Loving God and Neighbor
Sustenance for the Practice of Ministry
From the Old Testament onward, the love of God and neighbor is a persistent theme throughout the Bible. From Israel’s time as strangers in a strange land to its establishment as a nation, from the start of Jesus' ministry to the early days of the church as described in the epistles, scripture echoes with the admonition to care for widows, orphans, and strangers in response to God’s love. However familiar it may be, this refrain to love God and neighbor offers rich possibilities for sustaining ministry vocations and practices. Just as food, water, and exercise are essential to sustaining human life, so too is the love of God and neighbor essential to sustaining vital lives of faith within Christian community.
Like everyone, pastoral leaders can at times be deluded—even manipulated—into anchoring their identity in worldly standards of success and power. Although many attempt to construct such identities, these efforts are in fact an impossible task. In truth, such identities cannot be sustained. Inevitably, any identity not rooted in God leads to an insatiable thirst for ever higher levels of worldly “success.” It leads to a hunger for new and better techniques to pursue a success that masquerades as effectiveness. Even if such success is achieved, it almost always comes at great price, bringing with it perpetual fatigue or, worse, loss of vocation and even faith. Whether we are new or seasoned pastors, it is our Christian identity and practices of love of God and neighbor that sustain faithfulness—and effectiveness—across the mountaintops and through the valleys of our vocational journeys.
But how shall we love God and neighbor? First, we must acknowledge the interdependence of these loves. In Matthew 22.34—38, Jesus demonstrates this connectedness when he is asked which commandment in the law is the greatest. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” he responds. “This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as your self. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Again and again, in Matthew, the other synoptic gospels, the Torah and elsewhere, several biblical passages suggest that we should love our neighbor as our self. The gospel of John, however, offers a different, more nuanced approach. In John 15.9, 12 and John 13.34, Jesus' commandment is no longer to love neighbor as self, but to “love one another as I have loved you.”
The implications of this shift are significant. Rather than loving neighbor as self, we are to love neighbor as God has loved us in Jesus Christ. Though the love of self disappears in this new commandment, it does not mean that self is entirely sacrificed. Rather, through baptism the self is initiated into the body of Jesus Christ, the church. As a member of the body of Christ, one remains a unique child of God. At the same time, through the power of the Holy Spirit one is sanctified, or made holy in Christ. Sanctification may occur in an instant or through a life long process, but in both cases takes on eschatological dimensions for individuals and communities.
What this shift means—if the implications of loving neighbor as God has loved us are taken seriously—is that humans neither love God nor neighbor nor even themselves well without relationship to God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Writing in Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity, Timothy Jackson, associate professor of Christian ethics at Candler School of Theology, says this shift has at least three aspects, or characteristics:
- epistemic—it provides a normative model for persons to imitate,
- juridical—an innocent atonement to satisfy God’s justice, and
- ontological—a conveyance of the Holy Spirit to empower a new cooperative community.
Drawing upon Christian tradition and doctrine, these characteristics demonstrate the implications of Jesus Christ’s full humanity and full divinity for the present body of Christ, the church, as well as the future realization of the reign of God on earth.
According to Jackson, the shift from loving neighbor as self to loving neighbor as God has loved us, means that the first task for Christians is not to love others or to love self but simply to accept being loved by God. The challenge—the task, he says—is not to accomplish great works for the purpose of earning a title but to remember and receive one’s identity in Christ. Such a starting place, so cut off from our own initiative and power, reminds us that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing, inviting us into relationship. It is from this vantage point that we may best understand our relationships with God and one another. In understanding ourselves—created in the image of God, forgiven and reconciled in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit—and our relationships, we can better understand our ministry vocations and practices. It is God, not any effort or technique of our own, that sustains ministry.
In her book, To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer in the Early Church, Roberta C. Bondi, professor of church history at Candler, recounts a story about the monastic, Dorotheos of Gaza. Once, when the brothers in the monastery seemed to forget what they were about in the monastic life, Dorotheos used the following illustration to help reorient the wayward community:
Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw the outline of a circle. The center point is the same distance from any point on the circumference... Let us suppose that this circle is the world and that God is the center; the straight lines drawn from the circumference to the center are the lives of human beings.
To move toward God, Dorotheos explained, individuals must move from the circumference, traveling along the various radii to the center. As individuals move closer to God, they move closer to one another. As they move farther from God, they grow more distant from one another.
The biblical narrative and the lives of Christian saints who have gone before not only remind us of God’s love for us but also show us how we can love God and neighbor. Our practices of worship such as prayer, reading scripture, singing and silence not only bring us closer to God, but allow us to participate in a beautiful dynamic that brings us closer to one another. Likewise, as we love and serve one another by visiting the sick and imprisoned, feeding and caring for the hungry and needy, and advocating for the disfranchised, we find God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, sustaining and guiding our lives of faith within the body of Christ.
“Without love nothing can please God.”
Clement, First Letter (c. 96 CE)
Laceye Warner is associate dean of academic formation, assistant professor of the practice of evangelism and Methodist studies, and the Royce and Jane Reynolds Teaching Fellow at Duke Divinity School.
