Stephen
Terry, Director
Mission
to My Neighbor
Commentary
for the November 18, 2023, Sabbath School Lesson
"Whoever claims to love God yet hates a
brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and
sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he
has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother
and sister." 1 John 4:20-21, NIV.
We like to quote John 3:16, "God
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosever believes in him shall
not perish but have everlasting life." With that quote we focus on the cross as
a supreme act of love on God's part, and we look forward to Jesus' promised
return to take his people home. But in doing so, we miss much of what Jesus was
all about. John 3:16 explains Golgotha and the cross that sprouted there, but
it does not explain the over thirty-three years that transpired before that
denouement of Christ's life. Couldn't he have been sacrificed to the same end
without over three decades of prelude? There must be more to the mission than
Calvary. Otherwise, the gospels would be far shorter.
John, who did not write one of
the synoptic gospels, saw something the others apparently did not fully
understand. All the gospels bring out that Jesus taught love and forgiveness,
but John saw a deeper meaning to all of that. He saw that it was not only a
recipe for peace, justice, and mercy. It was a revelation of the character of
God.
There is much hard heartedness
in this world. Even when those in need the most find those who are able and
willing to help them, it can mean being chastised by those helping for their
poor choices or profligate lifestyles. Reinforcing their low self-esteem as a
condition of receiving aid is not love. It is judgment untempered by mercy. It
is assistance given, not to truly show love and compassion for the recipient,
but rather to earn "brownie points" with God, something to grease the hinges on
the gate to heaven. But such motivation will not bring the result hoped for. As
Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord,
Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of
my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did
we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name
perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away
from me, you evildoers!'" (Matthew 7:21-23) Those who seek to justify
themselves by their deeds have missed the point. It is a desire for heaven and
not a love of others that has motivated their actions.
Some might fear they will be
taken advantage of if they do not carefully screen everyone who comes seeking
aid. In our global community that is almost impossible to do. Even if we
attempt to screen such requests, we must rely on others whom we also do not
know to vouch for their authenticity. In the end, we often end up paralyzed,
unsure of what to do. Maybe we have sent money to an appeal made on television
for some charity showing pictures that pull at our heartstrings. But even if we
send every cent we own, the same pictures with the same appeal continue to be
broadcast day after day. So, we are left wondering, did our contribution make
any difference at all? We also receive solicitations through the mail, and when
we respond, it becomes obvious that the small donation we could afford helped
no one. It only provided funding for them to send us a flood of solicitations
for more. These scenarios can produce charity fatigue where it is easier to
ignore the requests, filing the letters in the trash, than to deal with being
inundated. It only adds to our frustration when we feel guilty because we think
answers to these solicitations are steppingstones on the pathway to heaven.
The Parable of the Sheep and the
Goats in Matthew, chapter 25,[i] and
James epistle telling us that works prove our faith,[ii]
without the context of the rest of what Jesus taught, can lead us to believe
that our righteous works are the key. Many perfectionists have stumbled over
this idea. But it is the heart that makes the difference. We cannot simply
start doing good deeds and expect everything will be fine. First, we will not
be doing them from the heart, but from fear of missing out on salvation rather
than from love. John tells us that love and fear cannot coexist.[iii]
Either fear will drive out love, or love will drive out fear. When we come to
God, when we seek relationship with him, when we spend time daily in the Bible
and in prayer, we will begin a process of change, a process where the Holy Spirit
rewrites the programming of our hearts, changing them from stony hardness shaped
by fear to living, beating hearts of flesh and love.[iv]
This is not an instantaneous change. It is a lifelong process with many
stumbles along the way. Those stumbles will cause pain for us and others, but
if we continue to embrace the path of change God shows us, we will find
ourselves becoming more loving more compassionate over time. There may come a
time when we look back and find it hard to believe who and what we once were.
This can be a difficult concept
to grasp. It may even seem like foolishness to those who struggle to gain all
they can in this life. But it is that struggle that illustrates the problem. At
some point, we all seem to go from "Do I really need this?" to "I must have it because
I want it and can afford it." Little consideration is given to the needs of our
neighbors, and even less to global needs, so a few have, and many have not.
Jesus told us to not only love God,
but to love our neighbors,[v]
even those who are our enemies.[vi] So
much blood is watering the earth in many places as I write this because we
cannot allow ourselves to admit that we have enough. We fear that if we do not
continue to grasp for more than we need that we will lose what we have, and
that fear drives us instead of love. We fear that those who live near us will
take what we have, so we invest in security systems, aggressive dogs, and guns
to prevent that from happening. Then when we have taken all those security
measures, we continue to fear that people struggling to exist halfway around
the globe from us will also come and take it all away if we don't respond with
dogs, guns, and security systems at our borders. No one ever considers if it is
because we have taken all we could from those people to maintain a lifestyle
above what we have a right to. At its roots, isn't our fear really based on the
have nots eventually coming to reclaim what we have taken from them?
Two thousand years ago, Jesus
told us things did not have to be that way. The early Christians understood
that message and lived a communal lifestyle where all needs were met,[vii]
and acquisitive greed was discouraged.[viii]
Somewhere along the way, an institutional church developed and people who
should have been devoted to continuing that lifestyle saw the church as a means
to accumulate wealth and the power to keep and grow that wealth. It is then
that we saw develop the discrepancy between the humble believer barely eking
out an existence contrasted to the wealthy and powerful building the Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople or the later Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. It brings
to mind the disciples pointing out to Jesus how beautiful the Temple was in
Jerusalem, and his response that revealed how ridiculous it was to waste means
on constructing such monuments to vanity because one day "one stone will not be
left on another."[ix]
We live with this impermanence
without understanding it. We act as though anything we give to another's needs
is a loss, especially if we do not get a tax deduction for doing it. Therefore,
we accumulate without giving, like the Dead Sea which receives water from the Jordan
River but does not release anything to the arid land surrounding it. In the
end, the accumulated salt poisons even the shore surrounding that sea,
inhibiting life. We do not understand that our greed poisons our cities and
even our countries leaving mental illness, crime, and addictions that not only
make our towns and cities hell holes but force the greedy to live in enclaves
behind high security to keep away those desperate souls who would take what
they need from the only ones who have it.
This was the history of the
world before Christ came. Except for one brief, shining moment it has been the
history of the world since. Christians have written and preached much about the
anticipated but delayed return of Jesus, but they fail to realize that he
returns in every act of love and compassion. Our fear-based lack of such love
shows we are no more eager for his return than people were for his first
advent. Jesus warned us that it would get so bad that the love of many would grow
cold, but he also said that the few who would endure, who would keep on loving
to the end, would be saved.[x]