1 John 4:7-11, 19-21 | Luke 10:25-37
Jeremy Richards
It’s August 15th, we’re almost 8 months into a yearlong study on love, and, maybe a bit surprisingly, we are just now getting to loving other people. One would probably think that love of neighbor would come earlier. In fact, when we think of Christian love, we usually think of giving love as Christians. We think of the loving we do.
But accompanying our yearlong study on love have been two letters, “re”. Reimagining the love of God, restoring love of self, and now renewing love of neighbor. In a couple months we’ll attempt to reconcile love of enemies. This prefix “re” means we go back to something, we return to it, and we look at it again in a new light. And what we’ve been saying this past year isn’t necessarily something new, in fact it’s very, very old, but it’s still something we often forget. It needs to be revisited because, though we have the best of intentions, we often forget the proper order of things. Our priorities get mixed up.
While we may enter into the stream of Christian faith through any of these loves – trying to love ourselves, our neighbors, or even our enemies might lead us to seek out the God who is love – as we grow and mature, we come to see that there is a proper order of love, otherwise, again, we get all mixed up, we burn out, the well runs dry.
And the proper order is love of God, love of self, love of neighbor, and then, finally, love of enemies. Jesus says as much. Well, if you’re reading Matthew Jesus says as much. If you’re reading Luke, as we are this morning, the unnamed lawyer says as much and Jesus agrees with him. In Matthew, Jesus says the “first and greatest commandment” is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself. So love of God comes first, it’s the most important, and only after that comes love of neighbor. But there’s actually another love in between those two.
As we talked about a few months ago, when we read this familiar teaching from Jesus, we often skip over the as yourself part. But, it turns out, loving your neighbor is dependent upon you loving yourself. If you love your neighbor as yourself but you don’t love yourself, you won’t be loving your neighbor very well! Before we can love our neighbors, we have to love ourselves.
So we started the year with love of God, then we moved on to love of self, and now we can finally talk about loving our neighbors, which is certainly a crucial part of the Gospel. Coming to it a little late doesn’t mean it isn’t important. 1 John makes that clear. The author doesn’t mince words. He says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love,” and later, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” But even though John says this, it’s still clear that our love of neighbor is dependent on God’s love for us. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that [God] loved us and sent [God’s] Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” And it is because of this love of God that we love others: “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”
It makes sense that loving our neighbors (like loving ourselves, as we talked about a few months ago) is dependent upon our receiving God’s love for us, because loving our neighbors is no walk in the park. We can’t do it on our own. This was summed up by a man in an old, beat up pickup truck who yelled at me as he drove by while I was protesting on the corner a few weeks ago. I was holding a sign that said “Love thy neighbor, #BLM,” and as he drove by the man yelled, “My neighbors suck!”
I thought that was pretty funny. Every time someone yells at me or flips me off, I assume their issue is with the Black Lives Matter movement, but this guy seemed more upset about the general idea that we should love our neighbors than anything else. Because, apparently, his neighbors suck.
And let’s be honest, we can relate. We’ve all had sucky neighbors, haven’t we? The lawyer in our reading this morning must have also had sucky neighbors, or at least sucky people, in his life as well. He knows he’s supposed to love his neighbor as himself, he says so, but he follows up this statement with a question, “But who’s my neighbor?” and the text reveals his motivation: he wanted to justify himself. He doesn’t want to love everyone, just as, if we’re honest, we don’t want to love everyone, so he wants to know where the boundary is.
This lawyer doesn’t come off great in this passage, but, again, if we’re honest we can relate to him. We all want to justify not loving some people. Some people, by our standards, don’t deserve it. Our justifications for withholding love are influence by our culture, upbringing, beliefs, and convictions. People don’t deserve our love because of any number of reasons. I’m currently reading A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, and Ove, an old curmudgeon if there ever was one, dislikes anyone who doesn’t drive a Saab. His neighbor across the way, who he used to be his friend but is now his enemy, drives a Volvo for goodness sake, a sin Ove finds it nearly impossible to forgive.
