When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, " "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."- Matthew 22: 34-40
I love this passage. To me, it explains Christian faith in a nutshell. What's Christian faith about? Loving God with everything we have, and then others as ourselves. In fact, I think this passage is ground zero for the whole Bible, the place out of which everything else in the Bible flows. It is not only the central teaching of Jesus in the gospels, it emanates from the first commandment in the Old Testament.
So if love is so central to the Bible, why do we have such a hard time making love central our lives? We're not necessarily bad at love, but we're sure biased in our love. Think about this for a moment. We generally love the most those who like us and are the most like us, and we love the least those who dislike us and are the most unlike us. Ponder what I just said for a moment.
I'll show you what I mean. There was a woman who met a friend from long ago in the checkout line of a supermarket. They hadn't seen each other for years. Her friend asked her, “So how your children? Are they married?” “Yes,” the woman replied. “One has a great marriage, the other a bad one. My son, he is in a bad marriage. He is married to the laziest woman on earth. She expects him to do everything. She won't cook, she won't clean, she doesn't pay the bills. All she does is lie in bed all day reading, and expects my son to even bring her breakfast in bed.”
“What about your daughter,” the friend asked. “Oh, my daughter is in the most wonderful marriage. She is married to a prince. He does everything. He cooks for her. He cleans. He tells her just to take it easy, sit in bed or lie on a couch all day and read. And get this. He is so thoughtful that most mornings he brings her breakfast in bed.”
We are so biased when it comes to our love. Why do we have such a hard time loving everyone? Truth? It all comes down to the conflict between biology and spirituality. I'm not sure why this is, but most of us somehow think that because we are spiritual, or because humans are a sophisticated and higher form of creature, that we aren't influenced much by biology. We are. In fact, our biological wiring influences most of everything we do. Let me give you a basic introduction to psychology 101. Psychology understands that biology plays a huge part in our everyday behavior, and it is a discipline devoted to understanding the role biology plays. It understands that our minds are often controlled, or at least heavily influenced, by our endocrine systems, hormones, frontal lobes, pituitary glands, amygdalas, reticular activating systems, rigt and left hemispheres, and so much more. Our thoughts and actions have a heavy biological basis.
One of the ways our biology is influences us the most is through our survival instinct. Most of us don't even come close to realizing how much this survival instinct plays in everyday life, and how it influences our ability to love. We not only have a strong survival instinct when it comes to protecting our food sources, our families, and our homes. We also have a strong survival instinct that protects our beliefs and values. I don't just mean our religious or political beliefs. I mean our beliefs about others and ourselves. We humans are a very self-protective species.
We sense threats all the time, whether in the workplace or at home. For instance, are you married? If so, do you ever fight with your spouse? And if you do, what do you fight about? We may think we are fighting over the dishes, finances, and intimacy, but the truth is that we are generally fighting because we feel threatened in one way or another by our spouses. They say things to us in ways that cause us to be defensive. Defensiveness is a survival reaction. It is a reaction to a threat, whether it is the threat of someone telling us that we're slobs, which we hear as them telling us that we are bad, or the threat of someone telling us that we aren't a good husband or wife. These feelings of being threatened extend to the workplace, among friends, or even listening to the radio. Most of us feel threatened in one small way or another throughout our days. It's all part of our animal nature.
When we defend ourselves by criticizing them, we are acting out of our survival instinct, trying to protect ourselves and diminish others who may be a threat. You see this same biology playing out in our elections. Have you noticed that as the election campaigns get closer to the wire, the attacks on each other become more aggressive? Why? Because the candidates are getting closer to the end, and they see their opponents more and more as threats. So they do what anyone does when threatened: they attack as a way of defending themselves and diminishing the threat. We may not like it, but it happens. In fact, the more we identify with a candidate, the more we tend to feel threatened not only by his or her opponent, but by his or her supporters. This is why politics is so hard to talk about. People get incredibly defensive about their candidates and their own political opinions. They see others as threats to their beliefs and values, and act aggressively to protect themselves.
