(Lectionary 25A)
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 • Psalm 1 • 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 • Matthew 22:34-46
When we’re looking for what more we can do to fill our plentiful free time, when we’re looking for what we can add on top of our already full to-do lists, when we’ve got nothing better to do...who do we turn to? Is it Jesus? When we’re looking for help with keeping God’s commandments, who do we turn to? Is it Jesus? When we’ve done a pretty good job at getting in trouble for not playing by the rules, whom do we turn to then? Is it Jesus?
Jesus isn’t someone we readily associate with what we call “the law”--the things we are expected to do, the commandments God has given us to keep, the obligations we are responsible to fulfill. Jesus' graceful, forgiving love for us can create the disillusion that we no longer need to-do’s, commandments and rules. The grace of Jesus, however, does not come to abolish the law. He comes to fulfill the law.
Jesus shows his affirmation of God’s laws when the Pharisees try and challenge Jesus one last time. They question him about the 613 religious laws in the first five books of the Bible, otherwise known as the Torah. One of them asks him, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers with the law of love: “Love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind...and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says every law revolves around these two commandments: that without our neighbor we cannot love God, and without God we cannot love our neighbor. Jesus’ law of love is not a replacement of the old--it builds on it, putting together two laws taken directly from the Torah.
How do we keep this law of love without reducing it to a legalistic, controlling, score-keeping commandment? How do we live out the law of love that is given to us not out of a sense of a burden that’s meant to weigh us down, but so that our relationships with each other are transformed into ones of care, love and mutual respect?
One arena where we ask these “law of love”questions most is in our home and family life. As an impending father—not yet! but any day now—I’ve been thinking about fatherhood and what I observed of my parents “keeping the law” as a way of looking out for my well-being. One example sticks out in particular.
Once when I was in about third or fourth grade, my mom started to buy vitamins from Shaklee for me. I absolutely hated those vitamins. Could not stand them. They tasted like chalk, and had to be chewed up in order to get them down. Rather than go through this dreadful process, I decided to hide them. Each morning in my robe pocket, I would put the vitamin there, and then drop it in my wastebasket--and because I was also the one in charge of taking out the trash, nobody knew I wasn’t taking my vitamins.
Until one day...when I got a call downstairs to the laundry room. My dad had found my robe in the washing machine...with a whole bunch of smushed vitamins in the pockets. I had forgotten to put them in the trash! My dad asked me, “What’s this Jon?” I couldn’t hide my secret any longer.
After that, my parents asked me to do two things. First was to admit that I had lied, or as the commandments put it, that I had born false witness. I had given the appearance I was doing something they had asked me, when I had not, and I admitted to it. The second was to turn off the television for one whole week. I couldn’t believe what they were asking of me, but I did it. This “law of love” seemed way too harsh at the time, but I was grateful for it by the end of the week.
That whole week, it turned out, was a time when one of those terrible Chicago snow storms had hit, and a crust of ice had formed on the top of the soft snow. Each day after school that week, when I had normally gone inside to watch cartoons, had become a fort-building time in the backyard with these icy snow blocks. The “law of love” had opened up a space for creativity and new interests to blossom and flourish. And, I did end up taking those vitamins, though usually with a huge gulp of orange juice, which my parents said was OK.
That is what Jesus’ law of love is all about: it’s about God’s desire for the flourishing of human life, and human relationships. As parents, it can be hard for the “law of love” to rule our home life, for example, when we want to give our children all the things they see their friends have but that we can’t always give them. It can be hard for the “law of love” to rule at home when parents’ expectations for grades are set so high that no room is left for flourishing of life beyond the classroom.
What it comes down to is that Jesus’ law of love goes beyond emotions. It is more than a feeling. In our culture, love has been so sentimentalized that it has become a feeling towards something that we really “like”. We believe love is a passive feeling in response to something outside of us, such as, “I love chocolate”, or “I love that movie”. Love in the biblical sense is love that is active. It’s love that is just as loving regardless of how emotionally close we are to someone else or not. It’s love that acts on another’s behalf for their well-being. Love in the biblical sense is something we do, regardless of how we feel for them. When Jesus gives the “law of love”, to love God and neighbor, he doesn’t command an emotion. He commands an action.
We have to look no further for a picture of what that looks love like than Jesus himself. God gives us the ultimate love action of all, of raising Jesus from the dead, so that we may live forgiven, all in the name of love. We will not always keep the law of love perfectly. We will fail God and God knows we will fail one another. But Jesus’ cross of mercy picks us up, dusts us off, and enables us to live in restored relationship. The kind of relationships God cares enough to ask of us, are not ones bound by keeping rules, or being right with God, or being on the right side, but that are bound by the active love of God in Jesus Christ that is at work in us for the good of all.
What are some concrete ways I can show that love to God and neighbor, you wonder? Here is one challenge for you for this week. In his book The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman talks about five ways we express love for each other: quality time, gifts, acts of service, words of affirmation and physical touch. What’s hard is that each of us tend to give love in only a few of these ways that we are most comfortable with. But fulfilling the law of love calls us beyond our comfort zones to love God’s world in ways that aren’t easy for us, but that make God and others know that God's love is in our hearts. Try stretching yourself this week, and perhaps each successive week, to grow in one of these five languages that do not come quite as naturally: spending quality time, giving gifts, performing acts of service, speaking words of affirmation and offering (appropriate) physical touch. We may not feel any different for doing it--but Jesus law of love will have been made real for the other person. And when we fail at living up to this law, we will find God’s love is enough to continue giving us back to each other and to God so we may live in the live we've been asked to share: to love God with heart, mind and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Amen.
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