From very different perspectives, all three of today’s readings have to do with how to get along with each other. But one of them provides the foundation for the other two. The second reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans announces that there is one commandment which, if you fulfill it, you get to fulfill all the other commandments. It’s a bit like a spiritual twofer, but it’s an “all-fer” – we can fulfill not just two commandments, but all of them, by fulfilling one of them.
So you’ll understand why my reflections with you this morning are going to be mainly on the second reading – the section of Paul’s Letter to the Romans in which he tells us: “Anyone who loves another has fulfilled the law…All the commandments are summed up in this word: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ … Love is the fulfilling of the law.”
If Paul insists that “Love is the fulfilling of the law,” we might want to ask: Just why is that so? The answer, I’d like to propose, is both simple and profound: Because God is Love – or, Love is God.
There are only two definitions of God in the New Testament. I’m talking about sentences in the NT that begin with: “God is….” Fill in the blanks. In the first Letter attributed to John, we read: “God is love, and therefore whoever abides in love abides in God and God in them.” (I John 4:16) So according to John, God is an energy, not an entity. A force not a figure or super-person. A verb not a noun.
God-as-Love is the energy that gives rise to and sustains all of creation (as Teilhard has reminded and shown us).
So this is why love of neighbor is the fulfillment, the essence, of all the commandments – because when we are loving others, we’re allowing God to be God in and through us; we’re enabling God to do God’s thing in us. When we are loving we are expressing what God essentially is – Love. That’s the heart, the intent, of all the commandments.
By the way, (this is a footnote): the other “definition of God” in the New Testament is also from John’s writings: “God is Spirit.” In the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that “God is spirit, and God’s worshippers must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4: 24) – And “Spirit,” like “Love,” is an animating, inner energy
But if love is the fulfillment of all the commandments, that doesn’t make fulfilling this commandment easy. To love our neighbor just as much as we love ourselves seems, for many of us, to be a pretty daunting, if not impossible, task.
Maybe what makes it so daunting is that in order to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, we first have to love ourselves! That might be the problem. We don’t sufficiently love ourselves in order to be able to love our neighbor. Why is that so? – That could be a complex psychological question that may have to do with our childhood experiences.
But let me offer a theological perspective as to why we don’t love ourselves, or why we can’t overcome some of those childhood experiences: It’s because we have not taken seriously enough the rather stunning, perhaps perplexing, call St. Paul makes at the end of today’s reading from Romans. In the very last verse, he adds – it seems out of nowhere: “Put on Jesus Christ!”
Pauline scholars tell us what Paul means by that. “To put on Jesus Christ” means to have the very same experience that he had, the experience that animated and directed his life: that he was loved by God – by a Reality he called “Abba” – which was his word or symbol for God-as-Love.
This awareness, this trust, that we, like Jesus, are held and sustained by a Love we call God is an inner, a contemplative experience. This contemplative experience of being loved by God grounds and sustains our ability to love ourselves.
To really love one’s self, in other words, requires a Lover of one’s self. For Christians, Jesus of Nazareth reveals that Lover; he called it Abba. Feeling, trusting, sitting silently in meditation with this God, this pervasive love-energy, we are enabled to love ourselves and then our neighbor.
I think this reading from Paul can throw some helpful light on the other two readings. A love of neighbor that is as strong as love of self will certainly animate us to do what Ezekiel in the first reading calls us to do: to speak up in protest of what he calls the “wickedness,” the “evil” of his times – the suffering that some people were inflicting on others.
When we look at what’s happening in our country today, love certainly calls us to speak up in protest against a government that seems to be causing so much needless suffering. But what will animate and guide our protests will be not only, or not primarily, the injustice, or the cruelty, of what is being done, but the love we have for what Ezekiel calls “the wicked” ones who are acting unjustly and cruelly. They too are our neighbors. We will oppose them fiercely, but we will also love them fiercely. Which means our opposition will be nonviolent. As the last lines of the reading from Ezekiel state: The Most High “has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” The love of the Most High extends also to the so-called wicked. So must ours.
Regarding the Gospel reading, when, as Matthew’s Jesus tells us, we encounter people who “sin against” us or others, we will not be silent; we will “point out their faults.” But we will do so with caution and kindness – first, as the Gospel instructs, a one-on-one conversation, then with other witnesses, then publicly before the whole church.
And if they still persist in their wrong-doing, Jesus in Matthew gives us an interesting directive. He doesn’t say to remove them, or resort to violence, but “to be wary” of them. – I understand that as a call to continue to admonish, to oppose them, but not exclude them – to still hold them in love as we oppose them.
So, I’ve given this sermon a title. (I always try to formulate a title for a sermon as a way of making sure the sermon has one clear and central message. The title is “Love of neighbor requires love of self. And love of self requires a Lover of Self.”
And in order to experience this divine Lover, St. Paul urges us “to put on Jesus Christ” – to experience that same love of Abba that carried him through his life and mission. We are invited to identify with Jesus Christ and share, participate in his own experience. That’s possible, Paul tells us. That’s what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
How do we do that? One of the primary ways is through the Sacrament that we are about to celebrate and experience this morning. Jesus left us this ritual of gathering together around a table to remember him, to tell his story, and to break bread and share a cup — and through this ritual, symbolic activity to experience, to feel that we indeed consume him, that he becomes us and we become him. He continues to live his life and share his experience of God in us.
The Eucharist is a beautiful ritual experience; but in order to truly be effective it must become also a contemplative experience in which we open our hearts and quietly trust and feel his presence with us. That’s why we always have some time for silent meditation after Communion. Today, we will extend that time of silence in place of a post-Communion hymn.
We move now to the table, to share bread and wine together – and so to “put on Jesus Christ” – to feel, with him, the love of God that will enable us to love ourselves and to love our neighbor — and so to make a little contribution to healing this messed up world of ours.
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