We try to follow almost everything. Except this. We really don’t want to listen to how Jesus wants us to love.
Hint: it’s about love
Epiphany 7C | Luke 6:27-38
Love is already hard. That isn’t news to us.
It is easy to love someone for about five seconds. And then they open their mouth and say some stupid stuff. Or to love someone before you find out that they slurp their soup. Like, if we had known that before we committed, I mean, maybe we would’ve thought twice.
Simple love is easy. Love before contact with another person. Love from over here. I love you, man! That is pretty easy.
How about loving when people are being awesome? That’s easy too. When they amaze us. When they sing so beautifully. We can love them for that. I love Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam: that golden baritone.
Or how about when they do some incredibly generous thing. William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign. Shane Claiborn and his work to abolish the death penalty. Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future. Loving people who are showing love.
Then there’s loving when you are feeling good! When things are going your way, you get a bit generous. Thankful. I see you back there! And then you tip a little better. Bump that 18% to 25%. Now we’re both riding high!
So what about when things are hard?
When they don’t seem that lovable. Or when you don’t feel much like loving. Maybe we’re just not in the mood. Or maybe we’re not feeling loved.
We can always come up with reasons to not love. There are plenty of them. And we all have them at the ready. They didn’t do the right thing. Or look the right way. Or don’t like Star Wars. I mean, how can we even be friends?
And some of our reasons actually make some sense. Such as when we’re dealing with abuse or mental illness. Or when we are dealing with something. I’m pretty confident that these aren’t the kind of things Jesus has in mind, though.
These are the obvious ones, right? Ridiculous reasons on the one hand. Exceptions for health on the other.
There is a third category we like to justify, however. And that is the very stuff Jesus wants us to look at. And this is the catch-all bucket that we print off and slap the label “deserving” to. This the bucket we put people experiencing poverty in, right? Saying they must deserve their poverty. Therefore we can’t be generous to them because they don’t deserve our generosity.
That’s the place Jesus is operating. Not in those other ridiculous ideas like whether you should unfriend someone on Facebook or get out of an abusive relationship. From one extreme to the other. No, he’s talking about the junk going on inside our heads that keeps us from loving our neighbors because we don’t want to.
This isn’t their moral failing. It’s ours.
Why don’t we want to love like Jesus?
I’m really quite serious. I’ve been in church almost my whole life. Many different churches with a lot of different kinds of belief. But the one thing they all have in common is this:
They don’t want to be as generous as Jesus.
They’ll talk back about that whole forgiving 77 times thing, but they’ll begrudgingly accept the idea.
But this one, right here: give when somebody asks from you: that’s too much.
Years ago Tony Campolo, the evangelical pastor, made a video series we watched at my church in Midland, Michigan. The church had an endowment from the Dow family (Dow Chemical) three times the size of ours. Campolo was teaching on this. And he gave example after example about trusting the Spirit and listening to Jesus and what our role in a relationship is. So guess what all these faithful people said.
What if they buy booze?
After spending 45 minutes hearing a gospel of generosity, we then spent 45 minutes discussing all the ways to avoid being generous.
And the kicker for me at twentysomething was this: nothing about that moment surprised me in the slightest.
As devoted followers of Jesus, we’re willing to go along with about 92% of his teachings. And this is one we may struggle with the most.
We demand reciprocity
The reason we refuse to follow Jesus on this is that we don’t acknowledge how Jesus is asking us to redefine love. Yes, a big part is that we don’t want to acknowledge it. But it is also because I don’t think we even recognize what he’s doing because we don’t admit to how we define it.
We base love not only on a feeling in our hearts, but on a concept of reciprocity. About giving and receiving. So love only really counts to us when it is given back. We’re taught from early age about the fidelity of relationship. We love our parents and they love us. So our foundational experience of love is mutual love.
But somewhere along the line we start to mandate that mutuality. Gifts require thank you notes. Buying someone a drink means they have to buy the next round. There should be little wonder why young men begin to assume they are owed attention and then act out when they don’t receive it.
We’re mixing these ideas into a dysfunctional cocktail of expectation, desperation, anger, and moral outrage.
Any gift that requires a thank you is not actually a gift. It’s an exchange. We’re bartering. You give a gift in exchange for a thank you. Or [and this is where it gets really fun] you give a gift in exchange for the moral superiority of evaluating how the gift is received! Isn’t that awesome?
So if they receive it well and send a thank you, we get to give our friend a gold star for following social customs around “gift-giving”. But if they don’t, we get the moral indignation of being “slighted” by not being thanked! In both cases, our brains lights up with pleasure chemicals. So we quite literally benefit either way.
This isn’t really about thank you notes.
It’s about the onus we put on other people to love us and using that as an excuse not to love them.
What that church in Midland was struggling with was that there is no but… There’s no “what about this other thing?”
Jesus says to give. Period. No strings to attach. No moral obligations or oppressive expectations.
This is so radical an idea, it feels even radical for Jesus.
And I suspect it has to do with this one very simple idea: that in this, he’s resting our love on our action. Not on an expectation for mutuality. But on an expectation on ourselves for generosity.
It isn’t that a child loves a parent as reciprocity for the love she has for him. It is the selfless love of a parent and the selfless love of a child that connect in mutuality.
Jesus invites us to lead with our hearts, not our heads on love.
This is why it is so hard to give whenever we’re asked. Because our brains start deciding whether or not we’ve got the cash. Or what they’re going to do with it. We decide for them whether or not they are worthy of our love and generosity.
We are literally withholding love. Love that God has given us to share. We’re hoarding it and saying these precious people, made in the image of God aren’t good enough for God’s love.
And Jesus is showing us how to move that thinking out of the equation to make more room for generosity.
And we do that by letting go.
I think of the image, the very real experience, of opening my wallet, pulling out a twenty and handing it over.
And then I let go.
It’s not mine anymore. I don’t get to manipulate or control. I don’t get the endorphin rush of moral superiority. There is no keeping tabs or final verdict. We don’t get to collect data for a spreadsheet to hand to a spiritual accountant to tell us if we’re in the black on “being right”.
I let it go.
Perhaps Jesus is showing us that it’s about getting our brains to let our hearts do what they do best.
And why that image Jesus uses toward the end of the overflowing portion so resonates with us. It is both physical and a metaphor. Like pulling the bill out of the wallet. An image to carry with us.
“A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap”.
A picture of overflowing generosity. It isn’t earned. Or deserved. So much abundance; more than we need. Ours for the taking… and the sharing. Because that’s what we do.
That’s what we do.
Love without reward. Without thank yous. Without fame. Love. Not to be loved. But because we already are loved by God. Created to love. Called to love. Compelled to love.