Advance February 3, 2006 Kay
“Love thy God with all thy heart, mind, and strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself.” This passage appears sixteen times in one form or another in the New Testament, and in Matthew 22: 37-40, Jesus says it is the greatest commandment of them all when accompanied by “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” References to the word neighbor take up an entire page in Armstrong’s concordance, which helps us locate specific passages in the Bible. Our neighbor is important, according to the Scriptures, and it is up to us to discern how important.
Matthew also quotes Jesus as saying, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of God.” Jesus then tells the crowd that there is no reward in loving those who love you, that the reward lies in loving those who are difficult to love. Now this is not to say there are no immediate paybacks for loving those who love you. The paybacks are just obvious in this case. The great reward comes when outcomes of your loving attention are neither immediate nor obvious; maybe you never see the benefit, or rewards. But the need to love and pray for those who don’t love you is a priority for Jesus. Why?
February is Black History month. We celebrate, among other things, the life and death of Martin Luther King, and the life and death of Coretta Scott King, his partner and his wife. They spent their lives crying out to the world, “Enough!..” Enough abuses, enough bloodshed, enough hatred, enough bigotry, enough hating your neighbor! Surely the world today needs to hear this message, and to hear it from people of faith who are accepting of differences in others, who love their neighbors, just as themselves! There are lots of us…And we are not speaking out very strongly, if at all!
We need to hear from the Christians who truly do accept their neighbors, who are aware of the world situation right now but do not wish to take sides and team up against some religion, some philosophy, some nation or some world-view. This is a challenge. What do we say? How do we reach out? How do we even articulate the problem?
Huston Smith, Professor of Religion and Philosophy, who teaches at Syracuse U, has written, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. In a recent interview, he stated that “we are hamstrung between the fundamentalists on the one hand, who are locked into a dogmatic literalism that fails to put Scripture into context, and on the other side, the liberals, who have conceded too much ground to secularism and the scientific method.”[1] Most of us belong in one or the other of these groups, unfortunately.
The loss here is the deep failure to find common ground among all Christians. The loss here is the deep failure to reach out to neighbors who don’t think as we do, to find common ground as human beings who want to inhabit this earth peacefully. And these losses will be our inheritance to our children, unless something changes.
This is the first of a series. Next: “Identifying Common Ground”