"COMMANDED
TO LOVE YOURSELF!"
James says, "You fulfill the royal law if you love your neighbour as yourself." We're going to unpack that in a moment, but this first. In the past week I have heard the word love used for Mahler's music, cumquat marmalade, a new girl friend and hipster jeans. Pathetic, aren't we, with our use of language! So at the risk of boring you to death, I'm starting with a Greek lesson. Turn to your order of service for the synopsis of today's address, and you'll find Greek words for four kinds of love. Eros, from which we get 'erotic', has to do with sex and with desire for the other. Philia is love between friends; Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love (adelphos meaning brother). Storge is familial love: blood ties.
But there's another. Agape is the one that appears most often in scripture; eros and storge never, philia hardly at all. Agape is used for God's love, and for something we should aspire to – as reflecting the nature of God. Used in the New Testament, it's not about liking or being instinctively drawn to, or bonded with, another. As I have put there in the synopsis, it's about "affirming the worth of the other in explicit and practical ways." You have to include explicit and practical because it's both attitude and action. As theory only, it's meaningless. Like saying "John is very athletic – but he never gets out of bed!"
The text really points three ways: two quite explicitly, and the third by implication. I want to restate these, with some stories. They are the imperative to love neighbour, the imperative to love self, and the divine impetus for both.
I
First, the imperative to love neighbour. I don't have to say that "love your neighbour" goes way beyond trying to treat Mr and Mrs Next-door in the way we've suggested. God knows that can be hard enough! The big dilemma today is where 'neighbourhood' begins and ends. It has a meaning never envisaged by Paul or Jesus or the Old Testament writers. In the context of the modern world it is a frightening concept. Not surprisingly, some take flight from it. One can hardly blame them if they duck for cover.
In the late 60s we lived in the US. It was a turbulent period: the civil rights movement, anti Vietnam demos, and campus unrest among students. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. One of my friends there had left his congregation in Alabama, very disillusioned. He had tried to interest his people in civil rights, and in becoming racially integrated. Over a period of three years, half the congregation left and his house was bombed four times.
Folks were deeply divided over these issues; on whether ministers and congregations should be talking about them at all. I remember a sharp exchange with a member of my own. "John," he snapped, "my definition of a good Christian is someone who looks after his wife and kids and minds his own damn business!" I didn't agree, but I could see how he felt that he had to define love of neighbour in manageable terms. My own conviction is that it really means taking seriously our membership in a planetary community, since the whole world has become 'neighbourhood'. I don't pretend this is simple or easy, but neither do I believe we can evade it. Sometimes this comes home to us in rather dramatic ways. Let me illustrate with a personal story.
During the Marcos regime, in the early 80s, I was in the Philippines for a while. I met with human rights workers, who had been in custody and tortured, and also with the most unbelievably poor, living on garbage dumps. On the flight home words from the book of Job rang in my head. "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye hath seen thee, and I repent in dust and ashes!" I was met at the airport by two of my daughters. In the car I was happy to let them talk. When we got inside, one said, "Now tell us about it." Twenty-four hours earlier I'd been with a woman vet' science student just out of a year's detention by the military, for trying to help poor farmers organise a co-op. She had been kept blindfolded, and moved constantly from one place of detention to another. She was the same age as my daughter who had said, "Tell us about it", who was also at the university. I tried to speak and burst into tears, because it all now seemed incredibly close to home. It was a week before I could tell students (I was Dean of the Theological School) without losing my cool. Terms like neighbourhood and neighbour take on new meaning. It's a hard one. So to
II
The imperative to love self. Part of the thrust of this commandment is that the measure of love for neighbour is love for oneself. In fact, it suggests that if one doesn't value himself or herself, this love of neighbour may not be possible.
Some years ago I ran a lay leader course for a district council of churches in Adelaide. One participant was a renowned trouble-maker in his local church; it looked like he could upset the course if I didn't do something. People would cringe if he sat forward in his chair, preparing to speak. The tone of voice was enough, but when this was coupled with a matching choice of words, it was like some kind of nauseous gas had been pumped into the room. The irony was that he was continually attacking fellow-christians for their lack of love.
