All You Need is Love? Proper 25 A

 

All You Need is Love?

A “lawyer” of the Pharisees asks Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” It seems straight forward. But the “lawyer” is more of an expert in biblical studies. Such experts recognized 613 commandments in Torah. No matter which one Jesus might pick, it would be easy to pick another one and then say, “But what about this one?” there being 612 other choices. It’s a trick question. Not unlike the question that was on my final exam in Christian Ethics: “All you need is love. Defend or critique.” Given Jesus’s answer to our expert in biblical studies, it might be easy to say, “Yes, all you need is love. After all Jesus answers with love: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first 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.”

 

Love God. Love neighbor. He seems to be saying, “All you need is love of God and love of neighbor.” But Jesus is clever. Part one comes from Deuteronomy chapter six, and is the opening line of a prayer that the Jewish people pray several times a day. It is the foundational prayer of the people of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. Jesus establishes that he is four-square rooted in the traditions of the Pharisees and Sadducees. And he goes on to quote Leviticus 19:18 which says that love of God means loving those God loves: your neighbor, understood as most especially those without resources: widows, orphans, and resident aliens. And loving God means listening to and acting upon the critiques of society issued by the prophets.

 

That is, the love Jesus is talking about demands acts of kindness, acts of mercy, and active advocacy for a just society. Our prayer for this 22^nd Sunday after Pentecost calls us to embrace faith, hope, and charity for all people. This means housing people, feeding people, providing meaningful employment for people, guaranteeing civil and social rights for people – all people. As the prophet Micah put it long before Jesus, the love of God and neighbor might be summed up as “to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.”

 

It ought to be noted that during Jesus’s lifetime, he was not alone in giving such an answer to questions like that of our expert in biblical studies. It is said that Rabbi Hillel was asked by a student, “Teach me all of Torah while I stand on one foot.” Hillel responded, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Get down on two feet and go study the rest!" That is, biblical “love” demands a lifetime of studying “all the rest” of Torah and the Prophets – and Jesus – and then take action on behalf of others.

 

As one commentator notes, the First Letter of John more specifically than any other New Testament voice spells out the role of the second commandment in relation to the first by his statement: “Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20). A failure to honor the second commandment while claiming to observe the first makes one a liar. The First Letter of John also says, "We love because he first loved us" We can only love God and neighbor because God first loves us. Jesus came to dwell among us to model what such love looks like when lived out day by day.

 

As Jesus himself outlines it, those who care for the least of our sisters and brothers are those who feed the hungry, provide a drink for the thirsty, visit those who are unwell and in prison, clothe the naked, and welcome the stranger – those who are not just like ourselves. To say, “All you need is love” is to overlook our need to be merciful, humble, compassionate, kind, just, and forgiving as we strive for justice and peace for all people. As we learn to respect the dignity of every human being. As Saint Paul famously wrote to the Corinthian church, we need to live lives of faith, hope, and charity.

 

Speaking of the apostle Paul, our portion of his letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest of his letters that we have, has been a passage that I have tried to live up to in my 40+ years of ministry. In the official search documents of the Episcopal Church, clergy are given a box in which one can use something like 150 characters to describe one’s vision of ministry. I wrote something like, “I believe in the mutual ministry of lay persons and clergy in the spirit of I Thessalonians 2:1-8.”  My intention was to get the most out of less than 100 characters, while inviting those on search committees who might be interested in interviewing me to do some bible study themselves on the nature of relationships within the church community. Paul, like Jesus, seems to be embracing relationships of mutual love and care for one another, when he writes: “…we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”

 

A church leader needs to be humble and gentle, not imperious and demanding. We aret o share not only the gospel of God, but also our own selves. That has always struck me as the minimum standard of life in a community that strives not only to believe in Christ, but to follow Christ Jesus in all that we say and all that we do with each other, and with all those neighbors and strangers God in Christ sends our way. Paul sets the standard very high – for himself, and for us all. And throughout his letters to the earliest Christian communities, he often admits how difficult it is to live up to the standards he sets for himself, which, as a former Pharisee, he knows is based in love of God and love of neighbor. As one who had once persecuted the followers of Jesus, Paul was honest and contrite in his repentance, his turning, from one way of life to a whole new way of loving God, loving neighbor, and becoming a leader in the early church.

 

I have no idea what I wrote in that Christian Ethics final exam back in 1982. What I do know is that even then I knew that what I need and what we all need is more than just love, however that might be defined. We need hope. We need faith. We need compassion and empathy for others. We need forgiveness. We need mercy. We need a discipline of charity and giving. And we need one another – which means we need those others, those who are strangers, as well as, and in addition to, those we already know, care for, and love.

 

Most of all we need to acknowledge and accept God’s love. For it is only that God first loves us that we even begin to know what love is. As Ilia Delio concludes in her little book, The Primacy of Love as she describes God’s love for us: “What more do we need than the power of love to turn the tears of this world into a heartfelt song that endures beyond time and space? Where there is love, death has no power over us. It is love alone that sets us free, and in this freedom of love we can know unspeakable joy, for we see with the eye of the heart what remains forever closed to the finite mind. Through the eyes of love, we see the face of God.”  [p.82-83]

 

That is, once we accept the love of God for us, we will see the face of God in others – all others.