[AI translation] Today begins the week of prayer which the member churches of the World Council of Churches are observing throughout the world, according to a single programme and a single leitmotif. Christians of all colours, races and tongues will flock to the many churches throughout the week, evening after evening, to pray together for the unity of Christ's Church. The Word on which the preaching is based is the same everywhere: the fruit of the Spirit. On the first day the theme is love as the foundation of unity, the next day it is joy, followed by peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and finally temperance. Today - either in the morning or in the afternoon - in every church, in every language, the sermon is about love. That is why I would also like to talk about the so-called great commandment."Which is the great commandment?" asks the Lord Jesus, a Jewish lawyer. The background to this question is that the Jewish scribes have divided the scholastic law into 248 commandments and 365 prohibitions, for a total of 613 provisions. The life of a devout Jew was one of constant dread: at what moment would he break one of the many without realizing it? From this anxiety comes this question: which is the great commandment, the greatest of the many, the 613? The Lord Jesus' answer reveals that God does not govern by decree, like the authorities on earth. God's law is not a collection of commandments - how difficult it would be to keep them all in mind - but essentially one commandment, which covers all the rest. All the commands in the whole Bible are but an elaboration of this one command. And this one is this: Love God with all your heart, soul and strength. What more, beyond this, could a man ask for? The Lord Jesus adds something more: Love your neighbour, but not to add one more, but only to shed light on the one commandment. It is in fact the same as the first, but a practical proof of it. So Jesus Christ is talking about the same commandment, but He is presenting it from two sides.
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind." This is one side. Let's try to realize what we are talking about here. God wants us to love him, me to love him! He is not satisfied with less than that. If I only respect Him but don't love Him, that's not enough, that's nothing! Respecting the enemy is not enough. It is not enough just to obey Him, but obedience is a great thing and we owe it to God. But even obedience is nothing without love. To obey is to obey out of fear; it is to obey a hated tyrant. I also owe it to God to serve Him, for He is the supreme Lord, to Whom we must place ourselves entirely at His disposal, but even that is not the point! The devils also, against their will, serve Him.
God expects love from me! God wants love! He created man for this very purpose, and He created man in His image and likeness, so that there might be those who would love Him, who would return His love! If I could worship, serve and obey Him as the angels in heaven do, but without love, God would say to me: I don't need your service, your worship or your obedience! He is not satisfied with anything but my love! But even the fullness of my love. So it is not enough to say, "All right, I will give Him a little of my love, because He says so: Love with all your heart! Love with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. Love that includes everything and all of me, that fills and uses my whole being, is what He wants from me!
I read somewhere that once a mother gave her little daughter a beautiful pot of flowers, telling her to take them to her sick friend and make her happy. The little girl set off, but on the way she changed her mind and tore off only one petal of the beautiful flower and gave it to the patient, keeping the flower for herself. Then, weeks later, she went to her sick companion again, and again she took a wilting petal from the flower. But that's not why he got the flower... We are not given life to give a leaf of our emotions or a wilting petal of our love to God, to make him happy... God is waiting for a love that has my whole heart, my whole soul and my whole strength in it! That's what I got my life for!
Of course, you can't love like that: on command! So I can only love God in return on the basis that He has loved me first. A few days ago I was talking to someone who really has all the right intentions and efforts to sort out his relationship with God. He said, "I often feel that God is a little unfair to me." At least this is honest talk: he is not deluding himself with false emotions, he is not trying to make himself believe how much he loves God. After all, you cannot love with all your heart someone who you feel is unfair to you. In many hearts there is this unspoken accusation that God is unjust... Well, as I have said many times before, let me say it again: God is indeed unjust to us all, much more unjust than we think. Is it not true that whoever deserves punishment, death, damnation, receives forgiveness, eternal life and heaven?! Is it not true that you are not punished for the sin you have committed, but someone else who is perfectly innocent?! The injustice is not that you are perhaps more burdened than someone else, but that your greatest burden, the burden of all your sins, has been transferred to the account of an innocent man, that all your sins have been visited by God on Jesus Christ! That Someone has wept in your place and for you, crying to heaven, "My God, why have you forsaken me?!
I cannot get enough of this injustice that cries to heaven, I love God for this injustice! Until then, I have honoured Him as the One to be honoured, I have served Him, I have tried to obey His commands out of calculation, but out of fear. It is only since it has dawned on me how unjustly the Lord Jesus has treated me, or rather how unjustly He has treated me because of me, that I have tried and been able to love Him. Since then I rejoice that I am free to love Him in return! Since then I have known that this commandment - "Love the Lord your God" - is the greatest privilege that God wants to elevate me to the height of true human dignity!
