All You Need is Love:
Loving Others: The Greatest Commandment, Part 2
Mark 12: 28 – 34
We spent last week looking at what it means to love God. Hopefully, we discovered that we love what we’re passionate about, and that to love God is to desire Him, to devote ourselves to Him, and to discipline our lives to be with him through windows of grace like prayer, fasting, bible study, worship and others. Desire, devotion and discipline must become tangible actions, for there remains the truth that we cannot love God unless we love others. I think that’s why Jesus would say in Mark’s Gospel that loving our neighbor is “equally as important” as loving God. It’s also why this lawyer would include it in his response to Jesus’ question. The two are eternally woven.
The starting place for our conversation is that we love ourselves. We’ll make the assumption that we do, otherwise, that fact is too weighty an issue to deal with in this message. You won’t love others properly until you love yourself. Regardless, we are commanded to love others. Let’s make that our focus today. To do so, I want to call your attention to a story Jesus told about neighbors. It too, was told in response to a lawyer’s question. What is it with these lawyer’s and their questions?
We know the story as the story of the Good Samaritan. It’s in Luke’s gospel, chapter 10, verses 29 – 37. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells the story to a lawyer who wanted to know how to receive eternal life, and he answered his own question with a reciting of the Jewish Shema of Deuteronomy 6 we read last week—“love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.” Then, he adds, “love your neighbor as yourself.” Luke adds in verse 29 that the lawyer wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” He wanted to justify himself. After all, you really can’t expect me to love everyone, now can you? If we want to justify what we do, we can simply define people and circumstances using our own definition and thereby absolve ourselves from any guilt for not doing what we knew we should do, or for doing something we knew we shouldn’t. We’ve all got a little bit of lawyer in us.
Now, the story: Jesus said a Jewish man was traveling on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho and was attacked by bandits. They beat him up, stripped him and left him for dead beside the road. We could stop right there and say the man had no business going from Jerusalem to Jericho alone. It was a road known to be frequented by bandits. See, it was the man’s own fault. He should have been smarter. He took a risk and the risk didn’t pay off. Certainly, that’s what those who stood around Jesus listening that day would have thought initially. It’s the man’s own fault. How often have we seen someone broken and beat up by life, and we thought, “Well, they made an unwise decision. They made their bed, now they have to sleep in it?” Probably, much too often.
Jesus continued the story by saying first a Jewish priest came along, but saw the man and passed by on the other side of the road. Next, a Levite (or Temple assistant) came by, and likewise went around the man on the other side of the road. The good Jews listening to the story would have said, “Yup. That’s what I would have done.” Neither a priest nor a Levite could sully themselves with the blood of a beaten man. It would have rendered them unclean and they would not be fit for service in the Temple. They would have to go through a long, drawn-out cleansing process, and it simply was not worth the effort. They made a prioritized decision. They had more pressing business to which to attend.
Then, Jesus says, a dreaded (don’t you like the use of that word?) Samaritan came by. Jesus is setting his listeners up, and he’s also setting up this lawyer. Samaritan’s were hated by Jews, and any Jew, if he was a good Jew, wouldn’t want a Samaritan to help even if they were lying in a ditch dying. That’s exactly what the listeners and the lawyer are thinking, but Jesus’ story reminds us our neighbor isn’t necessarily who we think it is. So, this Samaritan sees the man, and Jesus says, “he felt deep pity.” So, the Samaritan kneels, soothes and bandages the wounds. He puts the man on his donkey, takes him to an inn and cares for him. The next day, he offers the innkeeper money to take care of the man. He does, after all, have to go on about his business, but he tells the innkeeper, “if you have any other expenses beyond what I’ve paid you, when I come back, I’ll settle up with you.”
Jesus asks the lawyer, “Now who was a neighbor to the man attacked by bandits?”
The lawyer replied, “The one who showed mercy.”
Jesus said, “Yup. Now, go and do the same.”
The KJV says, “Go, thou and do likewise.”
What must we do to show love to our neighbor? First, we acknowledge that love engages us on the emotional level. Certainly, that’s true with romantic love, but I remind us we’re not talking about romantic love here. We’re talking about “agape” love—that sacrificial, self-denying kind of love. Yet, even agape love engages us on an emotional level. The Samaritan, Jesus said, “felt deep pity.” In other words, he felt compassion. Pity and compassion are both emotions, so love is emotional, but it isn’t ONLY emotional. It is the emotion, the compassion that motivates us to act, so even though it may be emotional, it becomes tangible. Compassion was the Samaritan’s motivation, and it had nothing to do with the fact the man should not have ventured down the Jericho road alone. We think, for some reason, that because a person has made a decision that led to bad consequences that we should have less compassion for them. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a person is broken and battered, we have a responsibility to love them the more.
We should have compassion because Jesus had compassion on the crowds who sought him. In Matthew 9: 35 – 36, Matthew tells us:
Jesus traveled through all the cities and villages of that area, teaching in the synagogues and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom. And wherever he went, he healed people of every sort of disease and illness. He felt great pity for the crowds, because their problems were so great and they didn’t know where to go for help. They were like sheep without a shepherd.
