March 16, 2008 Palm Sunday
Sermon Title: “Love Your Neighbor”
Series: Extreme Love: The Greatest Commandment
Text: Mark 12:31
Dr.
Delivered on March 16, 2008
“You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.”
Mark 12:31 NRSV
Love Your Neighbor
It’s said that it was hard to distinguish between the character W.C. Fields played in the movies and the man himself. His comedy reflected his hatred of children, his love of wine, and his cynicism towards all of life. But as W.C. Fields lay dying in a hospital bed, a visitor actually caught him reading the Bible. When the friend asked him what he was doing, the dying comedian replied, “looking for a loophole.”
“Looking for a loophole.” I probably should have titled today’s message “Looking for a Loophole” because today’s phrase, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is one that causes even the best of Christians to begin looking for loopholes. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve been in where people bring this up: “Are you really supposed to love everybody? Is that even possible? What if they’ve hurt me or someone I love?”
Unfortunately, no loophole exists. The statement “You shall love” stands at the very heart of the Bible; both the New Testament and the Old Testament make the claim that love is to be our highest priority. There’s just no getting around it.
What makes it so difficult to love your neighbor, besides the fact that he or she may be an ornery cuss? As I see it there are three things that make this part of the Great Commandment so difficult.
First of all, it’s a COMMANDMENT. That may seem self-evident by the fact that it’s part of the Great Commandment, but what I mean is simply that it’s not a suggestion. Jesus doesn’t say, “Try to love your neighbor…” or you “ought” to love your neighbor. He says you SHALL love your neighbor.
Right off the bat, this knocks out any excuses we might have. It’s difficult when you don’t have any excuses, isn’t it? I remember when I was a teenager I only had a few jobs around the house. One was to empty the dishwasher each morning and the other was to take out the trash. I remember more than once my mom or dad would call out, “Steve the trash needs to be taken out” and I’d say, “But I don’t have my shoes on…” or, “Can’t, the dumpster is full” and they’d say, “I’m not suggesting you take out the trash…I’m commanding it.” God does the same with us here.
A second thing that makes the commandment to love your neighbor so difficult is that it is so COMPREHENSIVE. It would be one thing if Christ said, “Love people who are like you.” Or “Love the people who like you.” But the term “neighbor” as Jesus defines it includes everyone – even those who are different from you. In fact, Jesus goes beyond that. He says we’re even supposed to love our enemies (Matt. 6:43-44).
Jesus was asked one time, “Who is my neighbor?” In the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) he was asked by a guy looking for a loophole. He was a lawyer, an expert in looking for loopholes. The lawyer asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life and Jesus repeated the Great Commandment. But then the man, “wanting to justify himself” (looking for a loophole) asked, “Who is my neighbor?” In response Jesus told the story of a man who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead by the side of the road. As he lay there two good Jews, a priest and a Levite, saw the injured man crossed the road to pass him by. But a Samaritan, a man of a race that was despised by the Jews, came along and helped the victim. Jesus concludes by saying the one who was neighborly was the one who helped the man, not the religious types who passed him by.
Loving our neighbors is difficult, especially when they are different from us, but Jesus offers no exclusions in loving our neighbors. We got a Belk’s circular in the local paper last week. I got all excited because at the top it read 35 to 50% off everything in big bold letters. But then I kept reading and down at the very bottom, in print that was so tiny you could barely make it out the ad said “The following exclusions apply: no jewelry, cosmetics, housewares, shoes, etc….” The best I could figure the only thing on sale was men’s socks! Jesus offers no such exclusions in his “love your neighbor” law. No matter what language, nationality, or ethnicity…we are to love them. That makes it difficult.
Still a third reason loving our neighbor is difficult is because it is CONTRARY to our nature. This is perhaps the toughest obstacle of all. Loving our neighbor, putting ourselves out for them, is the exact opposite of the most common human practice which is self-preservation, self-centeredness, or in some cases, plain old selfishness.
Don’t believe me? Try this experiment. Put three children in a room along with two toys for ten minutes. Or put two children in a room with one toy. If they’re normal kids you’ll have a riot of selfishness on your hands before the ten minutes are up.
Two friends met for dinner at a restaurant. Each one ordered a steak and when the waiter came back with their order the two steaks were on the same platter and one was much larger than the other. One of the men quickly served the other by putting the smaller steak on the other guy’s plate. “I can’t believe you just did that!” said his friend. “What do you mean?” the other guy asked. “You gave me the little steak and kept the big one for yourself.” “Well how would you have done it?” the second man asked. His friend replied, “If it were me, I would have given you the bigger steak.” “Well what are you complaining about? I got it, didn’t I?” And they both laughed. It’s tough to love your neighbor when everything within you is saying, “Go for the biggest steak.”
Well, so far, I haven’t helped us out much, have I? It’s been all bad news so far. Well take heart! There is some good news on at least two counts. And, no, these aren’t loopholes or cop-outs, they’re truths taken right out of the Bible.
