Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Love. It’s the summation of the Law. Love God with everything you got. And love your neighbor as yourself. When you come down to it, everything else in our faith is just a commentary on that.
What is love? There are 3 Greek words which correspond to the English word “love”. The first, eros, is the root of our word “erotic”. But it’s much more than that. It’s a love born of passion - a musician can have eros towards his instrument. A connoisseur of fine wine, of art, a gourmand - they all can have eros.
The second is philia. It is the love one feels for a friend. It’s found in many English words, also; philadelphia - the city of brotherly love; philanthropy - generosity arising for the love of one’s fellow man; hemophiliac - a lover of blood; and philosophy - the love of wisdom.
Eros and philia - two types of love, but both are governed by feeling. There is a third type of love, the one that is commanded us. It is agape, or its latin equivalent, caritas. It is a love which seeks the good of the other. And it is a choice. It is not a feeling.
When John says, “God is Love”, this is what he's talking about.
Paul describes it in his first epistle to the Corinthians. “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”.
As I said, this love is the summation of the whole law. It is essential for our life. Again, Paul says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing”.
Yes, love of God is essential. We are to love God with our whole being. I said that this love is not a feeling. And fundamentally, it is not. But we can, and ought, to direct our feelings to embrace it. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind. We don’t get to pick and choose which of the Church’s teachings we will accept. If we choose what to believe, we are not loving God with our mind. We aren’t expected to understand everything, but we are expected to accept, to believe everything that the Church has defined regarding Faith and Morals. As St Augustine prayed, "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief".
You can’t understand the teaching that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of our Lord? You still have to accept it. You don’t like, or understand, the Church’s teaching on morality? You still have to accept it.
As St. Augustine says, if we believe only what we want of the Gospel, we don’t believe the Gospel, we believe ourselves.
The second great commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. How can we love our neighbor if we have to love God with our whole being? Loving our neighbor is PART of loving God. So, if you don’t love your neighbor, if you don’t love each and every person you see, you’re not really loving God with your whole being.
But, remember, this love is not a feeling, it’s a choice. And we’re human. We can’t have feelings of affection for every person we meet, but we can be patient, kind, not arrogant or boastful - all those things Paul talked about.
With one another, he gives us a little more instruction in our epistle reading. We should live “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace”.
Let’s go back to the Gospel reading. A man was robbed and beaten. Three people came upon him. The first two were Jews, men of rank within the religious system, a Priest and a Levite - the Levite would’ve been like a deacon in the church today.
Remember last week we talked about Christ creating one new man out of the two, out of Jew and Gentile, out of clean and unclean? That lesson continues here, because the first two to find this man, to pass him by, were Jews. Just like the lawyer asking Jesus the question, they were Jews. But, the third man to come upon this victim of crime was a Samaritan, a Gentile. Unclean.
Jesus asked the lawyer, “Which of these people was neighbor to the victim?” He answered, “The one who showed him mercy”. Don’t you think that Jesus told the story this way to show the lawyer that Jews didn’t have the corner on righteousness? It was a Gentile who showed mercy. The Jews did not.
Our Gospel today brings us right back to what we’ve been discussing over the last few months. Mercy.
Let me suggest to you that mercy is nothing more than Love in Action.
At the end of his discourse on love to the Corinthians, Paul said, Now these three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love. And the greatest of these is love.
“Which of these people was a neighbor?”. The one who showed mercy.
As Jesus says at the end of the reading, Go and do likewise.
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