To answer the lawyer’s question, and quash his attempted self-justification, Jesus tells a story – it may be a parable or it may have really happened, who knows? Whatever the case, it’s arguable the best known of all Jesus’ teachings: the story of the Good Samaritan. In this story, as we all know, a “certain man” is walking the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, and some robbers attack and rob him, leaving him “half dead.”
A total of three other men encounter the man. There is a pattern: all three come near him and see him. The first two are Jewish religious leaders – a priest and a Levite – and they follow the same pattern: they come near, they seem him, and they pass him by. There are all kinds of reasons people give for why they pass him by, but Jesus doesn’t actually give any. Because he doesn’t need to. Because the reasons don’t matter, what matters is what they did. They passed him by. I’m sure, like the lawyer and like us, they had all kinds of reasons for self-justification.
But the third man breaks the pattern. And this isn’t just some other guy. Not only is he not a religious leader, as the other two were, he’s not really a proper human being as far as Jews at the time were concerned. Fred Craddock, a professor of preaching and New Testament, explains the Samaritan this way, “Ceremonially unclean, socially outcast, and religiously a heretic, the Samaritan is the very opposite of the lawyer as well as the priest and the Levite. This story much have been a shocking one to its first audience, shattering their categories of who are and who are not the people of God.” The Samaritan is the ultimate other in the mind of Jesus, the lawyer, and any good Jews who were listening to this exchange.
At first, this social outcast, the Samaritan, follows the same pattern as the other two. Like them, he comes near to the man and he sees him, but then something happens to him, something different. And it isn’t something he does but something that is done to him, done in him. He is “moved with pity,” according to the NRSV, but a better translation would be that he is moved with compassion. He draws near, he sees the man naked, beaten, and bleeding, and he can’t help it, something inside him compels him to stop and go to the man and bandage his wounds, to put him on his own donkey, take him to an inn, and pay for everything the man needs. It’s born out of the kind of person he is.
This quickening of compassion within the Samaritan, I think, is the key. While it happens in the moment, his actions aren’t something random or unexpected. They were in character. And character is something that’s fostered over time. I would guess it took the Samaritan a long time to become the kind of person he was when this story takes place. When the Samaritan encounters this man, his bitter enemy, a Jew, he has already, prior to this moment, become the kind of person who is attuned to compassion, one who cannot simply pass by another human being who is in need without being moved. Who knows how many instances, small and large, took place in this man’s life prior to this, how many minute decisions he made in his everyday life, that shaped his character, that made him into the kind of person who reacts in this way.
This man, a Samaritan, who the Jews saw as heretical religious and ethnic outsiders, Jesus uses as an example of one who embodies the whole of the Jewish law (pretty radical!) – that is, he loves both God and neighbor. If our argument is right that proper love of neighbor flows out of love of God and love of self, then the Samaritan must have been someone who first received and returned the love of God, and who had a healthy love for himself, prior to his actions toward the unnamed victim on the side of the road. If he didn’t love himself, he may still have taken care of the man, but maybe it would have been out of obligation, or in an attempt to make himself look holy and righteous. But we know that that was not his motivation. His motivation was compassion, or pity.
The Samaritan is the kind of person we want to become. It’s the kind of person Jesus wants us to become. After this teaching, Jesus asks the lawyer who was a neighbor to the man, and when the lawyer responds, of course, that it was the Samaritan, Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” This is what Jesus says to us as well: “Go and be that kind of neighbor.”
But to go and be that kind of neighbor isn’t something we can simply snap our fingers and become. It’s something that must be cultivated. It may take us a long time too. It’s work that must be done at a deeper level, a heart level. Sure, after hearing this, we may be motivated by guilt to give a few of our houseless neighbors a dollar here or there, but that, of course, isn’t what Jesus is getting at. We want to become the kind of people who are moved not by guilt but by compassion.
Again, this can only happen if we open ourselves up to the love of God, come to see that we are infinitely loved by God, and return that love to God. As the New Testament scholar Joel Greene says, “Love of neighbor flows out of radical love of God.”
