The twenty-second chapter of the Book of Matthew records one of the most powerful and significant scriptures in all of the Bible. Jesus, when asked by a Pharisee “What is the greatest commandment in the Law?” responds in two parts. He tells him to “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, and with all of your mind”. Then, he instructs him, to “love your neighbor as yourself”. This has to confuse the Pharisee because of his knowledge of the commandments that had come through Moses centuries before. Jesus, sensing the Pharisee’s confusion offers a suffix to His statement. He tells the brother that “All the Law & the Prophets hang on these two commandments”. He, in essence, tells lets him know that if His intention was to please God, his focus must be learning how to be loving & not legalistic.
I think about this in the framework of where we are as a nation today. But, perhaps a slightly more contemporary example can make my point more clear: The famous musician & composer Burt Bachrach penned a song in 1967, the lyrics of which, more than forty years later, ring prophetically true today. Bachrach fatefully writes “What the world needs now is love; sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of”. Bachrach probably had no knowledge of how prescient his poem would be as you and I live in a society that is loveless in large part because people love less. Bachrach’s piece is steeped in Jesus’s biblical principle. But after centuries of having this edict ignored, for many of our brothers & sisters, the prolonged effects of infidelity, violence, oppression, and discrimination, have made the mere notion of love farfetched instead of “feel good”.
In these troublesome times, if there is one agenda on Satan’s stratagem that has succeeded it is convincing us all that we do not need one another to make it by or make it over. We live in a present age where the contemporary cry is that men don’t need women, women don’t need men, children don’t need their parents, African-Americans don’t need other races, and other races don’t need us. It is this division that has allowed love to be stretched to its breaking point. This wayward, warped = worldview prompts many of us ,as a people, to love in a way that is either defensive and distant or hazardous and harmful. We confine the love inside of us, often deciding out of self-preservation to love as our past experiences tell us to and not as God does.
This phenomena is most evident in where we are in a society as we now are witnessing a hardened generation of young people who are not bad, evil, or angry, but rather trying to find their way through life without any example of what love looks like lived out daily. A protracted life without love is at the root of why a man may malfunction in his relationships, or why a women may have developed an aversion to them. A sustained belief that only those who resemble ourselves (economically, culturally, and ethnically) are the ones that we can rely on, depend on, and benefit from blocks the blessing God may have for us from those who are different from us. If we are ever to be all that the Creator would have us to be as a people, as a society, as a culture, or even in the context of humanity, we must fight against those who continually use our differences to divide us and purpose to use Godly love to connect ourselves one to another.
In Godly love, we don’t have to be anything else but what God created us to be in order to be accepted and appreciated. In Godly love, hurt can be healed and submission is not confused with subservience. In Godly love, we see one another as God does and value the lives that He gives to us all. In Godly love, the family unit is unbreakable and viewed as vital. It is Godly love that bridges the gaps between us made by race, class, gender, or sexuality. The danger our nation faces is not one that can be avoided by passing more bills and laws; it isn’t one that a given politician can prevent. If we, as God’s children, do not align with Jesus’ simply complex principle of what it means to love, America will give way to self-destruction. What the world needs now is love. We must begin to take steps to show our other brothers & sisters, the way in which to best resemble God’s presence on Earth; we must rediscover compassion and our capacity to care.