No Exceptions--October 1, 2024
"You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.... When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." [Leviticus 19:17-18, 33-34]
God knows we are in the habit of looking for loopholes, and God has a way of closing them off. We are sneaky schemers, God knows, so often looking for ways to limit our responsibility to love or cut people off the list. But God insists that our call to love has no exceptions.
We need to start there, even if it makes us squirm and sweat a little bit, because honestly, this is where the Bible starts with our calling to love. As we embark on a new focus this month in our year of "Meeting Jesus," we'll now spend this October focusing on The Love of Jesus. And to be clear, that kind of love is both Jesus' love for us, and it's also the love we are called into because of Jesus for everyone else. There's no splitting them up, and there's definitely no separating our love for God with our call to love our neighbors.
But even before we get to Jesus' conversations with people in the Gospels about how and who we love, it's worth starting here, in the early memories of ancient Israel in the Torah. Here God commands the recently liberated Hebrews to practice love, both for people like them (their "kin" and "neighbors") as well as for aliens, immigrants, and foreigners who come to live in their land. In other words--there are no exceptions, and there is no geographic, cultural, or ethnic limit placed on whom we are called to love.
And just to be clear, all of these commandments about our love for others are rooted in the memory that God has loved first. (We'll eventually have that conversation with the letter we call First John in the New Testament, who insists that we can only love because God first loved us.) But the same underlying logic is here even in Leviticus, because the commandments to love are backed up with God's declaration, "I am the LORD," and the reminder that this is the same God who had loved the people first when they were enslaved and set them free from the clutches of Pharaoh. It is because the people knew what it was like to have been mistreated (and unfairly feared) foreigners who were shown love by God that they were also to love both neighbor and foreigner alike when they were the ones in their own land. As love always does, it starts with God, and then moves outward in all directions.
It's worth noting, too, that God seems to foresee future seekers of loopholes after the initial commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself," who might say, "Oh, well, see, the term 'neighbor' only includes people LIKE ME. Sure, I'll love 'My Kind of People' but you can't expect me to give a care about outsiders!" God sees that excuse coming a mile away and prevents it from ever getting off the ground with the follow-up commandment, "You shall love the alien as yourself," and the added insistence, "for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." In other words, God tells the formerly enslaved migrant Israelites, "You should know better than to mistreat, discriminate, or show hostility to foreigners in your midst, because you know what it is like to be on the receiving end of that kind of treatment." God sees the potential protest that only wants to put "Me and My Group First" coming, and God stops that train of thought in its tracks. Nope, God says, that's not how you do things around here.
From the very beginning, God calls the people to love not only "insiders" who share their background, citizenship, and heritage, but the "outsiders," aliens, and foreigners who don't. No exceptions. The Torah doesn't make a distinction between "immigrants" who have been living in your town for decades, "foreigners" who moved in last year, or "aliens" who just showed up at the bus stop in the first light of morning today. And, even more significantly, the Torah does not make a distinction between any of those kinds of "outsiders" and the "insiders" of ancient Israel. According to the God who frees the enslaved, you are supposed to love neighbors and aliens (of whatever stripe) alike, the same way you love yourself. The same rights you count on for yourself--are to be extended to everybody else. The same grace and help you rely on to be there for you--is to be given to everyone else. The same respect and common decency you reasonably presume will be shown to you in the course of your day--well, you guessed it, you're called to show to everybody else around. There are no loopholes, and there are no exceptions.
When Jesus comes on the scene, he expects no less of his community of disciples; if anything, this is the default assumption for Jesus and for the Judaism in which he grew up. This is the expectation: we are to show the same love for "Me and My Group" as we do for the folks who get labeled "Those People," because God has loved us all first, and because God has loved us when we were the outsiders in need of a welcome, too. For whatever else we have to say in this coming month about the love of Jesus, we can't escape this starting point: God's love for the world is universal in scope, and that is the basis for our love of others. If you don't like the idea of showing the same quality and consistency of care for neighbors and foreigners that you do to yourself, the Bible advises you to find a different god, because the LORD who set the Hebrews free from slavery and the One who is revealed to us in Jesus leave no room for loopholes, fine print, or exceptions.
And on the other hand, if this vision of expansive love captivates you and gives you hope, well, good news, because we are just getting started. It turns out that the love of Jesus is deeper, richer, wider, and more blessedly weird than we dared to imagine.
And we are only at the beginning.
Lord God, set us free again from all that holds us back from loving all people as we love ourselves.
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