Proper 25A
Matthew 22:34-46
October 23, 2011

Our Closest Neighbors

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

A friend of mine, a United Methodist pastor named Herb Schaefer, is restoring an old house in Bentonsport in southeast Iowa. It was built in the Federalist style in the early part of the 1800s. When Herb bought it, it was a mess. The beams that rest on the foundation had rotted and needed to be replaced. Beyond that it needed a new roof and had a long list of repairs that needed to be made to it.

The house has passed through a number of hands. Each of its owners, it seems, added something. Late in the 1800s an attached kitchen was built onto the rear of the building. Fireplaces were bricked up and covered over with walls. The ceilings were lowered. Someone—may God have mercy on their soul—actually knocked out one of the front first floor windows and installed a bay window!

I’m enough of a historian that I can appreciate Herb’s pain about the suffering that his poor house has been through. Fortunately for both Herb and house, there were detailed architectural drawings of the house as it was in the 1930s. It seems that a Depression Era federal projects employed architects to find and record unique especially representative buildings all across the country. One of the buildings so recorded was Herb’s house. In fact, the seventy year old drawings were how he found the fireplaces!

I’m sure that each of the modifications to the original structure was made by someone who thought they were making an improvement. The end result, though, was so mixed up that you could no longer tell what it was by looking at it. It had lost its integrity.

After jacking the house up and installing new beams, the next phase of Herb’s work was to strip away the “improvements.” Soon the Federalist house began to reappear, shabby and in need of many repairs to be sure, but it made sense again.

I’m afraid that the text from Matthew is more than a little like that wonderful old Federalist house in Bentonsport. “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” Jesus said. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” Jesus said. And people have been hanging stuff on those two commandments ever since.

So the first step in reading this text is to strip away the accumulation of the centuries. To see what these words ever were we’ll have to knock out the bay window (what were they thinking?). We’ll have to take a wrecker bar to the dry wall and bricks that cover the fireplaces. Then we can see what we have.

The fireplace comes from theologians. In the middle of the last century a Swede named Anders Nygren published a book that noticed that there are three different words for “love” found in the New Testament.ⁱ His theory was that each of these three words stood for a different kind of love and that the different kinds of love are categorically different, especially the two kinds called êros and agapê. Êros is physical love, maybe better translated “desire” than love and it is love that seeks its own satisfaction, so it is inherently selfish or at least self-seeking. Agapê on the other hand is a spiritual love that seeks the benefit of the other. It is disinterested, not that it doesn’t care, but that it doesn’t seek to gain anything for itself.

Some readers grabbed this distinction as if it were one of those combination tools with pliers, screwdrivers, wire cutter, knife blades, saw blades,corkscrew,and a tire pump,all in one. Convinced that they could use this tool to solve every problem they quickly noticed that the word for love in this text is agapê. Ah, they said, this means that we are supposed to love God and our neighbors with this disinterested, spiritual love. Desire and physicality are not supposed to be a part of the love that is the subject of the Great Commandment.

It is understandable that Nygren came up with this. On this side of the Atlantic we read him in English translation. Who, after all, reads Swedish? But he wrote the book in the late 1930s having witnessed the devastation of the Great War and while listening to the beating of the war drums leading up to the Great War, Take Two. Perhaps he and his fellow Europeans had had enough of physicality and desire—it didn’t seem to go anywhere good.

But that’s no excuse for making distinctions that aren’t in the language. Yes, Greek has more than one word for love. So does English. Like our English words for love, Greek words have shades of meaning. But also as in English, the various words are used in ways that slide into each other. I love ice cream, Carol and God (not necessarily in that order). We could say that love and adore are two different words with two different meanings and we can trace some differences, but they slide into each other. It’s not nonsense for me to say that I adore ice cream, Carol and God (not necessarily in that order). No one will make a whole theology out of the shades of those two words.

Besides, the Christian mystics who have spent their whole lives focusing their whole being on loving God, who have pursued most directly the commandment to love God with their whole heart, these mystics will tell us that loving God has everything to do with desire and it is not in the least disinterested.

And how could it be otherwise? We human beings are embodied creatures. The only life that we know is life in a physical body. We might pretend that our minds (or souls or spirits) on the one hand and our bodies on the other are two different things. But this is a notion we have made up. We find this idea helpful when we’re thinking about some things, but your preacher and your doctor will both tell you that our minds and our bodies are bound up together.

So tempting as it might be sometimes to think that we can in this life leave our bodies behind and love with only our minds, it’s just not how we do it. We love in the only way we humans can love,but the fact is we already love. Everyone loves something, the early Christian monks, said. Commanding us to love is redundant. It is not the kind of love but whom we love and for whose sake we love, according to the monks. To do that right we need wisdom and the virtue they called discernment.

So much, then, for the fireplaces. We can see them now in the midst of bits of plaster and broken bricks.

Now for the bay window. It comes from the pastoral counselors. Again, in the middle of the last century, they came up with this idea that the two commands—the commandment to love God with everything we have and the commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves—teach three loves. They seized upon the part about loving others as we love ourselves and decided that this meant that we are commanded to love ourselves and that we cannot love others until we have mastered the art of self-love.

I do notice many people treat themselves rather badly. Some people seem to punish themselves for no good reason that I can see.

And then there are those who treat other people badly. I suspect that some of them at least are acting out of self-loathing that they live with by turning it outward onto the people around them.

