“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these. Mark 12: 30-31
May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 1 Thessalonians 3:12
At a recent church service, the question arose, “Do I really have to love everyone?” It’s a reasonable question, given the amount of harm some people have inflicted on others and the state of our country and the world today. In a recent discussion at Edwards following a sermon about restorative justice, I found myself making the case that while it’s important that we see the humanity in all people, and hold onto the belief (or at least the hope) that everyone is capable of transformation, it’s not necessary for someone who has been harmed to go so far as to love the person who harmed them. But like the riddles Jesus gave us through his parables, I think that rather than cling to either the obvious interpretation or the one which we wish were correct because it feels most just to our worldly temperament, we’re meant to go deeper, to grapple with the difficult possibilities, the ones we struggle to accept that Jesus might be telling us we need to learn; the transformation we might need ourselves.
There’s a story about Martin Luther King, Jr. during the time when he and his father were co-pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. At one point, both Martins were called out of town, and the church was left in the hands of an associate pastor. When they returned, a parishioner informed them that the associate had initiated a campaign to oust the Kings and take over leadership of the church. When Daddy King asked MLK how he thought they should respond to the associate, Martin turned to his father and said, “Daddy, we have failed to love him enough.”
In the scripture passages above, Jesus reminds us of the Commandment to love our neighbor as ourself, and Paul tells us to make our love increase and overflow for everyone. The example Jesus sets through his actions, even more than his words, points the way. But of course, we’re not Jesus, and practice does not always follow from belief or intention. How then, do we well-intentioned but highly imperfect believers go about the business of loving everyone?
To start with, there are many kinds of love. The love I feel for my spouse is inherently different from the love I have for my daughters. And the love I have for my friends is different still. In fact, the love I feel for each individual whom I care about is unique, each relationship special, each with its own history, language, humor, challenges and quirks. And there are times when I am filled with love and appreciation for someone, and times when I am hurt or offended by something that’s transpired between us. To state the obvious, love is a process, not a static resting place. So it is with our friends, family and lovers, and so it is with humanity as a whole.
Of course, it’s much easier to say we love our community, our neighbors, our fellow travelers across the country and around the world, than it is to feel that when people act in ways we consider offensive, hateful or harmful; much harder to love the individuals who make up the world than to love the world, en masse. When my next door neighbor piles snow on the sidewalk I have just finished shoveling, love is not the emotion which leaps to the surface. And we’ve no shortage of bad actors on the world stage whose actions and beliefs we find harmful, offensive and odious, and whom we wish would just go away, or worse. But as we talk about nurturing community, isn’t the community which Jesus is calling us to love the community of all of God’s people; indeed, all of God’s Creation?
Given the many kinds of love which are possible, and the call to love everyone, not just our insular community of friends, maybe I had it wrong when I said it wasn’t necessary to love the one who harmed you. Maybe seeing the humanity in someone who has caused great harm and believing that they are still a child of God and still capable of transformation is a kind of love. For how can transformation happen without love? And maybe what we should be asking, rather than “Do we really have to love everyone?” is “How has our failure to love everyone enough led this person to cause such harm?” How can I transform myself to love everyone as I seek to transform harmful behaviors in others?
God of Parables and Impossible Pursuits, help me to love everyone, enough. Amen
–Willie Sordillo