The first of these concerns the word love found in this passage. We’ve already talked about what we mean by neighbor. Your neighbor is anyone in need whether they are a friend or a foe. But what does Jesus mean by “love” here? That’s where it gets helpful. The Greek word for love in this passage is agape. Agape love is a God-centered, selfless, active, unconditional, unmerited love; it is a sacrificial love that expects nothing in return.
How is that good news? It’s good news because of what it doesn't mean. Let me explain. The kind of love you and I typically think of when we think of loving our neighbor is brotherly love. The Greek word for this is phileo. Phileo love is love in a friendly, worldly sense – that kind of love is good and has its place but it's not what Jesus is commanding here. Here he says “agape your neighbor as yourself.”
Agape love is an act of will rather than an emotional response. Agape love is shown by what we do rather than what we feel. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus didn’t ask the lawyer, which of the men “liked” the victim more, he asked which one loved him – as demonstrated by the Samaritan’s actions.
Stated another way – and you need to hear me carefully and clearly now – you can love someone and not necessarily like them or what they are doing in the worldly sense of that word. I believe that’s one way we’ve missed the true meaning of Jesus’ teaching here and made it more difficult than it is – in fact, we’ve made it darn near impossible. We have wrongly assumed that because Jesus says to “love our neighbor” he’s talking about the warm, fuzzy, kind of affection usually inferred by that term. In reality he’s saying we must love them in the sense of being willing to put their interests ahead of our own, expecting nothing in return. “Liking” in the worldly, phileo sense is an emotion, coming from the heart. Loving in the sense Jesus refers to it here is a decision, and is act of the will. Jesus would no more command us to “like” everyone any more than he would use that third common Greek word for love, eros, which is a sexual kind of love.
Think of it this way. How can you love your enemies? By definition you are not going to like your enemy on an emotional level but you can still show love towards them by your actions. You can forgive them, don't take revenge, don’t disparage them, don’t retaliate, etc… That’s what Jesus did on the cross. As we’ll hear read right here on Friday night, one of the seven words Jesus spoke from the cross was “Father, forgive them…” Did Jesus love his executors? Yes. Did he like them or what they were doing to him? No.
On a more human level, when you were a baby and cried in the middle of the night, your parents didn't probably feel like getting out of bed to check on you. They probably didn’t like the fact that you were crying. But they did get up and tend to you. Why? Because they love you. Feelings are nice, but you can’t depend on them; they’re very unreliable.
Now, before you go running out of here saying, “Pastor Steve said we don’t have to like people we can just love them,” let me clarify something. Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean you can ignore them nor have nothing to do with them either. It doesn’t mean you can pull blinders down over your eyes and ignore their needs because you don’t like them even though you supposedly love them. What if Jesus did that with us? What if he said, “Okay, I love them so I’m going to forgive their sins, but I’m not going to have anything more to do with them, and they’d better not expect anything of me.” He doesn’t do that, does he? That’s a childish, unredeemed, still self-centered attitude that says the whole world revolves around me. That’s a misunderstanding about what it means to love in the sense Jesus was talking about it here.
So the first thing that’s good news that I want to say is that if you don’t happen to love the entire world in the mushy worldly type of love you’re not a bad person in violation of this commandment.
The second bit
of Good News concerning the commandment to love our neighbor is that we have a helper
to do that, and that helper is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Divine Love, He
is One with the Father and the Son and helps us to love God and others better. “The
fruit of the Spirit is love,” says Paul (Gal. 5:23-24). An apple tree
doesn’t have to strain to produce apples on its branches. They come naturally.
Likewise, since God has given us His Spirit, love, God’s love, should flow from
us. Unfortunately, too few of us take advantage of this “Helper” God has given
us.
Dr. Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ used to tell the story about a ranch owned by a man who was struggling during the Great Depression to make enough money to keep his ranch going. It got so bad he was living on government subsidies and in serious danger of losing the ranch to the local bank. Then one day a crew from an oil company drove up and told the rancher there might be oil on his land, and asked permission to drill a well. He consented and when they drilled they struck a huge oil reserve. He was an instant multi-millionaire. The day he purchased that ranch he had received the oil and mineral rights. Yet, he’d been living on welfare. He was a multi-millionaire living in poverty. The problem? He didn’t know the oil was there even though he owned it. Dr. Bright suggests that many Christians live in spiritual poverty. They are entitled to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the ability to love others as Jesus did, but they are unaware.
Is loving our neighbor as ourselves difficult? Yes, it’s a commandment, it’s a comprehensive love, and it’s contrary to our nature. But is it impossible? No. For one thing Jesus was talking about agape love, love as an act of the will more than as an emotion. And second, He left us a Helper to enable us to love, the Holy Spirit.