The NIV says, “he was moved with compassion.” Jesus, moved with compassion, he healed, he restored, he forgave, he died. He did it all for us because he loved us. What started in the heart of God as compassion, mercy and pity ended at the cross in deep love and grace, and from that came the forgiveness of our sins and the restoration of our souls.
So, love is rooted on the emotional level, but quickly becomes tangible. If we love others, it will begin as we connect on an emotional level with others. We must remove ourselves from the center of life and feel compassion and concern for others. Else, we’ll be like the priest and the Levite. We’ll say, “I’ve got other things that demand my attention. I have my agenda. You’re not a priority right now.” To love others is to see a need and to be moved with compassion so that we desire to see lives different, better, more whole.
Emotion sustains us as we move to action. Without emotional engagement, the commitment to act will wane. Love is both emotional commitment and tangible action—the action is like that we see in the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan knelt, bandaged the wounds and carried the man to safety. The tangible act confirmed his compassion. But, this love was also sacrificial. The Samaritan had already invested his time by stopping, bandaging and carrying the man to the inn, and yes, even he took the risk of being rejected. Some Jews would rather die than have a Samaritan help them, much less touch them. It’s possible that the beaten man could have said, “Get away from me. I’ll die first!” I think, though, that only healthy people are quite so stubborn. When we’re desperately clinging to life, we’ll grasp at any straw, accept any help. The prospect of terminal circumstances changes our perspective rather quickly. Yet, rejection remains a real possibility. The lesson? We should never let our fear of rejection keep us from loving others.
The Samaritan not only sacrificed his time and energy, but he sacrificed his money, as well. He paid the innkeeper to care for the man. His money became a tool he used to demonstrate his love for others. Money is amoral. Our morals determine how we utilize the resources entrusted to us. We are a blessed congregation. We are a generous congregation, but if we ever get to the point that we see money as anything other than a tool for promoting life-transforming ministry, that’s the day this congregation will begin to die. That’s the day we’ll turn inward and become selfish.
The same holds in our personal lives. Financial resources can be blessing, or they can be curse. Giving generously is a core value of a disciple of Jesus Christ. It is a means of showing our love in tangible ways. If we utilize money as a means of glorifying God, we’ll discover His blessings in ways we can only begin to imagine. But, if we grasp tightly to money in fear of losing it, we’ll discover that it will soon vanish, and we’ll be left wondering what happened, and why God seems so far away.
One more thing I see, and that is that love is on-going. Loving others is not a one-time endeavor. Love is lived in relationship, and the Samaritan said to the inn keeper, “When I come back…” He gave money to the inn-keeper, and he had every intention of returning to check on things. Life transformation happens in relationship. That’s why a church’s mission outreach must be more deep than broad. We can do a little good in a lot of places, but little transformation takes place, either for others or for us. Or, we can do a lot in a few places, and thereby build relationships that begin to transform the world, one relationship at a time.
Can I tell you what my dream is? I dream of the day our missions budget is at least $136,000 a year. That’s an odd amount, right? I dream that would be our starting place because that’s exactly how much we’re paying in debt service a year. What if we paid off our debt in short order, and took those funds budgeted for debt service and kept it in the budget for missions outreach—creating tangible, sacrificial ways to love our neighbors? What if we built on-going relationships with agencies on the local, national and international levels so we could make a difference in their lives, and as importantly, they could make a difference in ours? That’s what I’ve asked of our missions team to consider moving forward. Jan Nelson is putting together a team of leaders, and the only instruction I’ve given her is “dream big, God-sized dreams.” I’ll be anxious to see where that leads.
I want to thank Carole Rogers who has headed our missions team for the past several years. She’s done a fantastic job coordinating the various mission outreach ministries of our congregation. And, she’s done it on a shoe-string, too. Under her leadership, we’ve been vital and effective. We want that vitality and effectiveness to continue. We have many Sunday school classes and groups within our church who have relationships with agencies in our community, and we’ve had an on-going relationship with Habitat for Humanity as a congregation. Habitat hasn’t built a house in three years, so that relationship isn’t as visible as it once was, but that’s changing. Habitat is gearing up for a new build. That’s one place, and one way we, as a congregation can love our neighbor tangible and sacrificially.
Another way we can do that is to partner with The Foundry—the new UM church plant in the northern part of the parish. We can partner first by praying, but then secondly, by providing missionaries to help Chad and Meredith Brooks plant that church. You’ll be hearing more about that next month, but I want to plant the seed today so you’ll be praying to ask the Lord about how you might be involved. That’s part of our DNA as a congregation, you know? Three other UM churches in Monroe are the direct result of the missionary efforts of FUMC. How will we help the fourth?
Loving others is hard work. It’s hard because our love of others must be tangible, it must be sacrificial, and it must be on-going. Amen.