Do we love God? Well, it is very easy to answer this question in a way that leads one to fall into a completely bona fide error. That is why Jesus Christ told us how to measure the reality of our love for God in a realistic, visible way: by loving people. The test of the commandment to love God is this: love your neighbour. How can I love God? Well, technically, by loving man! God is only truly loved by those who love man! The two are so much alike that one without the other is not true. The apostle John puts it this way. We have also a commandment from Him, that he who loves God should love his brother." (1 John 4:20-21)
Let me illustrate this with a now fairly commonplace case. The other day I was reading in a book one of Gandhi's writings. He writes: "Years ago, when I was living in South Africa, I was often in great inner uncertainty and confusion. One evening, in my great spiritual distress, I was passing a church which was illuminated, evidently a place of worship. I decided to go in, hoping to hear something that would give me light. But I got no further than the door, because when I went up the stairs, a stout churchman pushed me back, saying that this church was for white people only. My inward uncertainty and confusion did not end that night, but I came to a decision about one thing, that the Christian church had become a world closed to me forever." Perhaps the sermon in that church at that time was about the love of God. It may have been very beautiful and moving, but anyone who can exclude some people from the church in this way cannot really love God, despite what he says! We all agree on that, don't we?! Well then, in the same way: if you, or you, can exclude someone who thinks, feels or speaks differently from the church of your heart - no matter why, but you cannot love, accept, admit him into yourself - then it is not true that you love God, even though you say so and want to make yourself believe it! "He who does not love his brother whom he sees, how can he love God whom he does not see?!"
But even if we say that we love our brother, it is not always certain that it is true. For our love is a very mixed thing, with many foreign contaminants in it. Our love is always mixed with sympathy, so it always tastes of selfishness. For example, we say that we love a flower and as a testimony to this we kill it because we pluck it from its stem. Or when someone says: 'I love children', this usually means, in practice, that they love the right, nice children, the lovable ones, the ones that everyone loves. Our love always turns out to be not really love for the other person, but for some quality: his good humour, his wit, his prettiness, or his well-pressed clothes, or his fat wallet, or his good wine, or his television. In other words, it turns out that we like ourselves in the other person. Oh, how different this is from real love!
What, then, is true human love, pure, unmixed, genuine love? Where can we find it? In whom? Well, there is really only one Someone: the man Jesus Christ! But is it not in the greatest witness of his love, in his self-sacrifice for us, that we look for an example, for it is rare that one truly lays down one's life for another person. It is in the very small moments of the life of Jesus Christ that the practical meaning of loving another person is revealed. For example: the Lord Jesus is urgently summoned to the head of the synagogue, to the distinguished house of Jairus. A little girl is dying. She needs help, and she leaves immediately. But on the way, at the worst possible moment, when every minute is precious, a wretched nobody, a sick woman with no name, is being blamed... And the Lord Jesus doesn't say, "I'm busy now, come back later, I have an urgent programme, don't let anyone disturb me! Én, aki nagyon jól tudom, mit jelent, amikor föltartja valaki az embert a maga kicsinyes problémájával, amikor sürgős dolga lenne: sokszor elcsodálkoztam már azon a szereteten, amivel az Úr Jézus a vérfolyásos asszony dolgával foglalkozott. Or, for example, the tired Jesus Christ wants to go with his disciples to the other side of the lake to rest and take a breather, because they haven't even had time to eat all day, according to the account, and as soon as they land on the shore, a crowd is waiting for them. Again, no rest. The minimum requirement of an exhausted body is to be left alone for a few hours! You can't! And then the Lord Jesus doesn't complain, doesn't get angry, doesn't get upset that this is more than enough, doesn't even let them rest, but smilingly teaches and heals them. That is love! Or, for example, when he picks out the most despised and unlikable person in a crowd around him: Zacchaeus, and goes to stay with him. To love best the one whom the least people love, and even the one whom most people hate: that is love! Or when he said openly to the Pharisees, whom everyone feared, woe to you, for you will perish if you do not repent. To honestly dare to expose the sin in another, even if everyone is bowing down, even if it may hurt you, and to try in every possible way to stop someone on the downward slope of destruction: that is love!
You see: this love has nothing to do with sympathy, with sentimentality, and it seems to be a love that is specifically for the little ones, the wretched, the unlovable, the sick, the oppressed, the outcast, the despised, the unjust. All people who are hurt by something, tormented by something, oppressed by something. This love is full of solidarity, full of help, full of consolation, full of strength, full of blessing! This is the love that the Lord Jesus had in mind when he said: Love your neighbour, so love your neighbour! This is the love that does not flow out of us, even here in the same church, but that flows out of Jesus Christ! For He loves you in this way, in spite of the fact that the test of your love for Him is such a lamentable picture. Is it not love beyond comprehension that after so many failed attempts He should send you again? For He says: Love thy neighbour as thyself, and thou shalt prove to thyself that thou lovest God!
Amen
Date: 18 January 1959.
Lesson
Gal 5,16-23