Exodus 22: 21-27 (RM in Canada) or 20-26 (RM in the U.S.) or Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18 (RCL) or Jeremiah 31: 31-34 (Lutheran); Psalm 18 (RM) or 1 (RCL) or 46 (Lutheran); 1 Thessalonians 1: 5c-10 (RM) or 2: 1-8 (RCL) or Romans 3: 19-28 (Lutheran); Matthew 22: 34-40 (RM) or 34-46 (RCL) or John 8: 31-36 (Lutheran.)
Ah, love songs. Heart-wrenching love songs. Silly love songs, for that matter.
If you grew up with popular music playing on the radio, or as recorded music or live performances, you heard a great deal from an early age about, yes, love. You heard about how passionate, delightful and tender love could be, and on the other side, how heartbreakingly painful and utterly devastating lost or rejected love might leave you. You could have heard even more about the despondent, depressive side of love if you grew up with country music, which was once defined as “Three chords and the truth.” And let’s not get started on opera.
Powerful emotions come into play on either side of the love equation, positive or negative, and either of these can batter a person like hurricane-force winds. As the character Mr. Spock mused on Star Trek,
“Love… hmmm… humans claim a great deal for that particular emotion.”
New Testament Greek has several words that translate into English as “love,” but only one of them, eros, corresponds to emotional gale-force love. And that’s not what Jesus was referring to, whatever term he may have used in his native Aramaic, in the Gospel reading for today from Matthew 22. The two most common New Testament words for love are agape and philia. Basically these describe ethical relationships, ways of respecting others and behaving toward others. These concepts of love operate apart from one’s subjective feelings of the moment, because higher values are in play. Emotions as such are not the driving force. Practicing love for others represents an ethical norm that at best becomes habitual. And, God knows, we can’t always be sure we’re getting it right.
For instance, how does one love God? Scripture gives us abundant examples of God’s love for us, but few that really show us in a practical way how to love the infinitely transcendent and immanent God. Jesus cites Deuteronomy 6:5, the Shema, the most significant prayer in Jewish scripture, not a regulation, and not instructions on how to do it. Prayer is the instruction.
His questioner, the Pharisee legal scholar, would have recognized it immediately: to love God with all one’s heart, soul and strength. (Matthew has Jesus substituting “mind” for strength.) The conscious living, and loving, relationship of an individual, as part of a people, with God, would make perfect sense in the Jewish context of the covenant relationship. “Loving God” might sound emotional but in this context it had more to do with intention and faithfulness to the covenant.
But Jesus goes on to cite Leviticus 19:18:
“…you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.”
This connection comes from an earlier work, the Testament of Issachar 5:2, part of Hebrew wisdom literature.
But Jesus does something remarkable with this linking of two separate verses. He sets up a new moral framework. The law itself is now dependent on love.
Anglican commentator Reginald Fuller writes:
“Jesus understands them in a new and radical way. Without love of neighbour, love of God becomes a barren emotion. Without love of God, love of neighbour is a refined form of self-love.”
I wonder. Maybe, with God, it’s a healthier, more wide-open, more rooted-in-the-love-of-the-Creator form of self-love. Maybe it’s a potentially healing, affirming form of self-love capable of pouring itself out to heal and affirm others, especially those most in need of any sort. The Exodus reading makes only too clear that the Holy One is the centre and source of human ethical behaviour. Can one treat others with such a powerful, cosmic love, and not see oneself as part of that beloved creation?
All the more reason to try harder to be aware of others who may be bogging down, to be as gentle and patient with ourselves as we hope to be with others
© Susan K. Roll
This Reflection was adapted from the Covid-era Reflection of October 25, 2020.
Susan Roll retired from the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, in 2018, where she served as Director of the Sophia Research Centre. Her research and publications are centred in the fields of liturgy, sacraments, and feminist theology. She holds a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, and has been involved with international academic societies in liturgy and theology, as well as university chaplaincy, Indigenous ministry and church reform projects.
