Love Your Neighbor

In the last five years, it has increasingly been apparent to me that whatever the vast majority of Christian churches have been doing, it has not resulted in people being formed in the image and likeness of Jesus. There’s a lot more I’m likely to say about that in the future, but this week it was vividly demonstrated through the distorted interpretation of the gospel put forth by the vice president this week as he claimed in a Fox News interview:
“There’s this old school, very Christian concept that you love your family, then you love your community, then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

The vice president may follow this worldview, but it is not Christian. And whether this is a matter of politicians wielding religion for gain or the church failing to teach a would-be follower of Jesus the truth about the Way that Jesus taught, it certainly illustrates one more reason why the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is vital to our nation and why there must always be some “swingin’ room” between church and state, to use preacher Gardner Taylor’s phrase.

But let us return to this concept of love and neighbor and a genuinely Christian understanding of Jesus’s teachings. The instruction to “love your neighbor as yourself” is not original to Jesus, of course. It is, as he says, one of the twin commandments from which all the others are derived (Matthew 22:40). The revolutionary thing that Jesus does, however, is redefining “neighbor” as both “anyone” and “enemy.” He proclaims “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” because doing so demonstrates your family resemblance to your Divine Parent (Matthew 5:43–44 NRSV). He tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate not merely that the Samaritan (who the inquirer would have seen as their enemy) is in fact being a neighbor by crossing racial, ethnic, and religious barriers to care for an “enemy” who was hurt — but also that it is the Samaritan who by showing mercy to their enemy will “inherit eternal life” (Luke 10:25).

This is not a new interpretation. John Chrysostom in the late 300s wrote:
“This is the summit of virtue, the foundation of all God’s commandments: to the love of God is joined also love of neighbor. One who loves God does not neglect his brother, nor esteem money more than a limb of his own, but shows him great generosity, mindful of him who has said, ‘Whoever did it to the least of my brothers did it to me.’ He is aware that the Lord of all considers as done to himself what is done in generosity to the poor in giving relief. He does not take into consideration the lowly appearance of the poor, but the greatness of the One who has promised to accept as done to himself what is given to the poor” (Homilies on Genesis, Homily 55.12).

I appreciate the more recent voice of Dave Gibbons, who gets to the heart of the distinctive difference between a Christian understanding of neighbor and that of the vice president. He writes:
“Jesus was telling the religious leader that his neighbor, instead of being someone like him, was someone not like him at all, someone he would be uncomfortable with or even hate… The second most important commandment is all about loving people we don’t understand, whom maybe even the community we live in doesn’t like, maybe even hates, or at least disregards or writes off. People who are misfits. People who are marginalized. People who are outsiders. Loving my neighbor is not about likeness at all. It’s not about people who happen to share my skin color or ethnicity, or about people who talk like me or think like me, people who like the same food as me or like the same things I do. Instead, it’s about people I would not normally choose to befriend, people who might make me uncomfortable to be around” (The Monkey and the Fish, p.74).

This, my friends, is the Way of Jesus. And as Gibbons writes later: “Loving people who are unlike us and who are not necessarily accepted or understood by our own community or culture — is absolutely doing the work and will of Christ… It’s a taste of something extraordinarily unusual, so different from the normal rhythm of humanity that it causes people to take a second look to pause and listen because it strikes them as something supernatural” (pp.74-75).

Thanks for sticking with me through a longer read this week. Something this central to our life and faith seemed worth it to me.

Peace+

Pastor Michael