‘“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, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’
Luke
10:27, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18
Because
we in the West are so influenced by ancient Greek thought, by the impulse to
classify everything into distinct categories, we have a tendency to hear these words
as highlighting difference:
‘“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,
“Love your neighbour as yourself.”’
and,
indeed,
‘“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, “Love your neighbour as
yourself.”’
But
what if the spirit of these words – perhaps best understood as both an
invitation and a challenge – was more concerned with unity?
‘“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, “Love your
neighbour as yourself.”’
Differentiation
is not entirely unhelpful. Indeed, it is a necessary stage, without which we
are unable to navigate the world as we set out from home. Ancient Hebrew
thought is also concerned with differentiation, such as that between ‘clean’
and ‘unclean.’ But while setting out from home – moving from Eden to fill the
whole earth – is part of God’s intention for us, it is also God’s intention
that we eventually return home – return to that place where we walk in harmony
with one another and with God. And that movement requires first a stage of
differentiation and then a stage of unification. This is why it is written that
in Jesus, God is reconciling all things to him. God fills and bursts our
containers.
The
other evening I was with friends who are committed to living a life that
attends to seeking to love God, the extended family of faith God has given us
(self – the person only exists in community), and those who live alongside us
(neighbour). That is a good thing. What I shared with them was what God had put
on my heart, to ask the question: “How have you spent time with God today?”
I was
not surprised that the first reaction was one of discomfort, of guilt. Why?
Because of that tendency to separate things into different categories: the
tendency to see loving God, self, and neighbour as ourselves as three different
kinds of activity which we must seek to perform. Loving becomes defined by
certain activities, which become tasks, which become squeezed out, which become
opportunity for guilt. I gave God five minutes today...I haven’t told anyone
about Jesus today...
One
of the ways we remind ourselves that we are called to love God, self and
neighbour is visually, through a triangle, a shape that has three sides, three
angles. But a triangle only exists when there are three sides coming together
at three angles: a triangle is a unity, at every point, in every moment.
We
are never not with God, never not with our extended family of faith,
never not with our neighbour. We are
not alone in the world.
I
love God when I acknowledge his presence, as I sit in the garden, as I
acknowledge his presence in the person I am talking to. And I love that other
person as I acknowledge God’s presence in them – for in so doing I am drawn to
recognise them as made in God’s likeness, honoured, rather than focused on the
particular ways in which that likeness is marred in them...and how that marring
jars against the particular ways God’s likeness is marred in me. I love – or not
– my extended family of faith and my neighbour as I make decisions that have an
impact on them – including the simple, daily decisions, such as what I buy, and
where.
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