23 Oct 2005

Loving Our Neighbor

Matthew 22:34-40

An Eight year old wrote this about love and true love:

"Love is when Daddy reads me a bedtime story.

True love is when he doesn't skip any of the pages."

I have to tell you, my son does not know the difference between love and true love. He is only three years old. He only knows that love is love. But, if he knew the differences he would know that sometimes I truly love him and sometimes I just love him, especially when it is 11 PM and he is still wide awake.

Today I want to revisit this whole idea of true love, especially as it relates to biblical love.

The story in Matthew is very familiar to us. The Pharisees got together and the experts in the Law among them wanted to test Jesus. They asked him, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind'. That is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, 'Love your neighbor as yourself'. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

I do not know about you, but I have heard a lot of sermons about truly loving God and loving my neighbor as my self. I mean, I understand the context of the text. I know the meanings behind the Greek world Agape. I know the connections between mind, heart and soul. And, I suspect you do too. Knowing we have to love God and each other is not the problem. We know this is what Christianity is about. Our problem is truly living up to what we preach. The old saying, "it is easier said than done," applies here as well.

Perhaps this is why we North American Christians, prefer to emphasize the loving God part and downplay the loving neighbor part. Let me give you an illustration. Paul Kelly called me on Friday morning to ask me if I had a song in mind that can be used as a response song to the sermon. We both began to think of songs and hymns we knew, but we could not think of a song that spoke clearly about loving our neighbors as our selves. I know that there are a few songs out there that speak about this, but we could not think of a single one that morning. However, we were able to remember a lot of songs that spoke about loving God.

People who spend a lot of time trying to understand and describe the North American Church say; because of our individualism we have privatized our faith. In other words, faith issues are between God and the individual. My understanding of God and the Gospel takes priority over what the community or others say I should believe. The individual, not the community, determines faith beliefs.

It is not surprising, then, that we North Americans can speak about loving God with "all our hearts, souls and minds," without speaking about loving our neighbor as ourselves. In other words, people truly believe we can love God without loving our neighbors. A graphic image of our North American belief would look like this:

So, what do we do with this text? How do we begin to be more faithful to what Jesus had in mind? First, I think (and this may be too radical for some of us) we need to reject what society believes. We must fully embrace the concept that we can not love God without loving our neighbor. Richard B. Gardner, in his commentary on Matthew, writes, "Jesus is telling us that love of neighbor is the field of action where we embody or demonstrate love of God." In other words, the way we express our true love toward God is in how we love our neighbor. A graphic image of this concept would look like this:

Loving God can not be separated from loving our neighbor.

Of course there are other passages that speak more clearly about this concept. In 1 John 4:8 we read, "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love" (NRS).

Again I ask, how do we begin to be more faithful to what Jesus had in mind?

Second, I think we need to revisit our understanding of Love. As you know, the N. T. was written in Greek. The Greek word for Love used in our text is Agape. Now, Agape can be misleading. Let me explain. Three hundred years before Christ, the Greek philosopher Plato gave very concrete definitions of love. He said that there are three types of love: 1. Eros, which is the love for physical pleasure- the love for lovers. This is where we get the word erotic. 2. Philo, which is the love for one's own family. This is where we get the word Philadelphia, which means the city of brotherly love. 3. Agape, which is the love for knowledge, for all that is true and pure. Because this love does not seek physical pleasure and it is not connected to our own natural desires to love our family, it is said to be selfish-less love.

Scholars believe that the N. T. writers used the word Agape to mean "sacrificial love," a type of love that was self-giving, self-sacrificing. This can certainly be the case. However, Jesus spoke Aramaic (a language like Hebrew), not Greek. It is more likely that he used the word Hesed instead of Agape to describe love of God and love of neighbor. In fact, both sayings "love God and love neighbor" are direct quotations from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 respectively, which were written in Hebrew.

What am I trying to say? I am saying that we must have a broader understanding of love than the traditional Agape definition. Hased love is the love that is steadfast. It is a love fully connected to commitment. God loved Israel with a Hased type of love. Meaning, God loved Israel even though at times they were unlovable, because God promised He would.

As you can tell, Agape and Hased love is not connected with human feelings. Rather, biblical love is connected to self-giving and commitment. In other words, biblical love asks us to stay in a relationship with someone we might not feel like loving. Let me give you an example. I love my wife dearly. She is my best friend. My wish in life is that we would both die together at the age of 101. It would be difficult to continue this journey we call life without her. I have feelings for her. But, say those feelings were gone- I would still be committed to staying together and giving of my self, because that is what biblical love is about. Feelings have little to do with biblical love.

Part of loving my neighbors requires commitment- it requires staying in relationship with them regardless of how I feel about them. God is not asking us to feel love toward everyone around us. God is asking us to be part of their lives. True love, therefore, requires commitment.

You know? Reading the entire bedtime story to Danny when I do not feel like it may be true love- it would require a level of commitment and self-giving. However, I do not have difficulties loving Danny- after all he is my son. The difficulty comes when I have to love my neighbor- he or she may not be so lovable. This is when the old saying, "it is easier said than done," becomes real. This is why it helps to know God is not asking us to have loving feelings for everyone around us, but He is asking us to be part of their lives. We may not have loving feelings for our neighbors, but because we love God and because we believe Christ lives in us, we can be committed to have a relationship with them and give of ourselves for them. This is what I believe to be true love.

Let us therefore, "Love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds" and "Love our neighbor as ourselves."

Let us therefore, seek to truly love God and truly love our neighbors by giving of our selves and be fully committed to be part of their lives. This is what I consider to be biblical love... true love.

Amen.