A lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘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.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Matthew 22:35-40
Most of us who have hung around church for even a short period of time can quote the lines above. If we know anything about the way of Jesus, we know it is primarily a way of love. It is about loving God and loving our neighbors. And if we are looking for a metric that is a gauge of whether walking with Jesus along this way is making a difference in our lives, we can look at the extent to which we are growing in love.
St Paul, the Fighting Pharisee who became the slave of the Crucified Carpenter understood this fact. His turn away from being a fiery protector of purity and toward being a grateful recipient of love opened him up to transformation. He became consumed by a love he did nothing to deserve and was so enabled to reach out in love to worlds that he once beheld only with disgust and disdain. What’s more he wrote copiously and beautifully about the transforming power of this Divine love. He is today the go to for texts to be read at weddings. Even people who know little or nothing of Jesus are familiar with St Paul’s depictions of the true character of love. In places like 1 Corinthians 13 and Romans 12 he unpacks what love looks like. He understands that true love is not a merely a feeling, but also a concrete action, a sacrificial extension of oneself toward another.
Over the next six weeks I want to spend some time in my sermons exploring Paul’s discourse on love in Romans 12. Here he invites his readers to “let love be genuine (Rom 12:9).” By this he primarily means let love be integrated; let gratitude for God’s love toward you inspire acts of love toward others and let the dutiful extension of yourself in the work of seeking what is best for another teach you about the same kind of love that God has shown you. Love God and love neighbor and make no distinction between these two loves. Let love be genuine. Let love be integrated. Let love be your resource and your goal. Let love both constrain you and liberate you.
This all, of course, begs the question: How? Paul understands from personal experience that he cannot write a prescription for how we get there. He above all people knew that it took God’s transforming work to turn him around. But what he does do is give us a picture of what this genuine, integrated love looks like. He helps us to be on the lookout for the virtues that are signs of this love. He invites us to identify and relax into things like humility, curiosity, empathy, and intimacy. He reminds us that this work of becoming available to the work of God’s love is about both enthusiastically entrusting ourselves to the mercy of God and defiantly resisting the things that would have us turn our backs on God’s extension of himself toward us in love.
St John says it well: “Little children let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. (1 Jn 3:18)” Let love be genuine. Let love be integrated. O Lord, give us an undivided heart.
David Rohrer
04/30/2022