We hear it every Sunday in the Rite I service. We hear it at Church School and over and over in sermons: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” This is it: the distilled essence of Christianity, as well as the essential summary of all 613 commandments in the Torah and of all the entreaties of the Hebrew prophets. However, I clearly remember not getting it.
I must have been about 12 years old when it first hit me that I did not love God. I already knew that I didn’t love my neighbor. In fact, I had a Peanuts cartoon proudly pinned to the middle of my bulletin board that had Lucy proclaiming, “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” People were hurtful and disappointing and annoying … and besides, if I opened myself up to them, they might not love me back.
I was a religious kid. I said my prayers; I was taken to church and Sunday School every week by my parents; I knew that God was supposed to love me. But I also knew deep-down that I didn’t love God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I might feel respect toward God, or curiosity, or occasionally loyalty or even awe—but certainly no warm and fuzzy, heart-giving love. I wasn’t even into loving Jesus. I didn’t like the songs in youth group that sounded like Jesus was everyone’s boyfriend. To me, love was a feeling, and it was a feeling that I didn’t have for God or God’s Son.
As I grew older and less and less inclined to love hurtful humankind, I grew more and more desperate to love God. I thought that if I could just know God better, then I could love God more. If I could close myself up with God—just the two of us—then I would find some kind of union with God and could grasp the deep kind of love of which the mystics speak. I prayed that I might love God. I sought God in reason and Truth. I sought God in beautiful words and in music. I didn’t have much energy left over to love my neighbor, but I didn’t care. I was seeking God.
What I didn’t know back then was that the two commandments that Jesus puts together in our Gospel lesson—one adapted from Deuteronomy 6:5 and the other from Leviticus 19:18—are not set in contexts in which love means a heart-warming emotion. Rather, they both tie love to commitment, to something that can indeed be commanded and willed. Deuteronomy 6:5 is part of the shema, the important creed recited several times each day by devout Jews, the phrase that is to be placed on their doorposts and recited to their children and bound on hand and forehead. The love that God is asking here from the people of Israel is a firm devotion to keeping God’s commandments, an unwavering commitment to follow and obey God, to chose God above all other gods, and to walk in God’s ways. Put in human terms, it is like the commitment involved in remaining faithful to a spouse, forsaking all others, both when we feel close and “in love” and in the times when we wonder what we see in them at all.
In the same way, the love for our neighbor required in Leviticus 19 is not just a warm, loving feeling, either, but a commitment to take the needs of our neighbor seriously. It is the kind of love shown by the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable, the kind of love that does not leave anyone bleeding on the side of the road. To love a neighbor is to avoid stealing from him, defrauding him, or taking advantage of him when he is weak. To love is to show mercy, justice, and faithfulness. As the prophet Micah proclaims, “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” God can indeed command us to love—not to bubble over with pleasant feelings—but to give ourselves over to God’s ways and truly to do acts of justice and mercy.
A colleague shared with me last night after Marcus Borg’s lecture a story from Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov.[1] In this story, Father Zosima, a wise, elderly monk, is consulted by a distraught and suicidal young woman who is tormented by her lack of belief in God and in the afterlife. Her life has no meaning, no joy, no purpose, without the belief that comforted her in her childhood. Father Zosima tells her that her despair is the most terrible thing that a human being can experience, and that he can help her. He does not offer her some abstract proof of God’s existence. however. Rather, he tells her to go home and every day, to commit herself to concrete, practical acts of love for the people with whom she comes in contact. If she does this, the wise monk explains, she will slowly and gradually begin to find that she believes in God. And the more that she practices true self-giving love with those around her, she will discover that she cannot not believe in God, who is self-giving Love itself. To believe in God is to commit oneself to God; it is to love God. And such commitment grows out of sharing in God’s outpouring love for humankind.
I can testify to the truth of the monk’s wisdom in my own life. What transformed me from cold-hearted youth to this morning’s preacher, you might ask? It was not seminary. It was not knowledge found in reading all of those hundreds of theology books that I have in my office. It began with the witness of young children. For over twenty years, I spent most of my time each day with young children—both my own and the elementary school children in my classroom. And I learned what love is from them, from those little ones who are still so close to God. If you turn down the corners of your mouth and look hungrily at a baby’s cookie, she will immediately raise up a sticky hand to offer you a piece. If you rush around in a frenzy to finish your housework, a toddler will run over to hug your legs, smile, and pick up a rag to help. If you stand before a group of five-year-olds to teach them, they will turn wide, eager eyes directly to yours, ready to grasp and to tuck carefully away any wisdom that might fall from your mouth. If a first-grader, even an unpopular one, falls and gashes a knee on the playground, a sympathetic crowd of classmates will swiftly gather around him, vying for a chance to help him into the office for a Band-aid. Children are not always little angels, of course, but somehow the small, practical acts of openhanded love that I soaked up thirstily from those hundreds of children thawed my own dark and frozen heart; they made me feel safe to reach out, too, and they showed me how much we need each other. “Unless you become like little children,” says Jesus, “you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Of course, it is Jesus himself who most clearly shows us, in word and deed, the place in which love of God and love of neighbor meet. Jesus shows us both total commitment to God and total commitment to justice and mercy in this world. While such commitment leads to the Cross, it also leads to Resurrection and to the Kingdom of God. In real, tangible acts--for what is more concrete than touching lepers, rubbing spit into blind eyes, or being nailed to the wood of a cross--Jesus Christ reveals the paradoxical power of living a life of divine, self-giving love. Jesus ties love of God and love of neighbor together because they are intertwined. “The second is LIKE unto it,” doesn’t just mean that the two commandments have a similar structure or that they are both equally important. They are interrelated and inseparable. Twelfth-century theologian Guillaume de St. Thierry writes, “The love of truth drives us from the human world to God; the truth of love sends us from God back to the human world.” Commitment to God’s ways will always send us back out into the world, just as surely as service to the world will send us to God.
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