We cannot escape the fact that we are biological and act too often out of our survival instincts. We may be biological beings, but we're also spiritual, and it is the spiritual part of us that connects us with love. C. S. Lewis points out our double nature when he says that we are amphibians. And just as amphibians inhabit both watery world and an earthy world, we inhabit both an earthly world and spiritual world. The problem is that love is really of the spiritual world, not the earthly.
You can see the spiritual nature of love in John's writings. In 1 John 4, John writes, “ God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” That is a radical statement. What he is saying is that love not only comes from God, but that it is the essence of God. God is love. The two are indistinguishable from each other. Not only that, but anytime we truly love another, we are letting God love through us. We become spiritual in that moment. Anytime we lock love out, we lock God out and we become merely biological.
John also says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” What is he saying here? Among other things he is saying that love casts out fear, which is our biological survival instinct. He is saying that when we fear, we cast out God because we are living purely according to our biological instincts. When we love, we are living in the spiritual, and if not overriding the biological, we are at least allowing the spiritual to guide the biological. In effect, love means being rooted in God. When we love, we are living more in the spiritual than the biological, and it enables us to be more than just our biological wiring.
The whole point of our passage is that we have a choice: will biology control us, or will we choose to let the spiritual guide us? There's a very simple way to tell whether biology and protectiveness, or love and spirituality, reigns in our lives: to what extent do we tend to get irritated with others, feel threatened by others, need to be approved by others, need to put others in their place, criticize others, or defend ourselves from others? If the answer is that these feelings are strong in our lives, then biology determines a lot in our lives. On the other hand, to what extent do we tend to like others, want to help others, offer to do things for others without expecting a reward, like to compliment others, find the good in others? The stronger these are, the more we live in the spiritual.
Our passage teaches us to live in the spiritual by loving God with everything we have, and then making that the basis for our love of others. And Jesus gives a great example of this. In Luke's gospel, a parable is added to Jesus' command to love God first, then others as ourselves. He tells the story of the Good Samaritan. This is a story of spirituality overriding the survival instinct.
You know the story. A man lies beaten by the side of the road, and three people come upon him. The first, a Levite, will not help the man because the man threatens his survival. He knows that there may be bandits lurking behind the rocks who have beaten the man and are now using him to a lure, beat, and rob others. Also, he knows that if he touches the man, and he is dead, he'll be unclean for 7 days. He is afraid. So he keeps going. The priest also sees the man, but similarly fearing touching a dead body, he passes by. You see, as a priest in the Temple of Jerusalem , he serves only two weeks a year. He is probably in the midst of his two-week service. He doesn't want contamination and defilement to interfere with his service to God in the Temple. So he keeps going.
The Samaritan, in contrast, is the one who has the most to fear. The Jews hated Samaritans. Why? Because they were syncretists. This means that they had been Jewish centuries before, but as they had been attacked and overcome by enemies, they had allowed other religious beliefs and practice to change their Jewish faith. They still saw themselves as Jewish, but now had their own Temple and their own practices. The Jews considered them to be among the most sinful of all, more sinful than Gentiles, because they had defiled the Jewish faith. The Samaritan was at the most risk by helping the man. He not only could be beaten by other bandits and be declared unclean, but he if he was falsely accused by the Jews of beating the man, who would believe him? Who would take the word of a Samaritan? Yet, amidst all his fears, he is the one who lets go of fear, acts out of love, and helps the man by binding his wounds, taking him to an inn, paying for his stay, and offering to pay for longer if need be. He put aside his animal anxiety to live out of his spirituality—to live according to God's love and to let God love through him. This parable shows us the way of love.
We are called to live according to love. We are called to let go of our animal natures to be able to love more and more out of our spiritual natures. Our passage is basically a call to rise above our animal natures to take on God's nature . The question is to what extent are we willing to put our biology aside for God?
Amen.
