The importance of loving each other

 

In the first letter of John, we learn the absolute importance of loving each other [1 John 3:22--4:6].  We can no longer say we only love God; loving God and loving our brothers and sisters go together.  It takes faith to believe in God and also to believe that by loving one another, we’re keeping His great commandment.  He came to teach us this and insisted upon this even to His death.

In Luke’s gospel we see Jesus boldly step to the front of the Synagogue, unroll the scriptures and read a prophesy which tells of the one who is to come healing, liberating and preaching.  In front of the whole assembly Jesus proclaims to His friends and neighbors that He’s the one for whom they and all Israel have been anticipating and longing.  They were all amazed and spoke well of Him [Luke 4:14-22].

 Jesus had heard in His prayer and at His entering into the waters of the Jordan for His baptism, that He was the beloved of His Father [Luke 3:21-22].  The recovery of sight, the captivity from which He was to free people, all the things He was destined to do according to all the prophets [Isaiah 42], centered around His boldly announcing to all that they too were the beloved of the Father.  Believing in Jesus means believing also in all that He came to tell us about ourselves and His sisters and brothers.  Loving in the abstract is very easy.  Loving each of His family and making ourselves part of the family of God is not only bold, but disturbing.

There are certain passages of the teachings of Jesus that we might wish He had never said.  If He had said that we only have to love the attractive ones and that would fulfill the law of God, that would be fine.  If loving God could mean just praying or staying to ourselves, that would have been difficult enough.  Our selfish restrictive love and our patterns of simple human judgments get re-formed, and that process is very uncomfortable.  There He stands telling His neighbors and ourselves that He is going to unblind us about who are to be loved.  He tells us today to be ready for a liberation which will free us to love God by loving that person and those kind of people and persons who differ in many ways from ourselves.

These are hard sayings today and we take our turn marveling at His teaching and pondering what will He ask next of us.  We are the beloved of God, and we’re sent to boldly continue standing up in all kinds of places and live His love.