Sunday, July 10, 2022

Proper 10

Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

The Rev. Clint Brown

Love – the content and the aim of the Gospel. The content because love is that which has been revealed by God’s actions in our behalf; the aim because Christ has mandated that we love one another as he has loved us (John 14:34-35). The first is supremely demonstrated by Christ’s death on the cross, and the second by one of his most famous parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In those early days of Christianity, when Peter and Paul and the rest of the Apostles were spreading out and taking the Gospel to all parts of the Roman world, there was no more defining characteristic of this upstart sect than the radical boundary crossing exemplified by the story of the Good Samaritan. Slaves, foreigners, any and all of society’s cast offs and riff raff, these were the ones that embraced the new religion and were populating the early Christian communities. It seemed that there was no societal norm this upstart religion wasn’t willing to break, no “undesirable” it was unwilling to “cross the road” for, so to speak, in the name of love. As the foundational and organizing principle of our identity – so radical, so expansive – as I say, both the content and aim of the Gospel, let us examine it.

There are, in Greek, four words for love. There is, first of all, ἔρως (erōs), the love of passion and passionate feeling, usually synonymous with physical intimacy but not necessarily to be understood as only that. Erōs is characterized by its intensity, how it abandons ordinary constraints and will not answer to reason. It is the love we mean when we say we’re “in love.” And if it sounds a little dangerous, that’s because it is! But it is important to emphasize that we cannot live as humans without such deep emotions, by being touched by things that give us intense feelings of joy and pleasure that do not answer to any reason other than that we like them.

And second, there is στοργή, storgē, the word for family love, the love that defines the relationship of parent and child. You have only to think of the first moment you held your newborn to know what this love is. The bond created by the blood relationship is powerful and written into our DNA, a sign to us of love that is of a deep and instinctual kind. We are made to be in families and to know the kind of love that families know, love that is unbreakable, unshakeable, and absolute, a “given” that we can always rely upon in a world of expediency, of fairweather friends, fragile alliances, and shifting loyalties.

The third word for love is φιλία (philia), which is the warm and affectionate love such as friends feel toward one another. Philadelphia, both a city of ancient Asia Minor and modern Pennsylvania, translates as the city of brotherly love. Philia encompasses both spiritual and physical closeness and the trust and confidence we can have in our friends can equal, and often does exceed, that which we have in our families. Many ancient writers noted the irony, as did the Apostle Paul and the early Christian communities, that we can and do often find our most permanent place of belonging, our greatest sense of home, outside our families with those of like mind who accept us by choice and not obligation.

And, finally, there is ἀγάπη (agapē), and this is Christian love. It is love that gives and does not expect a return. It is sacrificial – it will have nothing to do with conditions or transactions – and it, more than any other, is the kind of love that we learn in Scripture most characterizes God. Jesus reveals its essential flavor when says that no one has greater love than to lay down their life for their friends (John 15:13); or, in Matthew 5, when he bids Christians to love even their enemies; or, as mentioned, in the image of the Good Samaritan. Why are we to love even our enemies? Why are we to extend ourselves even for complete strangers? Because that’s what God does. God makes his sun to rise on both the evil and the good, sending rain on both the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). Which is to say that there is in God an “unconquerable benevolence”[1] to all God’s creatures, irrespective of their class or character. In theology this goes by the word grace.

Now to us all this makes no sense at all. Plutarch, a contemporary of the writing of the New Testament, might well be speaking for us today when he defined a real man as one who was useful to his friends and dangerous to his enemies, but observe just how far agapē love forces us beyond this – beyond our human nature, our self-interestedness, our too-small conception of love as just one more “transactional commodity.” It should come then as no surprise to learn that the word agapē is hardly a word at all in the ancient world. In its rare appearance in classical Greek it is noteworthy only for how hard it is to define.[2] It is a word out of focus because unconditional love as an idea was out of focus. Agapē only comes into its own in the Christian era. As one biblical scholar puts it, it is a word “born within the bosom of revealed religion,”[3] a word that only God could define.

Like the love of God extended toward us, agapē love demands of every Christian a universal and unconquerable benevolence to all people, no matter their attitude toward us, their treatment of us, whether they look or think like us, or whether we judge them worthy of it or deserving. We love first and ask questions later. We are leaven that, through just a small amount, can affect the whole batch; we are salt that, though tiny, can make the whole dish savory; we are light that, even though a single candle, still has the power to penetrate the darkness of an entire room. Two thousand years has not changed how surprising, how revolutionary, how world-changing this kind of love is, so let us show we are Christians by our love.

[1] William Barclay, Great Themes of the New Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 4.

[2] Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 36-37.

[3] Barclay, Great Themes, 4.