My chance came when he cornered me on the fourth night; he was very angry. It was cold, and I suggested we go somewhere for a coffee. We left two hours later – when the owner insisted on closing, but not before I had found out what made this man the way he was. He came from a big family, and had been fostered during the Depression of the 30s. When his father suicided, he didn't go back home but stayed with a foster mother, also widowed. She was a stern and pious lady, with no kids of her own, and the lack of warmth was palpable. His school work slipped, and he was often in strife there and at home. Criticism and hidings aplenty. He began to see himself as worthless, and to turn on himself the hostility he couldn't express to teachers or foster mother. All this came like poison bursting from an abscess. It helped me to see why he was always assailing others for lack of love – but doing so with such lack of it himself. I talked with him once or twice more, and then put him in touch with a therapist who saw him for a long time over his trauma. He was a classic case of one who couldn't love others because he couldn't love himself. Another story . . .
This is more recent. A young woman I met in a seminar on feminist concerns who was altogether too prickly for her own good or for that of the other participants. I took my life in my hands and said, "Why are you so aggro?" She said men had ruined her life. "All men?" "Well, most." We narrowed it down to one, with whose unwelcome help she had been pregnant at fifteen. The pregnancy was terminated, because of doubts about her physical ability to go through with it. But the real issue was the awful guilt she was carrying. She had spent a year or two with a religious group that made a big thing out of sin, inducing a lot of self-rejection. Then she quit the group, but still carrying all this bad stuff inside. All this was pouring out in the feminist crusading, but it was very belligerent: really the acting out of her own self-rejection. I'm not sure if I helped the feminist movement, but she may have been helped a little. I found out a year later that she had left the radical feminists to marry.
As you might imagine, in each of these instances I took the opportunity to say something about God, because the persons concerned were or had been church-related. Recovering a sense of one's own worth and possibilities, or being able to shed burdensome guilt, is closely bound up with what you believe about God.
III
So to my last point: the divine impetus for love of neighbour and love of self. I suspect there may be a lot of nonsense to undo here: stuff about original sin, the judgement and wrath of God, hell fire and all that. I want to illustrate with something that happened after an ABC radio talk I gave. Among other things I said churches were rather widely perceived as holding a jaundiced view of humanity. In fact, I said, "It often looks like their god regards us as a thoroughly worthless lot; that it's only by his good-natured tolerance that we're still here at all!" I got the usual mail; some loony fundamentalists, of course, but also this one. It came from a chap employed as a community worker on an aboriginal settlement. I have his permission to share parts of it. He wrote,
"When
the department sent me here, I guess I was already expecting trouble.
You could call it the power of negative thinking.
And so, when I found some of my suggestions to the folks here weren't
being picked up, and that some of my letters back to the department brought no
response, I began to get very cynical about the whole enterprise.
It seemed like such a waste of time, and I felt quite worthless in the
situation. I think the aboriginal
people must have sensed this, and matters just seemed to go from bad to worse.
I had actually drafted a letter asking to be relieved of my post when I
heard you on the air.
As I recall, you said something like this: God affirms the worth and potential of every human being. Although I haven't been a churchgoer for seven or eight years, this must have been what I needed. It changed the way I saw these people I'm working with, and the way I saw myself. The Uniting Church's patrol padre dropped in not long after, and I told him about your broadcast. He said he knew you, and that you would like to hear from me, so that is why I am writing."
I hunted out the script to see what I had actually said. What he had heard me say was this: "If Jesus is who the churches claim (a gift to humanity from God, who discloses the things of God in a uniquely beautiful way), then he is surely God's vote of confidence in humanity. You might ask, 'If one doesn't believe in them, why bother to give them this Jesus person?' It must be that God sees worth and possibilities in every person, of which we're maybe unaware and need convincing." Then I said, "Jesus is both the divine vote of confidence and the prototype of the fully human. He is the free and responsible one par excellence, who triggers an answering chord in the depths of our being."
Brothers and sisters, the good word – the 'gospel' – is that God affirms your potential and mine: a potential to love neighbour as we love ourselves. That's real confidence. Let's see if we can't let it happen!
Scripture:
James 2:1-10, 14-17 Keeping the royal law, and linking faith and action
Mark 7:24-37 Jesus making life worthwhile for two sick persons
on
Sunday, September 14, 2003. MAY BE
REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.