I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately, because, it’s
like, really, really important, you
know? I mean, all you need is
love, right? Love is a many-splendored thing, as anybody on the love boat could
tell you . . . love lifts you up where you belong, I love New York . . . heck,
I love American style. Have trouble with your love story? Then take love potion number nine, and you’ll
be a victim of that crazy little thing called love, but don’t worry – there
must be fifty ways to leave your lover. We’ve got lovin’ in the morning, lovin’
in the evening, lovin’ ‘bout supper time . . . we’re so much in love with love
that we even have our own love holiday, with it’s own Saint, and it’s a wonder
his name isn’t St. Love . . .
We use love to sell things, everything from toothpaste
to deodorant, from Ford Broncos to Dell Computers . . . or maybe that’s sex
we use to sell things . . . I do tend to get them confused. After all,
we call the act of sex “making love,” like if we just have sex enough times,
love will be somehow generated out of thin air. Love’s become an item, a
commodity – if we just have enough of it, our lives will be perfect. And the Beatles sing about love as if it’s
something you get – love, love, love . . . love is all you need.
But at the same time,
we also think of love as an emotion, something you feel .
. . I love you, I love my car, I love my cat. We talk about the act of starting
to love as “falling in love,” like “falling off a cliff,” as if we can’t help
ourselves, it’s an accidental kind of thing – I saw her standing there, and I
just flat-out fell in love. This emotional love comes with a pleasurable
feeling, a warm-and-fuzzy state of euphoria – flushed cheeks, tingly, prickly
hairs-on-end . . . clichéd – but accurate – descriptions of what many of us
call “being in love.”
But have you ever noticed that these things wear off
after awhile? That cool, sleek car that gave you goose bumps when you first
drove it can become nothing more than a hunk of painted metal, especially after
a few repairs. That delightful guy you thought was the be-all and end-all of
the known universe turns into something ordinary, well-worn, Ozzie to your
Harriet – and that little rush when you see him is just no longer there.
Scientists – wouldn’t you just know – have studied it, and they’ve found out
that pleasurable feeling is caused by a kind of brain-chemical called an
endorphin that’s released into the bloodstream when you see your honey, and
that eventually, after repeated sightings, it’s no longer released. This takes
about seven years, thus accounting for – you guessed it – the seven-year itch.
Marilyn Monroe aside, it’s at this point – if not
before – that maintaining a relationship starts to be real work, and loving
someone becomes more and more active, more and more trouble. And that’s where
Paul comes in, because that’s what love is to him – real, down-to-earth,
matter-of-fact, work. In fact, he starts with the image of love as an obligation,
as something you owe somebody else. How romantic is that?
“Owe no one anything,” he says, “except to love one
another.” And that’s a real downer, because it sounds pretty cold – if we love
someone because we have to, it’s can’t be worth much, can it? And what
does he mean, owe no one anything, except to love one another? Why would I owe
you love, and you me? What could I have done for you that incurred such
an obligation? But here’s a thought – maybe it’s not to one another that we owe
it to love one another . . . maybe Joe doesn’t owe it to Clara to love
her, and Clara doesn’t owe it to Bill to love him, but Joe and Clara owe
it to God to do their loving. And this makes sense, because Paul goes on
and says “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law,” and here, as almost
everywhere else, Paul is talking about the Torah, the Mosaic law. And Jews are
bound to observe it out of covenant obligation to God. So maybe the obligation is
to God for Christians to love one another.
In fact, our passage begins and ends with two very
similar statements, both about love fulfilling the law. So it’s a good bet that
that’s what’s on Paul’s mind – the fulfilling of the law. In fact, the first
statement is a premise, and the final one is a conclusion, restating the
premise. And between the two is the proof – all you logical Presbyterian types
understand that—and he lists four of the Ten Commandments: “You shall
not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not
covet,” and any other commandment – and says they’re summed up by only one:
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” And note that he doesn’t say replaced
by the love commandment, but summed up, gathered together, united, and it makes
sense – if you love your neighbor, you certainly won’t kill her, or covet her
cat or her husband; you certainly won’t steal from her or commit adultery
against her. In fact, he says, love does no wrong to a neighbor.
Therefore, it is the fulfilling of the law. Q.E.and D.
He uses this notion of love as the summing-up of the
law to prove his point, and the reason he could do this is that it was a
common belief among Christians and Jews of the day – Christians, of course,
because Jesus had said something a lot like it like it, but contrary to popular
belief among Christians, who think that Jesus invented love, it wasn’t original
with him, either – it was a common
teaching among Jewish rabbis of the day. But if it was a common belief, why did
Paul make a big deal out of it? Why did he have to write this paragraph at all?
The key is in the word “fulfill,” and his declaration
that love fulfills the law – he’s saying that it doesn’t just sum it up,
it doesn’t just recapitulate it, but it satisfies the purpose that God
intended for it. And that’s about as radical as it comes . . . Paul is saying
that love does what the law was intended to do, it fulfills its role.
