Tell Out My Soul

Luke 10:25-37

What a joyful day, we are soon to celebrate the bringing of God’s light into the world. And the fourth candle of Advent that is shining its light today is the candle of love, the love of Jesus alive in the world. As we journey through the new liturgical year we’ll be focusing on the Gospel of Luke and these writings show us a compassionate view of Christ’s mission. And Luke’s Gospel shows us love in action in the everyday world of Jesus’ time.

We are called upon to love, and Jesus shows us the way. In today’s reading from Luke, we heard that Jesus was put to the test by a lawyer who asked him, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus answered him with a question, this is something that Jesus liked to do. He said, to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ The lawyer answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’ Jesus is being cheeky here, instead of allowing himself to be put to the test, he turns the situation around and puts the lawyer to the test. And he gives the lawyer ten out of ten.

The command to love God above all things appears several times in Deuteronomy and the instruction to love your neighbour as oneself appears in Leviticus. In this passage of Gospel these two commandments come together so beautifully, the lawyer gave the perfect textbook answer. But the lawyer was determined to find fault with Jesus so he asked him further, well, who’s my neighbour then? And then Jesus responded by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the church elders are held up to be hypocrites in not helping the man on the road while a Samaritan, someone shunned by the Jews, was obeying the commandment to the letter. Everyone, without exception, is our neighbour.

But then a thorny issue arises for all of us, that it’s difficult to love people we don’t like. What if we can’t stand our neighbour. That gets even tougher. CS Lewis, in his wonderful book “Mere Christianity” talks about like vs love. It’s normal to have aversions and dislikes, even phobias. My uncle Johnny was a brave man, he went to war and was captured and put in a POW camp. He went through a lot, and put up with a lot, but there was one thing that he couldn’t handle, and that was hypodermic needles. Uncle Johnny had a phobia about needles, to the point that whenever he saw one, he passed out. And it’s the same with people, I’m not saying that some people make us pass out, well maybe one or two, but I’m sure that we all know people who we find very difficult to like, and there are a few that we really can’t handle. You just have to look at a history book and you can quickly compile a list of very unloveable people throughout the course of history.

So here we have the greatest, as well as the toughest of all the commandments. Obeying this commandment shows true virtue and love of God, for as we love others, so we love God in them. Jesus tells us in John 4:19 that we cannot love God without loving our brothers and sisters. He says:
We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.

It’s easy to be nice and charitable to people that we like, there’s no challenge there and we don’t have to be told to do this. The command is to love, and by that, CS Lewis says that it’s not the love that you have for someone close to you, like a child or a husband or wife, or a brother or sister, it’s not that kind of love. It’s not the natural affection we feel for those dear to us. The sort of love that we’re commanded to do is different. It requires us to treat everyone the same, showing kindness, respect and charity, unconditionally, to those that we do not like as well as the people that we do like, and yes, even to show the same kindness to our enemies. Love thy neighbour, we’ve heard this commandment so many times, it just rolls off the tongue so easily but how hard it is to actually put this into practice, to show the same kindness and respect to everyone no matter who they are.

But there is something quite powerful that CS Lewis also mentions, he says that the more we show this kind of love to those we dislike, we find that we dislike them less and less, and that this aversion will diminish, because unconditional love tends to neutralises these negative feelings in us.

Love the lord your god with all your heart, your soul and your mind. God comes first, and everything else falls into place. Love your neighbour as yourself. We can unpack the second part of this commandment and dig a little deeper. We are told here to love ourselves. It’s okay to love ourselves, it’s imperative that we love ourselves. It’s almost as though it’s not possible to love another if we don’t have self-love. We wouldn’t go up to a person and insult them or treat them unkindly, but often we do it to ourselves. Often it’s in the form of negative self-talk. You may accidentally drop something and you might say to yourself, “butter fingers” or “well, that was silly.” We’re not perfect, sure we make mistakes and say and do the wrong things sometimes, but we’re not to be so self critical and beat ourselves up that we emotionally harm ourselves, and diminish that sense of our own worth.

Self-loathing is not an uncommon thing. Some people look in the mirror and hate themselves. This is quite tragic. God doesn’t want us to behave this way. Our lives are a gift of love from God, and we all belong to him. He loves us so much, imagine how it pains God when we don’t love ourselves, or treat ourselves harshly or we lack reverence for our own emotional or physical well being, or humiliate ourselves.

Jesus tells us how to love. Jesus goes beyond Deuteronomy and Leviticus, he gives us a more immediate and personal message. He told his disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Jesus in this commandment tells us to follow his example, we are to love as he loves.
So how did Jesus love?
He had compassion for all people. He healed the sick and lame, he fed the hungry, he showed love to his oppressors. He reached out to the worst sinners. Jesus loved Judas, his betrayer. It made absolutely no difference who these people were, what they’d done, or how far away from God they were. The love of our Lord was without limit.

God loves us with an incredible love and our role is to show that love to others, and to help others in real ways, especially those who cannot help themselves. This message runs right through the Gospel of Luke. There’s no escaping it; we’re to love others, friends, strangers, and enemies.

The word “love” often makes us think of softness, warmth, comfort and gentle things like that. But love is also a powerful thing, it can change lives, it transforms, it can prevent misery, it can ease suffering. It gives us meaning.
In the words of Paul:
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Time itself cannot change it.

On that first Christmas day, love was born into the world in the person of God’s son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and it has reigned over us, unchanged ever since. The power of this love is felt so strongly during Advent, as we wait for the birth of Jesus. It was present at the nativity, when Mary and Joseph gazed down at their newborn son. We can imagine how much love would have been there in that stable, and what that love allowed them to endure, especially Mary at the end of her son’s mission. Love made it all happen. It was love that allowed Mary to say yes to the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. And it was love that moved Joseph to shoulder the responsibilities that would have been almost unbearable to many men at the time. And it sustained Joseph when he took his little family out of Israel and into Egypt, into the unknown, so that he could keep his little family safe.

We are called upon to love as Jesus loves, the strongest love in the world. And it’s this kind of love, the quality of this love that can bring about the hope, the joy and the peace that are represented by the Advent candles that have been shining over the last few weeks. If we love as Jesus loves, we provide hope for so many in the world when all seems lost, and we feel the joy that is our due as children of God. And so importantly in these troubled times, loving as Jesus loves us, brings peace on earth. It is only love that can do it, nothing else can. Peace on earth, just imagine it, for a second. If enemies can treat each other as Jesus treated others, hostility would cease, instantly.
Hope, peace and joy are the outpourings of the love of God in the world.
I’d like to end this message with John 3:16-17
For god so loved the world that he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
This is what Christmas means to us, God coming to earth so that we may share in God’s great and powerful love through his son Jesus Christ. It is a reminder of how God loves us: relentlessly, completely, and without expectation of return.
Amen