For our sermon series on love of neighbor, we’ll spend a total of 4 weeks exploring ever-widening circles of love of neighbor. First, today, love of neighbor on an individual level, as modeled by the Good Samaritan. Then, next week, we’ll look at love of neighbor specifically in the context of the local church. The next week, we’ll explore love of neighbor in our wider local community – those we live with in our immediate location, but who are of other faiths or no faith. And the last week we’ll look at love of neighbor on a global.
The idea being that all 4 are important, all are crucial, and none are complete on their own. This is always the hard part of faith, in many different instances – to hold the both/and and not resort to the either/or. Within the Christian world, I would say that there are those who are naturally drawn to one or two of these areas of love of neighbor, but struggle with the others. Some tend to stress love of neighbor on an individual scale, and also probably within their church, but they often ignore the wider community, and are blind to systemic, global issues. Others, on the other hand, focus on love of neighbor on a wider, systemic, political scale, but, in my experience, they’re often pretty angry and self-righteous about it. The first group is usually way nicer when it comes to interpersonal, one-on-one interactions, but they don’t see the big picture. The other group can be pretty abrasive because they’re so concerned with the big picture that they forget that individuals matter too.
Of course these are oversimplifications. Most people fall somewhere between those two extremes, but I think most people do trend one way or the other. As Christians, though, we are called to love on all these levels – from the individual to the global, without sacrificing any of them. The famous teaching of Micah 6:8, which essentially sums up the life of faith, says that God requires that we do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with our God. I must say, from personal experience, it’s very hard to do justice and love kindness. It’s much easier to focus on one or the other. Just trying inevitably results in humility, as we fail again and again and must go to God, asking that God walk with us and lead us in the pursuit of both justice and kindness, which is to say, compassion.
On our vacation to Zion, Brie and I hiked the Angel’s Landing trail. Angel’s Landing is probably the most famous hike in Zion, and one of the most famous hikes in the country. The website Utah.com says, “Angel’s Landing is one of the world’s most renowned hikes,” and gives the reason: “There’s no view more dramatic than what you see hanging onto a chain bolted into a cliff.” To reach Angel’s Landing, a relatively small hunk of rock 1,500 ft. off the ground, you have to hike along a skinny ridge, holding on to bolted in chains along a narrow trail, with the giant drop off on one side or the other, and sometimes on both sides, depending on where you are on the trail.
When we started the hike, at the bottom of Zion Canyon, we looked up and saw Angel’s Landing towering ahead of us, 1,500 feet above us. It was hard to believe that we’d soon be up there, looking down. But we took one step at a time, and after a beautiful hike, and with a breath-taking view, we did look back on the trial we had taken to get there. We saw the stop where the bus dropped us off, and the bridge we crossed to begin the hike. We saw the very point we had looked up from a couple hours earlier.
If I’m honest, as far as my character goes, I’m not nearly where the Good Samaritan was when he saw the bloody body of the man on the side of the street. His example looms ahead and above me, like Angel’s Landing. I pass people in need every day, and at my best my heart breaks for them and I say a prayer for them. If I have a buck or two, I’ll give it to them. At my worst, I hardly notice them. But either way I don’t invite them into my house. I don’t pay for their medical bills. You might say, “Of course not, you can’t do that for everyone. The need is too great.” I don’t know, that may be true. But whatever the case, I know I could care more and I could do more. I could be moved by compassion more.
But proper love of neighbor isn’t something we snap our fingers and accomplish. We get there one step at a time, just as Brie and I climbed Angel’s Landing one step at a time. We learn to be more compassionate in our everyday lives. We try our best to be patient. We try not to respond in anger. We try to show respect. We try not to have road rage. We apologize when we make mistakes. We remind ourselves again and again that God loves us and we try to go out and love others like that. Because, again, we know that while it takes effort on our part, we’re ultimately dependent on God and God’s love. So we have to keep leaning into that love, trusting it to hold us like the chains along the path to Angel’s Landing.
And maybe, one day, without really realizing it, we’ll become the kind of people who, when faced with our own version of the man beaten by robbers, respond with compassion. We give of ourselves, and afterwards we don’t think twice about it, because it’s just who we are. It’s who we’ve become. Because we’ve come to understand that God truly loves us, and so we truly love one another.
May it be so.
Amen.