But this creates a problem for us Christians: isn’t
the whole point of the Gospel grace? Isn’t the point that our being made
right with God, being justified, being saved, is free, and that
we don’t have to do anything, in fact we can’t do anything, to merit it?
This love your neighbor stuff sounds like just another thing you have to do to
get saved. Hasn’t he just substituted loving your neighbor for
abstaining from pork, for remembering to wash up before a meal, or for not
touching a corpse? Isn’t this just works righteousness in disguise?
But Paul’s not talking righteousness here – he doesn’t
even mention the word once, or salvation, either. For Paul, that was never the
purpose of the law, to make the Jews –
or anybody else, for that matter – righteous before God. For Paul, the law’s
purpose was never to provide salvation. The purpose of the law to Paul
is to reveal the glory of God to the nations, so that “Israel might be God’s
light to the world.”1 And so fulfilling the purpose of the
law has nothing to do – in Paul’s mind – with whether someone is saved or
not. Rather, it’s to show the glory of
God to the world, to reveal the meaning of life in the Lord. In a Christian
context, we might say it’s the heart of evangelism. Through our communities
united by love, we’re to be beacons to the world. This little light of mine,
I’m gonna let it shine.
That’s why Paul puts it in terms of something we owe
God: obligation comes after the fact, after receiving something. God has
done something for us, sent Christ to Earth to set us free, made a new covenant
with us in his blood, and now our obligation, our side of the
covenant, is to love one another. Just as Israel’s side of the bargain was to
obey God’s commandments, we’re to love our neighbors as ourselves.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from
people who used to go to church, but something happened, somebody
snubbed them, somebody said something hurtful, or they just got tired of the
backbiting and the jealousy. In a lot of churches, far from acting like they
love one another, members jockey for power, for control, over whose version of
the Gospel will be taught, and in what way it will be taught. That is
human nature, I know, but we’re supposed to transcend that, we’re
supposed to be better than that . . . I wonder how things would be if people in
our churches truly loved one another,
and showed it?
And what’s more, in our
passage, Paul is speaking about loving our neighbors, not just other members of
our church family. How in the name of you-know-who are we supposed to do that?
I mean, I don’t even like my neighbor – he’s crabby, he plays his music
too loud, and he yells at my dog. And to top it all off, he’s not a Christian,
he makes no bones about it . . . he thinks it’s pretty stupid to worship some
two-thousand-year-old carpenter, and how am I supposed to love a guy like that?
And furthermore, the gospels make it
pretty clear that the definition of “neighbor” is wider than just the guy next
door – remember the Good Samaritan? Am I supposed to love people around the
world, with whom I have nothing in common, many of whom – lest we forget ISIS – seem to not particularly love me?
Well . . . yes, but maybe not quite in the way
we assume . . . Paul’s not talking about some emotion or feeling, he’s not
talking about being in love, about something we can’t help . . . he’s talking
about action, something we do. For Paul – and, I think, for most of
Scripture – love is action, it’s doing, it’s hard work. . . . and as we’ve seen, we’re obligated to
do it. Even if we can’t stand our neighbor, even if we get tired of his face,
even if we think his ideas are dangerously crazy, we are to engage with them,
to treat them as if we genuinely like them.
And you know what? When we grit our teeth and treat
someone we dislike as if we deeply care for them, a funny thing can happen on
the way to the forum – we can develop a genuine affection for them, it happens
all the time. For a start, treat everybody as you yourself would want to be
treated, and then go further . . . be kind to them, do things for them .
. . and most of all, try to put yourself in their shoes, try to imagine what
their life must be like. Instead of just shaking your head at something you don’t
like, try to understand why they are that way . . . and there’s a name
for this kind of thing, there’s a name for the process of getting to know
folks, for getting to know what makes them tick, for trying to see things from
their point if view, and the name is relationship.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Over in First John, God is equated with love:
“Whoever does not love does not know God,” the author writes, “for God is
love.” God is love. Now: a central doctrine of Christianity is the Trinity,
which holds that God is three persons—God the Father, God the Son, and God the
Holy Spirit—but also that God is indivisibly
one.
In other words, God is in
God’s own self is a relationship.
And if God is love and God is relationship, then it follows logically
that love is relationship, and relationship is love. We are expected to be in relationship, for
that is where God is, that is where love
is.
Biblical scholar Tom Wright says that Paul’s love is
“tough love,” in the sense that it’s tough to do, that because it doesn’t
spring from the emotions, it comes from the will, it comes from just doing
it, as the Nike ad might say.2 It’s hard work, but it’s our obligation. Somebody’s gotta do it, and that would be us.
And the good news, as always, is that the Christian
life is a journey, and as Paul himself knew all too well, we’re not yet at its
end, we’re not yet perfected, we’re just on the way. But he also knew that we’re not alone on the
road, that we have the Holy Spirit to power us, and intercede for us with sighs
too deep for words. He knew that Christ is with us all along the journey, and
he will be with us every step of the way.
Amen.
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