The Debt We Never Finishing Paying

Love is at the centre of Christian faith.  Today’s passage from Romans presents both the simplicity of love and the multifaceted nature of love.  The apostle Paul has just been talking about our obligations to others, including things such as paying our taxes, and then in verse 8 he says, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”  So first, we are to deal with our ordinary debts and obligations to others, not by denying, ignoring, or evading them, but by paying them and fulfilling them.  Then there is one debt that remains, the debt of love.  It is a bit odd, this way of thinking of love as what we owe one another.  And the 3rd century theologian Origen points out the paradoxical nature of it when he says, “The debt of love remains with us permanently and never leaves us; this is a debt which we both discharge every day, and for ever owe.”  We tend to like the satisfaction of being able to check something off on a to-do list as complete, but love is not that way: like many of the most meaningful aspects of life, it is a lifelong process.  We love every day of our earthly lives, and when our time on earth is finished, we love even more for the rest of eternity.  

Next, Paul says, “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”  He goes on to explain, “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”  This is very similar to what Jesus says in Matthew 22, when he says that the two great commandments are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself, and on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

The ten commandments are necessary, but they are only the bare minimum.  For instance, there’s a lot more involved with a good marriage than simply avoiding adultery.  There’s a lot more involved with good community relations than simply avoiding murder.  What’s happening in today’s passage is a change of attitude from “What is the bare minimum I’m required to do?” to a new attitude of “What do I aspire to?”  In our highest aspirations, our reach always exceeds our grasp, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  It is the nature of our highest aspirations.  We know that we don’t achieve perfection at loving during this earthly life.  That is the reason that in our prayer of confession every Sunday, we pray “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves” and that is true for each of us, every single week, every single day, that we have not loved God with our whole heart and we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.  Still, each time we are forgiven, and we begin again, continuing to strive each day for what we aspire to, and what God inspires us to.  

Love provides the motivation.  When we love our neighbour, we don’t want to harm our neighbour with adultery or theft or murder or even coveting.  The nature of love is to want our neighbour’s good, not our neighbour’s harm.  Even more important, God’s love for us, and God’s love for every neighbour we have, even the ones who exasperate us, is what provides the inspiration to love our neighbours.

I love the way the writer Frederick Buechner explores this topic in the section about love in his book Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC.  He says, “The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.  The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them.  The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.”  Buechner goes on to explain what he means by that.  “The unabashed eros of lovers, the sympathetic philia of friends, agape giving itself away freely no less for the murderer than for his victim (the King James version translates it as charity)—these are all varied manifestations of a single reality.  To lose yourself in another’s arms, or in another’s company, or in suffering for all [people] who suffer, including the ones who inflict suffering upon you—to lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself.  Is what it’s all about.  Is what love is.”

“Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless.  It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart.  It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.”

Buechner then explores the connection between love and God.  He writes, “To say that love is God is romantic idealism.  To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.”

The way the word love is used in the secular world is not quite the same as the meaning of love in Christianity.  We might get frustrated if we can’t summon up warm fuzzy feelings for the people who are driving us nuts.  But Buechner says not to let that worry us.  He explains, “In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will.  When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling.  You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze.  On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone.  Thus in Jesus’ terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them.  In fact, liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.”

“When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn’t say, ‘There, there.  Everything’s going to be all right.’  He said, ‘You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil!’ (Matthew 12:34).  And he said that to them because he loved them.”

“This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn’t have to be.  Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving.  It is hard to work for people’s well-being very long without coming in the end to rather like them too.” 

In my own experience, Buechner is right about that.  When I work for someone else’s well-being, I usually do end up liking them more as a result.  They still have all their old faults, and the more I love them, the more I find I like them, even with their faults.

Those of us in the church, myself included, tell people often that God loves you, even with all your faults.  That’s true, and it’s important.  There’s something else that those of us in the church, myself included, don’t say quite as often, which is that God loves each one of your neighbours, even with all their faults.  That is just as true, and it is just as important.  When someone is getting on my nerves and I’m not really in the mood to love that person, I find it helpful to remind myself how much God loves that person.  God loves that person with all their faults just as deeply as God loves me with all my faults.  My neighbour is, as the Apostle Paul puts it, someone for whom Christ died.  Seeing how precious that person is in the eyes of God enables me to see that person with new eyes too, eyes that are a bit more loving.  Remembering that my neighbour is someone for whom Christ died makes me less whiny about having to put some of my effort into loving someone with faults.  God’s love reminds me to believe that in the end, there is only one kind of love.  Love is at the center of Christian faith, and love radiates out to every part of Christian faith, and every part of our lives on earth and in heaven.