Love from Christian Perspective

1) GospelMt 22:34-40

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law tested him by asking,
"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" 
He said to him,
"You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

2) Jewish idea of Love

The Jewish idea of responsibility when it comes to who is to be loved goes like this. Everyone was to love God, that was compulsory. But everyone else was graded as to how much love they were to be given. There were those people to whom it was a responsibility to show love. Those on the outer circles of the community, like outcasts, sinners, tax collectors, Gentiles, Samaritans etc, some were to be loved less, or others were owed no love whatsoever. The Pharisees had established many laws to help people in their observance of this command. These laws told people whom they were to love, and whom they could ignore.

By saying that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love your neighbour, this gives a new slant to the traditional interpretation. To love God that was clear enough but to also say to love one another in the same breath puts both of these commands on an equal footing.

The love of God and the love of our neighbour are inseparable. You cannot claim to love God if you don't love your neighbour. Essentially the entire law of God can be boiled down to two simple commandments: Love God with your whole being; and love whomever God puts next to you as you love yourself.

3) What is LOVE?

Before we go any further we need to understand what Jesus means here when he uses the word love. That little four letter word "love" is used in many contexts. We talk about loving our dog, loving strawberries and ice-cream, or loving a member of the opposite gender. When we use the word love like that we are expressing our affection and have warm feelings for whatever it is that we are loving. Because we associate the word "love" with affection it’s no wonder that we have difficulty loving those people who annoy us, those who have hurt us, and those who don’t deserve to be loved.

When the Bible talks about love it primarily means a love that keeps on loving, it means commitment. We may have warm feelings of gratitude to God when we consider all that he has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that Jesus is demanding of us. It is stubborn, unwavering commitment. It follows then that to love one another, including our enemies, doesn’t mean we must feel affection for them, rather it means a commitment on our part to take their needs seriously, just as God committed himself to taking our needs seriously by sending his Son into this world. You see this in marriages where because of the aging process one partner has become physically incapacitated, difficult to live with, very demanding, and yet the other partner keeps on caring and putting up with it all. That’s coming close to the biblical idea of love. It’s that commitment even though it isn’t deserved. It’s that stubborn, unwavering commitment to the other person’s needs often at a great sacrifice to him/herself.

4) Example of Love in action.

This kind of love doesn’t come naturally. It is true that this kind of love comes from God, but putting it into practice is something we have to work on. Love – commitment - is a deliberate action of the will. To love means deliberately to turn toward another person and their needs, to give away something of ourselves to someone else without thinking of what we will get in return. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 15:25-37) we see an example of a man loving his enemy, committing his money, time and energy to seeing to the needs of the man lying in the gutter. He stopped to help and to hang with the consequences. All he could see was someone in need. This kind of love/commitment is self-sacrificing. It is putting the other person first, whether it is God or our neighbour.

In all honesty, it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that this kind of love has been in short supply in our lives.

Because this is not the case Jesus came to pay for our lovelessness. He showed us what true love is. His love touched the dumb, the deaf, the diseased, the disabled. His love warned, wept and washed dirty feet. His love told of a shepherd searching for lost sheep, a Father rushing out to embrace and kiss his lost son as he welcomed him home. His love turned the other cheek, and willingly walked that extra mile. His love carried a cross -- and died upon it! His love welcomed each of us into God's family, forgiving our sin in the water of our Baptism.

Jesus came to make us more loving. What form this loving takes is not important, but what is important is that it does take place. When you fail, remember Jesus loves you, and let his love shine through you into the lives of the people around you.

Copyright 2005, Pastor Vince Gerhardy