Love: Good, Better, Best

"You have heard that the law of Moses says, 'Love your neighbor' and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and on the unjust, too. If you love only those who love you, what good is that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. (Matt 5:42-47)

This was part of the gospel text in the lectionary for this past Sunday. One of the joys and challenges of preaching each week is when you are working with a text like this one that is so rich. Recently, I was winding up my day with my devotional reading from Eugene Peterson* and this was my devotional text. (Note to self: Look ahead at nightly devotions prior to composing weekly sermon!) Not surprisingly, Peterson managed to challenge me once again.


He describes this command of Jesus to love enemies as a “daring and courageous initiative that closes the gap between offender and offended.” My first reaction is “Wow, and here I always consider that command a burden, not something daring and courageous.” But that was just the appetizer. The main course – the reflection that caught me up short was Peterson’s reflection on love. “Love is not a reward to be parceled out as a favor to friends; it is a tactic by which we share the best in us so that others have an opportunity to live at their best.”


OUCH! Is that the way I regard love? As a favor to be parceled out? Do I use love as currency to get what I want and reward those who please me? If I am being honest, I suppose that at my broken human worst there are times when I do regard love this way. There are too many times when I decide who I think deserves my love; when I reward others with the ‘gift’ of my love.  How often do I act as though there were a scarcity of love, as if having given it to someone whom I decided did not deserve it means there will be less for someone else or that I will end up with none. I know better, don’t I? 

I do, or at least I SHOULD.  It troubles me to think that I use love as a currency with which I barter.  There are a couple of things that I find troubling about this.  First, it is bothersome to realize how often I actually use love as currency - something to be given when I am pleased or withheld when I am not.  If that isn't bad enough, the implication -and it is probably dead on - is that tug-of-war with love is the way I treat my FRIENDS.  If that is the way I treat my friends, how far removed from the command to love my enemies must my actions actually be?  Sadly, much more removed than I can imagine or would like to admit.

I struggle with this concept of love they way Peterson posits it.  As if the concept of loving my enemies as commanded by Jesus isn't enough, Peterson manages to take this nebulous, universal command to love enemies and gives it a concrete particularity.  Peterson gives us an image of what loving our enemies might look like. And that image involves a particlar and very personal sense of vulnerability.  Sharing the best of myself so that others have an opportunity to live at their best. 

I am not an only child, so I did learn to share pretty well as a child.  But I must admit, I do not share MYSELF well.  I am a reserved and private person. (who happens to be sharing all this on a public blog.  Now THAT'S irony.)  When I meet someone it takes me quite awhile to decide if I trust them well enough to actually share myself with them.  My thoughts, my feelings, my joys, my sorrows, my hopes, my dreams, my fears.  These are MINE and I guard them quite closely.  I am pretty doggone particular about which FRIENDS I share the best of me with.  To even consider sharing that with a stranger or, even more alarming, someone I would consider an enemy is just downright ... well, scandalous!

That's when the scandal of the gospel really gut punches me.  Nowhere in scripture do I read of Jesus trying to discern just which of us he was willing to give his best.  Deserving or not, all of creation got every bit of Jesus' love and all of creation is promised Jesus' resurrected life.  It isn't parcelled out a little here, a little there, depending on whether Jesus is pleased.  Jesus doesn't wait for us to be trustworthy friends before giving his best.  No, St. Paul tells us that "while we were still enemies" Jesus gave his life for us.   

So, here I sit, convicted of my failure to love by the Holy Spirit.  I fail to love enemies at all and I fail to love friends fully and unconditionally.  And in the scandal of that conviction, I am confronted with the scandalous love of Christ - who gave and continues to give his best so that I have the opportunity to live at my best.  

When confronted with the scandal of the cross, I am compelled to admit that loving enemies (and even friends) IS a daring and courageous initiative.

Lord, let me be bold, daring and courageous.  Loving where and whom I have never considered loving before.  AMEN

BE BOLD!
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