Proper 25, Year A | Matthew 22:34-46
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
October 29, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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Why is love so hard?
I’m not necessarily talking about loving God, although that can sometimes feel like a struggle, especially when our world keeps falling apart. You’re here at church, so most of us probably hope we’re already doing at least a decent job of it: we attend services; we pray; we participate in communion; we believe the Gospel; we sometimes volunteer for ministry opportunities or community events; and we try not to be too big of a jerk to anyone around us. I would guess that a good number of us probably feel like we’ve got something of a handle on this loving God thing. We might not be perfect at it, but we at least seem to be headed in the right direction, overall.
We might even be doing a decent job of loving our neighbor. We try not to hold grudges; we help out when we discover a problem; we’re generous in giving money and time in service; we share what we have or feed the hungry or visit the sick or offer comfort to those in distress. Even where we might find ourselves at odds socially or politically, we at least try to remain open, understanding, and kind. And with all the struggles we face just getting through life, I have to say that those efforts aren’t so bad, either.
Yet love can still feel so difficult as to be impossible at times. Why is that?
Whenever we encounter the Great Commandment, as we did about a month and a half ago,[1] I tend to focus on the fact that we’re hearing the Great Commandment, not the (plural) Great Commandments. Jesus isn’t presenting us with the opening steps of a decision tree, a simple means of deciding who we need to love first if push comes to shove. What we’re hearing is Jesus restating how we love God in a way that continues to shock us no matter how often we think about it: “he told them, ’You will love through action”—this is that agape term we’ve talked about—“You will love through action your ruler, God, with your whole heart and with your whole self and with your whole intention’—this is the primary and great decree. Then, equal to it, another: ‘You will love through action one near you like yourself.’”[2]
Even laid out so plainly, loving God by seeking good for my neighbor can still feel like a struggle. But I’m beginning to wonder if the key to this strangely difficult text might not be hiding in plain sight.
For at least 1600 years, Western theology has had an obsession with human sinfulness. We approach life in terms of “Original Sin” or Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden. Throughout the centuries, church leaders have emphasized not necessarily God’s love for us and their desire to see us flourish as demonstrated through Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection but just how terrible and shameful we as people are in the first place. From St. Augustine’s early volleys in understanding our continuing tendency to sin, we’ve learned to emphasize the negative aspects of human nature—pride, self-obsession, “disordered” desires, and the like. We apply concepts of sacrifice in a negative sense, of rejecting our own needs or concerns in order that we might somehow show honor to God, thus demonstrating our hope for the Divine to respond in kind. Various denominations express this in different ways, from the perception of needing to continue to sacrifice Christ from day to day to dogmas such as the total depravity of humankind; however, the core concept is the same: not love for self, but rejection—or sometimes hatred—of the self.
How, then, can we love our neighbor as ourselves when our entire Christian heritage appears to demand that we dismiss, disallow, or even despise ourselves?
I’m not trying to make excuses for self-centeredness or a negative sort of pride or things like that. It’s important to learn to step beyond those types of thinking and behaviors. There are times when we genuinely do need to set aside our own wants or interests for the sake of others. What I’m trying to look at are negative the concepts regarding humanity itself that we internalize and, in turn, somehow make our main focus as Christians. “Positive” or “negative,” self-obsession is a problem no matter how we end up practicing it.
However, Jesus never taught us to “hate” ourselves in the way that we understand that term. He does talk about not being able to follow him if we won’t “hate” our family members or “own life,” but we need to remember that that particular concept of “hate” has more to do with other people’s perceptions or which direction you’re facing than with an active distain. If I’m heading one way, you might assume from my body language that I “hate” what lies in the opposite one; if I turn around, you might then think I’ve actively rejected everything that’s now behind me. The reality, though, is that I’m simply trying to head toward what I believe to be most important—my emotional state regarding the things no longer in my line of sight might be completely irrelevant to the situation.
Truly loving ourselves has little to do with pampering and coddling or chasing whatever I want to the exclusion of others’ needs. It involves the exact same thing we take for granted in the idea of loving God or loving our neighbors: respect combined with genuine, gentle care for or even a stance of mercy and kindness toward ourselves. And that, more than anything else, may be how we can finally unlock this enigma of the Great Commandment.
So how do I show a real or healthy love for myself? I allow space for my faults. I work toward repentance—which really is just change—not with some unrealistic expectation of instant or complete perfection but by accepting that modifications only take effect through continuing efforts over time. I step around my perception of or desire to be an “ideal” self—the imaginary “me” that we so often long for people to think we are—and begin to accept, and maybe even show others, my own weaknesses and foibles, not as some sort of evidence of an eternally corrupted sin nature deserving of damnation as much as simply of being aspects inherent to a limited and fallible created being. Most importantly, perhaps, we learn to value active love not just through giving ourselves away but by accepting and appreciating the love that others—and God—keep attempting to offer us.
Some of us will be able to start there. You might already have a healthy view of self that allows you the freedom to treat others with the same kindness you’d like to receive. Some of us might need to work backwards on this, looking at ways we already serve those around us and then applying the same concepts of gentleness and vulnerability to the person we find ourselves to truly be. Others might be better served by taking their ideas of how to properly honor God and applying those concepts to respecting God’s children and God’s Creation—both of which do include the self.
We all approach God from a different starting point, but things like these could be our first steps toward repentance. As we keep at them and are able to expand them into more and more areas of life, we might finally see the kind of change that we all long for.
And maybe that’s all it really is, the secret to a life of truly honoring God and serving our neighbors. Maybe the way we ultimately learn to love God by loving our neighbor is by accepting and being kind to and genuinely and (somehow) selflessly loving ourselves just as we are.
[1] Romans 13:9
[2] Matthew 22:37-39 | My translation; italics are words supplied to provide better understanding in English. | All other Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.