And that brings us to the “How To” portion of this message: How to love your neighbor as yourself. I want to suggest we do four things:
First, practice forgiveness (Matt. 6:14-15). It is impossible to love as God loves and commands us to love when there is a spirit of unforgiveness within us. Jesus said if you approach God and then remember that there is something between you and someone else, go and be reconciled to your brother or sister first! (Matt. 5:23-24). That’s because Jesus knows that lack of forgiveness is like a splinter that may not even be visible to the eye, but if left unattended to it will fester and cause infection. It will consume and destroy. It will make you incapable of the kind of love Jesus commands here.
The statements “I love you but can’t (or won’t) forgive you,” or “I can forgive but I can’t forget.” simply are not true. It’s impossible to do that. Why? Because true forgiveness isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s not something to be earned or deserved or doled out. It’s not some kind of negotiation that finally ends with the reluctant words, “Okay, I forgive you.” Why? Because forgiveness is something you do for YOU, not the other person. Forgiveness is about YOU dealing with something that has a hold over YOU, not the other person. And as long as that something has a hold over some part of you – as long as you are holding anger, resentment or a grudge against another person, you are simply poisoning yourself.
Understood this way forgiveness isn’t about letting someone off the hook. Instead it’s about the freedom to love gained by shifting attention away from some hurtful act, not in denial, but in release. Let it go! You can’t love as Jesus commanded without doing so. Jesus said to forgive and forget. We should always be willing to forgive, holding a grudge and seeking revenge has no place in the lives of those who truly love God and their neighbors.
Second, turn off the judge (Matt. 7:1-5). How can we love people if we’re totally consumed with judging them or criticizing them? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught that we shouldn't worry about what others do or don't do. Instead, we should make sure that we’re doing what’s right. It’s so much easier to criticize others than to do the right thing ourselves isn’t it? Jesus points out that we often make a big deal about other peoples' faults even as we’re overlooking our own faults. He says it's like trying to get a speck of dust out of our friend's eye, while we have a huge stick in our own eye. First we should take care of our own problems and faults, before we tell others how to fix theirs.
I have to confess this morning, this judging and being hyper-critical of others sometimes gets the best of me. Not about any of you, of course. Is this a problem for anyone else here today? How can I love somebody as Christ commands when I’ve already sized them up and, more than likely, found them lacking or assumed the worst about them?
Chuck Swindoll tells the story of being at a conference and on the first day a man came up to him and said how much he’d looked forward to hearing him speak. That evening Swindoll noticed the man sitting near the front. But only a few minutes into the message the man was sound asleep. Swindoll figured perhaps he was tired after a long day's drive and couldn't help himself. But the same thing happened the next two nights, and Swindoll found his exasperation with the man growing. On the last night the man's wife came up and apologized for her husband's inattention to the messages. She explained that he had recently been diagnosed as having terminal cancer and the medication he was taking to ease the pain made him extremely sleepy. But it had been one of his life-long ambitions to hear Dr. Swindoll speak before he died, and now he had fulfilled that goal.
Turn off the judge – expect the best in others, and you’ll often get it. Judging and criticizing doesn’t do anything except get in the way of loving your neighbor.
Third, find somebody to help. Jesus could hardly have made things plainer about this than in His Parable of the Sheep and Goats. There he describes those who truly love others and who will inherit the kingdom as those who, feed the hungry, show hospitality to strangers, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned (Matt. 25:31-46).
We are not meant to live hard-hearted or self-centered lives. We are called to put our faith into practice and truly love our neighbors, especially those less fortunate. God has given each of us unique talents and gifts to use in His service. His work for us on earth is to use those gifts and talents in the service of our neighbors, thus glorifying Him. Each of us has something to offer to someone in need.
Best of all, you’d think that the more we give to others, the poorer we become, but just the opposite is true! Service to others brings meaning and fulfillment to our lives in a way that wealth, power, possessions and self-centered pursuits can never match.
I’m grateful I serve at a church like NewSong where I can simply mention helping others and I don’t have to harp on it. This church, more than any I have ever served or been a part of, understands that true Christianity is about serving others.
The final way to love your neighbor as yourself is to press on to know the depth and fullness of God’s love (Philippians 1:9-11). The more we understand and meditate on, pray about, and think about God and the love he showed us on the cross, the more we’ll automatically love others. I can assure you if you make the decision to make your spiritual formation through prayer, Bible study and meeting with other Christians half as precious to you as your favorite TV show, or sports team, or hobby, you’ll begin to experience His love more fully than you ever dreamed and you’ll be able to love your neighbor as Christ commands here. Press on to discover that God's love is more satisfying than anything else. To me it’s clear that’s why this command to love your neighbor as yourself is the SECOND part of the Great Commandment after loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. If you get part one correct, part two will follow easily.
How about you this morning? Have you experienced His love? Have you shared it? Or are you still looking for loopholes? Are you cruising for cop-outs to the second part of the Great Commandment? I hope not, because if you are you are missing out on some of the deepest joys that the Christian life affords. Receive His love, then practice forgiveness, turn off the judge, help somebody in need, and press on to know the depth and fullness of God’s love. Then you’ll see what Jesus meant when he said you can sum up the whole thing with one prepositional clause, “You shall love…” Let’s pray.