Matthew 22:39-40
Introduction
When I was a church attender and not a pastor, I generally hoped for new insight into the Scriptures. I was hoping the pastor would find some deep truth about God that I had never thought about before, a hidden gem that would bring about a fresh understanding of God. Not the same old thing that we had heard for years. That was not necessarily the best attitude. And if you are hoping for something brand new, something you have never heard before, you might be disappointed.
We have been looking at what Jesus wants from us. Jesus wants us to follow him. Last week, in a conversation with some religious critics, we saw that Jesus also wanted us to love God. In fact he stated that loving God was the first and greatest commandment. But then he added right after that a second commandment, even though only one was asked for. The second commandment was to love your neighbour as yourself. Like the first commandment, this also comes from the Old Testament. It is a quote from Leviticus 19:18.
Love our neighbours. For those who grew up in the church, that is something we have had countless Sunday school lessons on. Loving our neighbours seems so basic that it hardly requires comment. And yet perhaps in another way it is so important that we could spend an entire year on it and not have wasted our time.
Loving our neighbour. We have seen it is commanded in the Old Testament and Jesus teaches on it a number of times. If you do a search, you will find that the Apostle Paul quotes this twice and James quotes it once. Few verses are as repeated in the Bible. I think this is because both of the importance and the difficulty of living it out.
If you were to do a large survey of what the church is known for across Canada and the United States, what kinds of results would we get? Would love for people be at the top? From my conversations with people, especially those generations younger than me, the impression is not necessarily that of being loving. Things like being judgmental and sometimes even being hateful come up. That is not to say that the Church is not loving and in fact I see many examples of the Church being loving. But for some reason, we have tended to give off the impression that perhaps there are significant limits on who we may love and how.
Perhaps if we dig into this passage, we can clear up what loving our neighbour is supposed to look like.
Who is Our Neighbour?
The debate over whether Christians love their neighbour really comes down to who we think of as our neighbour. Now neighbour here does not mean the person that lives right beside you, although loving those neighbours could be a challenge as well. We had one neighbour that was angry with us for having a tree removed that was wrecking our sewer pipes and so had his guru put a curse on our house. The people on the other side of us had a party where they put fireworks in watermelons and we woke up to find the side of our house plastered with smashed fruit. We ere not feeling the love in those moments.
Going back to Leviticus, and to how people in general would have interpreted this verse when Jesus was having this conversation, a neighbour was a fellow Israelite. Basically, a neighbour was someone just like you. While I am sure there were still problems, this makes things a lot easier. How hard is it for you to love someone with the same religious, political, ethical, and moral beliefs as you? There may be a few personality traits that get on your nerves but there are no major obstacles.
The problem is that Jesus expands what it means to love our neighbours. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus says to go beyond loving those like you and to actually love your enemies. That is probably one of the hardest verses in the Bible for us to embrace. We don’t want love for enemies, we want revenge. One of the most satisfying types of scenes in a movie for me is when there is a really bad guy and he gets killed in a very appropriate way. The rest of movie can be bad, but when the villain gets what’s coming to them, I am happy. That is not what Jesus is teaching.
In Luke 10, Jesus gets even more specific about what it means to love our neighbour with the parable of the Good Samaritan. In that story, a Jewish traveller gets beat up by some bad people. A Levite and a priest, two of the most respected types of people in Jewish society, walk by without helping. It ends up that it is a Samaritan that stops and helps the injured man. There was a tremendous amount of ethnic and religious hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans. We have heard this story so many times we miss the shock that the original listeners and readers would have experience at this story. Try to imagine a group of people that you feel the most uncomfortable around. My experience is that most people have at least one type of people who if they walked into a room that you would hope they did not sit next to you. Now imagine that person being the one to stop and help you or you being the one to stop and help them. You are getting a sense of the story of the Good Samaritan.
I have found that churches hold back on being loving toward certain groups, not because they are unloving, but because they are afraid that being loving might be interpreted at condoning a behaviour or identity that they don’t approve of. Except that option is not given to us. In fact, Jesus specifically spent much time with tax collectors and prostitutes, something that damaged his reputation, but never seemed to have regretted it.
What Does Love Look Like
So sounds like our neighbours are pretty much everyone, no matter how we dislike them or they are different from us. That sounds pretty challenging. How can we maintain a life of loving people who are so challenging fir us to feel love for. Thankfully, it never says that we are to feel love for everyone, only that we are to love to them. This is something I have been trying to emphasize in many of my messages. The feeling is nice in relationships with people and with God but it is not required for there to be love. Still, what does love look like when we are supposed to love one another?
Let’s go back to the original appearance of this command way back in Leviticus to understand the baseline requirement of this command. “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:18) Having studied the Scriptures for numerous years, I have come to realize how much of it has to do with not getting back at people who have done something to us. This is the basic meaning behind Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek. And the only antidote for seeking revenge or holding a grudge is forgiveness. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus ties our forgiveness by God with our forgiveness of those who hurt us. That seems strange to us as we want forgiveness by God and the freedom to hold a grudge. The truth is that seeking revenge brings complete destruction. I mentioned that revenge scenes in movies are the most satisfying scenes. That is because our natural tendency is to want revenge and yet it is not God’s plan for us. I mentioned that the Church is not always seen as loving and part of that is because Christians have tended to celebrate the suffering of groups that they do not like. That is not loving our neighbours as ourself. By the way, part of this principle is not just abstaining from revenge but also not withholding blessing. Jesus taught us to “bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” (Luke 6:28) As you can see, loving your neighbour is much more than ticking off a box on a list of doctrines and ethical principles.
Conclusion
What does Jesus want from us? He wants us to follow him. Part of following Jesus is obeying the most important commandments: Love God and love our neighbours. It is so interesting that Jesus offers two commandments when only the one most important commandment was asked for. Was this just Jesus feeling generous and wanting to offer a bonus commandment or was there something else going on? The truth is that these two commandments are so closely tied together that you cannot pull them apart without destroying them. They are like conjoined twin sharing essential organs. God is love and we are called to be God’s children, and this means that we are called to love our neighbours. Jesus has widened the definition of neighbour far beyond what we are comfortable with. This is a very countercultural concept in a world that tells us there are certain people unworthy of love. In fact that is part of the point. Loving our neighbours in the way Jesus both taught and modelled is so challenging that we need to dive deep into our relationship with God and allow God to expand our capacity for love. Do not wait for the feelings to come, act in a loving way and ask God to give us the strength.
