I've been thinking about this question a lot lately - especially in the wake of a divisive election season where there seemed to be no shortage of opinions from various Evangelicals on how Christians ought to cast their vote. You had people on the Right saying that Christians shouldn't vote for politicians that would promote the right to kill babies. You had people on the Left saying that Christians shouldn't vote for politicians who are not loving their neighbor well (i.e. voting against open-border policies, voting in favor of big business, etc).
I can't help but feel like both sides are getting it woefully wrong.
When I look at Jesus' interaction with his main 'opponent' in the Gospels, the Pharisees, I don't see the same dynamics that Evangelicals are talking about today. Jesus' disagreements with the Pharisees were all under the umbrella of obedience. Pharisaical-ism was, for better and for worse, obsessed with obedience to God. So obsessed, in fact, that they created all of these secondary traditions so as to not even come close to disobedience. So when Jesus is confronting the Pharisees, it is not because they are calling something sinful, good. Rather, the stick that they used against the people around them was that they were not pious enough. They lorded it over the people that they (the teachers and leaders) were the most pious. In other words, it became a outward-behavior competition. Who can stay the farthest away from outwardly breaking the Law? Jesus was constantly getting at the heart of a person - to that end he famously said, "you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but the inside is full of greed and wickedness."
My overall point here is that Jesus was not talking to people who were sinning and calling it good. He was talking to people who believed in God and who wanted to obey. There seems to be this on-going conversation within the broader Church about how we "love others". And that's really what I want to address with this post.
Jesus says, in clear and unequivocal terms, "love one another, just as I have loved you [...] by this all people will know that you are My disciples: if you have love for one another." (John 13:34-35) Paul has his famous, "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." (1 Corinthians 13:4-6) These things we have all heard - but how many of us have stopped to ask ourselves, "what does it mean to love someone". Jesus says, 'love as I have loved', Paul describes what the attributes of love are, but does not tell us much about how that is lived out.
What Love Cannot Be
Paul is very clear in 1 Corinthians 5 - "expel the wicked person from among you." Who is the 'wicked person'? He clearly details it: the sexually immoral, the greedy, the idolator, the gossip, the drunk and the thief (verse 11). He says, "do not even eat with such people." He is talking about the people who say they are brothers and sisters in the Faith, but who do these things. So - the first thing we can say is that as fellow believers, love does not look like tolerating or placating the sin of someone who says they share in the Faith. Jesus himself lived this out - he didn't go turn the tables of the marketplace in the middle of Jerusalem, no - he went and turned the tables of the money-changers in the temple. When he healed people, several times he said, "go and sin no more".
To me this seems like a point worth under-scoring. Fellow Christian - for those of us who say we believe, part of loving one another is holding one another accountable. That is not pleasant. It is not affirming. It is not warm and fuzzy. It is sharp and painful (remember 'iron sharpens iron'?). To live as a believer while saying that something sinful is 'good' is to heap judgement on oneself. To be a community of Faith but to collectively call something sinful "good" is to heap judgement on that community. Jesus had no problem with the desire for obedience on the part of the Pharisees. He never lessened the importance of obedience. Rather - the focal point of their disagreements was either a) the hierarchy of good, meaning that one law would supersede the observance of another, lesser law, in certain circumstances or b) the importance of one's heart in the matter of obedience - that it isn't just about outward obedience, but inward heart-transformation. Regardless, all of that is with the assumption that obedience is in view, front and center. Jesus equates 'love' with 'obedience'. He says very plainly, "if you love me, you will obey me." (John 14)
Love cannot be ambivalent to neediness. Jesus says, "any help you gave to one of the least of these my brothers, you gave to me" and then a little later on - "away from me, you who are cursed, into the unending fire prepared for the devil and his angels! For I was hungry but you didn't give me anything to eat, I was thirsty but you didn't give me anything to drink..." (Matthew 25:40-43) As Americans and Christians - we can argue about what the rules and laws of our country should be towards immigrants, towards the poor, towards marginalized groups, etc. All of that is not as clear cut as some would like to make it out to be. Having said that - what we cannot argue about is our personal responsibility to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, tend to the sick and give aide to the foreigner. Why do we do this? Because we are God's ambassadors - His representatives (what it means to be 'made in God's image). When we act benevolently towards our neighbor in need, we are demonstrating one of God's core attributes, namely that He is extremely generous, not only materially but also in pouring out His grace toward us. I think some Christians, particularly American Christians, have deluded themselves into thinking that because they advocate for laws or policies that benefit the poor/needy/etc that they are somehow off the hook for doing the actual work in their communities, with their own time and energy. This is a lie from Satan himself. Governments are notoriously bad at social programs, the United States maybe uniquely so. Jesus never spoke of caring for one's neighbor through government - He modeled doing the work with his own hands. The Apostles also clearly lived this way (Acts 6, for example). We have to be willing to get into the mess with people - that is part of being a Disciple, and it is what 'loving your neighbor' looks like.
