12th Sunday after Pentecost 19.8.07 Love of neighbour
It is too hard to love our neighbour we might say, aware of the many faults that neighbours have, which make them hard to love.
But it would be no use trying to convince God it is too hard to love neighbour because He already does. He loves all the people we don’t.
He loves them so much He died on the Cross for them.
So we will make no headway if we want Him to change His commandment. The only remedy is to ask Him to help us love our neighbours. From the abundance of His love can He send a little our way and enable us to love where we previously could not.
This will enable us to have mercy for the weakness of others, and at the same time wanting them to reach their best (which is how God deals with us).
There are two kinds of people, a man once said to me: those who put people first and those who put the system first.
The ones who put the system first are the ones who go by the rule book. They insist on everyone conforming to the rules. Break the rules and you’re out.
The ones who put people first are the ones who overlook the rules and let people find their own way.
Both approaches can be taken too far; excesses lie in every direction.
If we insist on the rules too much we run the risk of crushing the bruised reed. If we punished everyone with every fault we would be back to hanging people for stealing sixpence.
At the other extreme (which is pretty well where we are in our present society) if we let people do whatever they please we are doing them no favours. One man’s freedom is another man’s injury. And this way people will not achieve their full dignity or status as sons of God.
We want to get things exactly right. To love neighbour as God does is to want what is best for that person ( not whatever he might feel like, but what God wants for him).
This does require a respect for the ‘system’ which happens to be God’s system and therefore the best for all concerned.
Granted we don’t trust systems in general, finding them impersonal and arbitrary etc, but when God has made the system it is a different matter.
So we do not have to lurch from one extreme to the other. We can have the best of both approaches.
We can have absolute respect for both the dignity of the other person and the rightness of God’s order.
And the truth in both the theoretical and practical sense is found in a meeting of the two.
I love my neighbour best when I am introducing him to God. This can be done in a number of ways, but basically means that God is working through me in some way in every interaction I have with another person.
People will protest, Why bring God into it? Indeed how can we leave Him out, because only in Him does the whole system make sense.
Only through God can we have that exalted understanding of human dignity. Otherwise we are just ‘collections of molecules’ as a politican recently asserted.
Knowing how important people are, but without going to the other extreme of letting everyone be his own god, we can then get the right bearings.
We love one another by obeying God ourselves and by encouraging (forcing in some cases, eg children) others to do the same.
So we realize that the command to love neighbour is not so far out of our reach; it just requires a gradual convergence on what is true and good in each person and each circumstance.
