” is much closer to the mark of what Torah, the Prophets and Jesus are all talking about.
From the beginning, the earliest Christians understood that it is God who loves us first. And that our love of God is reflected in how we treat one another. We are to be the love of God to help one another in natural disasters, like the category 5 hurricane that just leveled Acapulco. As some have suggested, we are to be the hands of God for one another at all times of tragedy. Because no one person, no one community of persons, can survive and rebuild after such disasters.
If we were to love God as God loves us, we ought to love one another as God loves us. This is what Jesus is saying to his interrogators. The trick in Leviticus is allowing ourselves to love ourselves as God loves us. I find in my nearly 40 years of ministry, many of us, perhaps most of us, find it difficult to really truly love ourselves. I see people, phenomenal people, people who do heroic things for others, doubt their own self-worth. What else could possibly lead a person to own an automatic military-style weapon, let alone walk into a bowling alley with men, women and children having a good time and open fire on everyone there? Or, invade a music festival of young people dancing and singing and begin killing people and capturing people and murdering children in front of their parents? Or, walk into a church office and shoot two women, one priest, one lay persons, execution style in the head, and walk out into the woods and takes one’s own life? Where has love been missing in their lives up to that moment? Where has any sense of compassion for the needs of others been? Why has no one noticed how empty, lonely and unhappy my life has been, people must ask themselves, over and over until something snaps? Until the only solution is violence. Against others, against oneself.
So-called “Social Media” seems only to make things worse. Young people are cyber-bullied until they take their own lives. Political discourse devolves into mud-slinging at best, bullying and demeaning at its worst. Hatred in the name of race, or religion, or political ideology devolves into violence. Easier and easier access to guns and ammo make it easier and easier to take out one’s hatred for others or self-loathing on others – either specific others, or all others.
I keep going back and going back to Professor Turner’s class on Christian Ethics and the haunting question on that exam. All you need is love. Yes, or No? Defend.
One impulse is to blame the other, all others, for all the inhumanity we heap upon ourselves and one another. The next most frequent blame is aimed at religion itself – all religions. On one hand, it is true that most all the world’s religions teach the golden rule in one version or another – do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. On the other hand, at one time or another, every world religion develops some kind of toxicity – a sub group that believes our way is the only way. That the world is divided into us and them. And unless we work to eliminate “them,” we, us, won’t survive. It’s the lie of the serpent. It’s Cain and Abel. And we allow ourselves to believe it.
I was reminded this week of something our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry once said: “To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. But maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement. And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.” That week in Jerusalem, just days before he was crucified on a cross of the Roman Empire, Jesus tried to remind anyone who would listen that above all else we need to love God and love one another. And that in agreeing to love one another is the only way to make a future possible In two thousand years we seem not to have tried this. The time to begin to love one another would seem to be now.
A contemporary of Jesus, Rabbi Hillel, once said, “If I am not for myself, then who is for me? If I am not for others, then who am I? And, If not now, when?” And if not now, when?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/27/us/these-are-the-victims-of-the-maine-mass-shootings/index.html
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