What Love Does
Pentecost 22, Proper 25
Fr. Tim Nunez
October 29, 2023
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A bit more than 500 years before Jesus came to Jerusalem for the Passover festival that would include his crucifixion, a Greek philosopher seeking the mind of God discovered a simple truth. The hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two legs. Or, a squared plus b squared equals c squared. For example, if one leg is 3 and the other 4, the square of 3 is 9, the square of 4 is 16, 9 + 16 = 25, the square root of 25 is 5. That formula holds up no matter how long the two right-angle legs are.
I know what you’re thinking. No one told you there would be math. But here’s the thing about the math. We can draw triangles and lines on paper or construct them, but they are at heart ideas. Pythagorean Theorem exists in the mind. Pythagoras didn’t invent the Pythagorean Theorem, he discovered it. It was absolutely true before he discovered it, before there were people or anything else on this planet. It’s true whether or not you remember, forgot or never understood geometry. It will be true long after we are gone. Pythagoras recognized, therefore, that truth has to exist first in a mind, which put him and other philosophers in pursuit of the mind of God.
There is evidence the Babylonians knew it a thousand years before Pythagoras, around the same time Moses was leading Israel through the wilderness during the Exodus and God gave them the Law.
One of the Pharisees, a lawyer whose legal education and work is all about understanding and applying the Law of Moses, asks Jesus which of the 613 commandments in the Law is the greatest? It’s a difficult question. You don’t want to assert part of the Law over another. The safest bet would have been to quote the First Commandment, “I am the Lord your God…You shall have no other gods before me. First thing first, right?
But Jesus picks two other commandments that aren’t even listed in the top ten. First, he quotes Deuteronomy 6:5, which is from the Shema that observant Jews would recite several times a day, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and with all your mind.” The second quote comes from warm and cuddly Leviticus, and it is just a phrase from Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” as we just heard in our reading this morning.
Then he says, “On these two hang all the Law and the Prophets.” In other words, this isn’t just about the Ten Commandments or the other rules God laid out for worshipping him and living together. They encompass the entire reason God created us and continuously calls us to him. And that reason is the focus they share: Love.
Love is much more than the way we are supposed feel toward each other or the ways we are supposed to treat each other. When I was a teenager, we had an orange and white cat named Pippin. Pippin was a sweet and affectionate cat, but he had this bad habit of lying in the driveway. He’d move if a car was coming, but one day when my mom was backing out, he didn’t. Her car’s tire rolled right over his head. Amazingly, it didn’t kill him.
It affected him, though. For one thing, after that he walked like, well, have you ever been behind a truck or car with a bent frame? His tongue hung halfway out of his mouth perpetually. And his meow became more like a meowrf. Worst of all, he became distant, just sitting on the front porch away from everyone, not responsive.
Over time, his personality came back. He still had his tongue out, still sounded funny and still looked like his frame was bent, but he returned to being part of the family. That’s the essential purpose of love. Love is the primary way God works. Love is the way God works on us as we love Him. Love is the primary way God works through us we love others as he loves us.
The Apostle John wrote “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
Please note the important distinction here. At its root, love is not something God does, love is what God IS. What did God say to Moses about the same time the Babylonians were working with right triangles? Don’t render unjust judgment. Have equal, fair regard for the poor and the great. Don’t slander people. Don’t profit from their blood. You will have to reprove or correct your neighbor, but don’t hate them. Don’t take vengeance. Don’t hold grudges.
What does Jesus, God incarnate, teach us about love? Love heals. Love seeks us when we are lost. Love calls us to follow where it leads and demands our best. Love is strong. Love persists among the outcasts. Love is unyielding. Love reproves and corrects because it calls us to the very best. Love is sacrificial, even unto death on a cross. Love is victorious in the end, despite even the apparent hopelessness of death. Love ascends to God and calls us home to be with him forever. As we see in this passage from 1st Thessalonians, love drove Paul to share not only the Good News of the Gospel, but to share of himself out of love.
And, like that Pythagorean theorem, this love of God and love of neighbor, existed before humanity. It is expressed in the creation, and will exist forever because it’s just true. It’s true whether or not we know it, whether or not we understand it, and despite our enormous capacity to fail miserably at it across the centuries and every day.
So much of our world is and has always been focused on economics and power struggles. But let love be your aim, and you will see healing and find blessing.
AMEN