Loving God and Loving Neighbor

In our Gospel reading from Matthew this coming Sunday, Jesus, in his debate with the Jewish elders and authorities, lays bare the truth of the matter. He lays aside his parabolic teaching and practices a little "straight talk." The pharisees ask Jesus which commandment in Torah is the greatest. We of course know that there are not just ten commandments, but hundreds in the book of Leviticus. So Jesus is asked to show preference for one commandment over another. Instead, Jesus summarizes the whole of the Jewish law into one mantra, cuts to the chase: Love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and just as importantly, love your neighbor as yourself. The theological point is that loving neighbor is the same thing as loving God. Later in Matthew in the 25th chapter we will hear Jesus say that as you do to the least of the human family you have done it to me. If one doesn't love one's neighbor then one doesn't love God, so to love neighbor is to love God. There it is, pure and simple.

Salvation then is not about us. It is about our neighbor. The notion of salvation being about whether one goes to heaven or hell or not is a hyper individualist illusion, born of the so-called Enlightenment. If the God we worship is love then God surely is drawing all things to Godself....nothing condemned or lost, all things loved and cherished. Augustine of Hippo got it wrong when he argued that the beloved of God were a select few, and that the rest would be cast off as ballast. Our God is a God who includes all, the righteous and sinner alike. Let's take the heaven or hell thing off of our worry list. Salvation is about loving our neighbor. As Jesus says, loving neighbor is the same as loving God, and the whole of scripture attests to this sacred reality.

The life of faith then is about love set loose in the world; love alive amid the dark corners of our world; love alive as salvation among the marginalized and dispossessed, our sacred neighbor. The church, the gathering of the people of faith, the people of conscience, is but a staging ground from which we go out as incarnate salvation for the world. We are reminded in the whole of scripture what this love looks like. It looks like feeding and healing. it looks like nonviolence. It looks like kindness and compassion and warm hospitality; it looks like nurture and empowerment of the weak. It looks like justice and dignity for the lost of our world. And the great mystery is that in living this life of love for our neighbor...there is where true happiness and fulfillment are found. Love God as you love neighbor and all manner of thing shall be well. Pure and simple and profound...the whole of the Law and Prophets indeed.