Can you love your neighbor if you don't love God?

Matthew 22:34-46

34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: 42 “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” 43 He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,

44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord,“Sit at my right hand,    until I put your enemies under your feet” ’?

45 “If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” 46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Once again the Pharisees want to test Jesus, so they ask him which is the greatest commandment.  This time, rather than saying something clever or surprising, Jesus begins by giving the same answer they themselves would give: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment.”  Ultimately every other commandment, every admonition and prohibition, every do and don’t, is just a sub-category of this commandment.  To truly obey this commandment is to successfully obey all the others - or to render them redundant.  If we love God with all that we are, everything else falls into place.  

The Pharisees would not have disagreed, but they probably would’ve put it the other way around: Obedience to God’s commandments - all of them - is what demonstrates the love of God.  They were famous for their scrupulous adherence to the law, which they easily equated with greater righteousness.  In the next chapter Jesus will say to them, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.”  

So Jesus, in his answer to the Pharisees’ question about the greatest commandment, quickly adds this followup: “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Jesus’ implication, especially when confronted by the Pharisees, is clear: if you do not love your neighbors, then regardless how scrupulously you keep the commandments, you fail to love God.  These are not just the two most important commandments; they are alike, even inseparable: “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”  

There’s an arresting verse in 1 John which makes this explicit: “Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”  

For many of us these strong words bring comfort to the soul.  We are burdened by past experiences in communities where loving God was all about following the rules but where loving your neighbors seemed very much optional and/or conditional.  We are exhausted by a Christianity that somehow, despite all Jesus’ warnings, ends up looking a lot more like the religion of the Pharisees than the kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed.   

We want a religion - we want a church - where we don’t just talk about loving God but where we love our neighbors, where we understand that loving the neighbor is the way that we show love for God, where the measure of our love for God is the way we love our neighbors, where we learn to love God by loving our neighbors.  

But then, a question whose answer is often presumed to be obvious: How do we love our neighbors?  If these two commandments are indeed alike, then in the same way that we cannot love God without loving our neighbors, might it not also be true that we cannot really, truly, love our neighbors without loving God? 

We read a brief passage from Leviticus which leads up to the commandment Jesus quoted: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”  I’d like to draw attention to one little unsettling statement in the passage: "you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.”  

The admonition is straightforward: If you see your neighbor in error, going astray, you must say something to her or him, you must point out their fault and call them back to righteousness - and if you do not, then you will be guilty yourself.   To love your neighbor as yourself is to want what is good for them, what will bring light and life.  To leave your neighbor in sin is to fail to love your neighbor, which is a failure to love God.  

The logic here is unassailable, but still I imagine your defenses have gone up.  Isn’t this exactly what we don’t want - encouraging people to proactively judge one another?  Some of us might want permission to be on the giving end of this - we might want to give a few people a piece of our minds - but probably no one really wants to be on the receiving end.  This sounds exactly like the kind of religion we’ve rightly rejected.  

Last week I quickly told an over-simplified version of the origin story of secular liberalism, which owed largely to a desire for religious freedom, for the state not to interfere in the church’s business, where every citizen is free to chose their religion - or none at all.  And we followed this desire to its logical outcome, creating a society where the highest value is tolerance.  

Rather than living under some oppressive authority (like the church) which tells us what to do, we want to be free to choose our own values, to pursue our own desires - and if we want to be free then we need to insist on the right of others to do the same.  We don’t need to agree about much besides the necessity of not interfering in one’s another’s lives.  Freedom means tolerance, it means living and let live.  This is a story that I’m sure all of us, to varying degrees, have unreflectively internalized.  It is the very air we breathe. 

But our lack of a shared understanding of what we take to be true, and right, and good - of what our lives should oriented toward - turns out to be a big problem.  (There’s something of a crisis in secular democracies because different factions hold widely divergent and often incompatible conceptions of the the good.)  We want to each make up our own minds, but how do we live together if we make them up differently?  The elevation of tolerance is certainly preferable to burning heretics or disappearing dissenters, but it produces an environment where the imperative is to leave one another alone, which produces societies like ours where so many people feel lonely.  

We need a shared a story to live together well.  If we each disagree about what we want for ourselves, we cannot agree what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.  The command becomes more or less equated with supporting one’s right to self-determination.  That’s fine as far as it goes, but there is more.  

At the risk of sounding like a religious crank lamenting how the people have turned away from God,  I do believe that, in the same way you can’t love God without loving your neighbor, you also can’t properly love your neighbor without loving God - without desiring the good and therefore also desiring that good for your neighbor, without conviction as to the ultimate ends towards which a human life is properly oriented.  

To the objection that non-Christians often love their neighbors better than Christians, I would say that this is obviously true, which suggests to me that these people’s hearts are turned to God even if their minds reject the notion. As we saw in the instance of the two sons called to work in the field, there are those who actions say yes even as their lips say no.  

Ideally church would be a place where this problem is overcome, where we do share a single standard, where we all are striving for the same goal.  But this immediately gets quite complicated: do we really all have a single understanding, a shared goal?  Who gets to decide what that is?  The attempt to specify standards and encourage (or enforce) compliance, however well-intended, almost inevitably leads, not to loving reproving of your neighbor, but judgment and condemnation.  The pharisaical impulse is strong. 

If our options are bland tolerance or self-righteousness, most of us want to err on the side of tolerance.  But those don’t have to be the only options.  

Every Sunday, before the kids exit for children’s worship, we all repeat the words: “God is love; God love me.  God help me to love you, and to love everybody.”  These words, of course, echo Jesus’ statement as to the two greatest commandments, and these words declare the fundamental truths we want our children to learn and know.  

And maybe we adults also might, at a minimum, agree that this is our goal, too, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  And if if we come together with that shared goal in mind, and we understand that love of God and love of neighbor mutually inform one another, perhaps we might learn to hold one another to this goal.

Not out of self-righteousness, not from a desire to put ourselves in the position of arbiter and judge, but precisely to help encourage our friends to reach the very goal that they have set for themselves.  If we each say, “I want to be the kind of person who loves God and loves my neighbor” then we might also learn to be the kind of people who can say to the friend, in love, “what you’re doing is (or at least seems to maybe be) contrary to the love of God and neighbor - it is hurting yourself and others.    

And because we are the sort of people who desire to love God and love our neighbors, because we are the sort of people who want to grow in this love more and more, we might also learn to welcome the reproof of our friends when we are straying from the goal we’ve set, we might receive it as the very love of our neighbor to us - even as the very love of God.