I could certainly be wrong about this, but I don’t believe that either of these kinds of people are suffering from a lack of self-love. They are suffer from a lack of wisdom. They do love themselves, but the self that they love is a false self. They cannot discern the difference between their false and real selves.

Like I say, I could be wrong about this, but right or wrong, Jesus did not teach that we are supposed to love ourselves. Jesus, not having lived in the last fifty years or so, was not afflicted with the strange and novel idea that what is wrong with the world can be fixed if only we love ourselves enough. Jesus assumed that everyone already loves themselves. We seek what we need. When we’re hungry, we look for food. When we’re tired we try to find some rest. When we itch we scratch. We don’t have to be taught this love. What the commandment commands is that we direct our caring toward meeting other’s needs as well as our own. That’s what Jesus believed that the Torah taught. That’s what Jesus taught in turn. We may disagree with him, but let’s let the man speak for himself.

So, with the bay window gone, let’s see what we have. We have Jesus’ summary of the Torah, that is, the law of Moses. We have all 613 mitzvôt, or commandments, that every ordinary Jewish man is obliged to observe boiled down to one. Well, okay, two. But the second, as Jesus observes, is “like” the first.

One of the greatest of the Christian mystics was a monk and reformer named Bernard who was the leader of the Benedictine abbey at Clairvaux in France. We know Bernard as the person for whom the dog breed was named. He talked and wrote a lot about love.

Bernard said love is a journey that moves through four stages. Each of the stages is distinguished by whom we love and for whose sake we love. We begin, Bernard says, by loving ourselves for our own sake. Then, aware that God has a claim on us and afraid of judgment, we love God. But we love God for own sake. Then we come to love God for God’s sake. The last stage is a surprise: In it we love ourselves once again. But we love ourselves for God’s sake.

If we love ourselves for God’s sake we will love our neighbors in the same way as we love ourselves. When I know that I am God’s beloved simply because God has made me and it is in God’s nature to love what God has made, then I know that you are God’s beloved, too, and I recognize that you are just as deserving of the things that you need as I am.

But, of course, that’s where we hope to end our journey. There are not many whose lives shine with that truth. Alas! I am not one of them.

But, with the “improvements” stripped away from this text, we begin to see it for what it is. And it has some integrity. It makes some sense without having to be novel or original. It wasn’t even original with Jesus. When Jesus lifted up these two mitzvôt as a summary for all of them, he stood in good company. Many Jewish teachers of his day said the same, especially among the Pharisees. Jesus is reminding his conversation partners (and us) of what they (and we) already know: Living in covenant with God is first and foremost about love. It’s about loving God and it’s about loving each other.

There’s nothing new there and nothing fancy. But that doesn’t mean that we get it. The Danish philosopher (We seem to be in Scandinavia this morning!) Søren Kierkegaard wrote somewhere that we didn’t have seminaries because the Bible was hard to understand and we needed to have places to learn what it means. We have seminaries because the Bible is easy to understand and we needed to have place to learn how to confuse things. I’m not sure I agree completely and I’m not even sure he meant it completely, but I see his point.

The Christian life is about love. It’s about loving God. It’s about loving the people whose lives touch and are touched by ours. Anything and everything else is secondary.

Karsten Snitker (an American musician of Norwegian extraction) reminded me a couple of weeks ago that October is a month that has been set aside for awareness of the prevalence of domestic violence. Domestic violence, whether it is perpetrated against children or adults, is a species of the larger category of bullying. We are slowly coming to recognize these things, to name them accurately and to understand the damage that they do to victims and, to be sure, to perpetrators as well. Looking back I’m pretty sure we’ll wonder what took us so long, but that’s the way people are. It’s the way I am, at least.

There is good literature about domestic violence and there are resources to help those who are caught in it. But let’s speak from the perspective of our faith tradition. For too long perpetrators have used the Bible as an excuse. They will find a verse here or there that seems to condone violence used by parents against children or by husbands against wives. For too long the Church has let this misuse of sacred Scripture go unanswered. We have even added to the burden of victims by requiring submission and forgiveness as the price of God’s love.

When we look at this through the lens of the text we have been wrestling with today, we find that the Christian life is about loving God and loving those whose lives touch and are touched by ours. Anything and everything else is secondary. If we read something somewhere in the Bible that seems to justify acting in ways that are not loving, we know that it’s either wrong or we got it wrong. Love comes first. Always. Period. So says the Torah. So says Jesus.

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are in a relationship marked by violence or threats of violence, know that this is not what love is about. If you have been or are being victimized, know that God holds hurting you to be deeply offensive. God loves you. You do not deserve to be a victim. Period.

If you are victimizing someone else, know that God holds hurting someone else to be deeply offensive. Just as God loves the victim of violence, so God loves you. Just as your victim does not deserve it, you do not deserve to be a perpetrator. God has a better dream than that for both of you. If the Christian life is about loving God and loving our neighbor, then our nearest neighbors deserve to live lives without fear of their nearest neighbors in their own home.

And those of us who observe violence or the threat of violence in a relationship need to know that God finds this violence deeply offensive. It’s not happening so that someone can learn or grow or develop patience or practice forgiveness. Violence is not redemptive. It is an offense against God and against God’s dream for us. If the Christian life is about loving God and loving our neighbor, then domestic violence presents us with one of those times that require a choice: we can either love God and our neighboror we can be silent, but we cannot do both.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

• iAnders Nygren, Eros and Agape, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953).