Love does not reduce people to one thing. There seems to be an ever-growing tendency in this culture to divide people into camps. Whether that's race, politics, financial status, and on and on - increasingly we talk about people as if only one thing about them was something that defined them. Our media seems hell-bent on getting us to focus on what makes us different from one another - constantly injecting these divisive issues into every news story. Likewise, our politicians seem to play this tune all the time - painting their opponents as members of 'that group of people.' As Christians, we have to resist this. If there is one thing we all share in common, its that we are all created by God. Our work as the image-bearing ambassadors of God is to seek and come alongside the lost, pointing as many as we can toward Jesus. How can we be effective in that work if in our minds, we paint a whole class of people as unworthy, simply because they see some issue differently than we do. I've only been around about 40 years, but if I know one thing, its that everyone has difficulty and suffering in their lives. It's also my experience that when things get really hard, that's when people are most likely to reach for God. How can we be a part of that if we aren't in their lives?
What Love Is (my take anyway)
Here's another shameless plug for 'The Chosen' series (free through their app, Season 3 starts in December!). One thing I love about the beginning of that show is how they portray Jesus' calling of his disciples. They take some artistic license, but they portray these men as being kinda lost in life. Peter has gotten himself into substantial debt, Matthew is hated by everyone (which is likely true since he was a Jew, working for the Romans as a tax collector) and lonely. Mary is demon possessed and living in a very bad part of town. Jesus climbed into their mess with them, and pulled them out. In the Gospels, it is maybe a line or two. But in real life - the untangling of those situations probably took some time. Real love is being willing to get down in the dirt with someone. We all like to put on this front that we have it together. Where I live, this is an especially powerful idol. We all know its not true, but we feel this vague pressure to keep up appearances. Sometimes it looks like keeping to ourselves when we're going through a hard time, not letting other people know what's really going on. Sometimes it means not really digging in with a friend, because we are afraid we might make them uncomfortable by probing. Community is a true gift from God - not only does allow us to carry each others burdens but it is also the mechanism for confession and forgiveness. We have to be willing to get into the mess with others and also to invite others into our messes when they happen.
Real love is telling someone when they are about to be hit by a truck. You might be saying 'huh, where did that come from?' Several years ago, I saw a video by the famous entertainer Penn Jillette. He is a self-proclaimed atheist but in this video, he shares about a time when someone came up to him after a show and preached to Gospel to him. He went on to say that he respects the 'proselytizer' because if someone believes that something is really a matter of life and death, but they don't say something, that is the definition of indifference. He says, "I mean, if I believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn't believe that a truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that."
Is it 'love' to stand on a street corner and tell everyone they're going to hell? No. Is it love to tell your friend that some of the things they've told you they are involved in are sinful? I would argue yes. Is it love to tell the fellow believer that if they continue in their lifestyle of sexual immorality, they are in danger of being cut off from the Kingdom of God? Yes! Do we have to constantly hit people in the face with their sin? No - but we neither should we be affirming of sin, either explicitly or by silence. Ideally - believers would be confessing to one another and seeking repentance, but it isn't always like that. Are we OK with having an uncomfortable conversation with someone? Sometimes, as part of loving someone well, that is what is going to be required. Which brings me to my last point...
Love is relationship. This last one might seem self-evident, but when I was thinking about this topic, it seemed worth talking about because the word 'love' has become so cheap in our modern society. So cheap, in fact, that there are jokes about it. "Ts & Ps" is a throw-away phrase (thoughts & prayers) for when people have sympathy for something, but not enough to where they'll actually do something about it. In the cult-classic "Anchorman", you have a character in Brick Tamland who goes around saying "I love lamp" (among other things). On any given day, you are likely to overhear someone saying "oh, I just love [insert object/store here]!" Real love is complicated, wonderful, difficult, and life-giving all at the same time. Real love involves relationship. Our relationships with one another and our relationship with God. In Paul's commentary on love from 1 Corinthians 13 that I mentioned early on in this post, a lot of those things are about preserving in relationship; patient, not envious, keeping no account of wrongs, enduring... In a Biblical sense, the only context for love is relational.
Skip Moen wrote the following about love, "There is no biblical debate whatsoever that God is love. The only real question is whether or not we express the same quality. You will notice that John equates our loving with knowing God's love. It is fundamentally about others, not ourselves. According to John, if you can't express benevolent compassion, trustworthy reciprocity, and extended selflessness toward others, then you don't know God's love either." Man - I wish I had a way with words the way he does. The way that we love others is in direct relation to how much we understand God's love toward us.
I don't really have a way to land this plane - I just felt this heavy on my mind and needed to get it out on paper.
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