Caring for the ‘Hood – Dennis Ormseth reflects on loving all that God loves.
Care for Creation Commentary on the Revised Common Lectionary
Readings for Sunday October 23-29, Year A (2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023, 2026)
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
Psalm 1
I Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
“‘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. And a second is like it; ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37-39)
Coming as it does at the end of a block of narrative in which the conflict between Jesus and his opponents over his mission and his authority is brought to the fever pitch that leads to his death, this saying, the so-called “double commandment to love,” constitutes something of an epitome of both Jesus’ teaching and his practice. Citing both Moses and the holiness code from Leviticus, Jesus demonstrates his loyalty to the faith of Israel and thus silences his critics. Again we have an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of care of creation in the mission of Jesus, if we can show the connection of this saying to that concern.
To love the neighbor requires love of their ecological neighborhood.
We have previously given attention to the second half of the saying, concerning love of neighbor, most recently in our comment on the texts for Lectionary 23. With reference to Paul’s ethical counsel in Romans 13:9-10, we asked, “Can one imagine that one could love a neighbor, doing the neighbor no wrong, as Paul specifies, without also caring for the ‘hood’ in which the neighbor lives?”
“Care for the neighborhood as an essential aspect of love of neighbor,” we urged, “encompasses all aspects of the web of relationships, natural no less than social, economic, and political.” We refer the reader to that discussion, and turn to what happens to be the more important and decisive matter of the first half of the saying, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all your mind.”
Love for God involves loving all that God loves.
In a recent discussion of the biblical meaning of love, Michael Welker makes the key points that are needed here. “If we take the time to compare the numerous statements about love in the biblical traditions,” he writes, “we are first struck by the multitude of ‘relations’ that cause them to speak of ‘love.’” Contrary to what he regards in contemporary discussions of love as “captivity of thought” to a “paradigmatic concentration on the affective person-to-person relation,” Welker argues that “[a]part from the great variety of ‘love relations’ in the biblical traditions it is striking that for centuries the love of God is strictly connected to the respect for and “attention to the commandments” or to the ‘holding fast to God’s word. Correspondingly, ‘to love God’s name’ and ‘to serve God’ (Isaiah 56:6) can be connected.’ . . . The ‘love of God’ . . quite obviously also means to take up and pursue God’s intentions as they pertain to the good order and the well-being of creation in general.” Love of God, he urges with specific reference to the saying of Matthew 22:37,
“. . . includes, and even opens up, law-abiding and loving relationships to the world, to fellow human beings, and even to other fellow creatures, according to God’s intentions. The so-called ‘double commandment of love’ should thus not be regarded as a combination of two different basic relations, but as a strict connection that says something important about the biblical understanding of love in general” (Michael Welker, “Romantic Love, Covenantal Love, Kenotic Love,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorn. LaVergne, TN: Wm. B. Eerdmans-Lightning Source, 2001, pp. 130-31).
The “love God loves with and wants to be loved with” is both revealed in Jesus and made available to us through him as a power with which we, too, can love the creation.
Covenantal love dignifies our role as God’s partners in tending creation.
Love in this perspective takes two forms, covenantal love and kenotic love. Both are of crucial significance for the care of creation. The covenantal form of love, Welker stipulates,
“. . . bestows a great dignity on human beings. They are dignified to take up and pursue God’s intentions in relation to creation, God’s interests in the well being of creation. They are dignified to reveal God’s will and God’s plans for creation. And they are dignified to work toward the fulfillment of the divine creative, sustaining, and transforming agency. No less is expressed in the notion of the imago Dei” (Welker, p. 133).
But given the great “weight of love” thus conferred on human beings—“For who could claim that he or she could respond to this calling and take care of God’s intentions for the creation? Who could claim to participate in God’s strength and being?” (Welker)—, God also “unconditionally turns to creatures in order to liberate them out of the depths of confusion, lostness, and sin, to win them for the coming reign of God, and to ennoble them to the experience and enactment of God’s love, something they can only experience and enact as a new creation.”
Kenotic love is God’s burning passion of all living things in themselves.
In this kenotic form of love, God reveals God’s own “burning passion for creatures” in themselves, and “not just for their suitability to the divine plan for the world.” This love involves “a passionate interest in the otherness of the other, a passionate interest in letting the other unfold himself-herself in freedom, a passionate interest to pave ways for the unfolding of his-or-her life, all are characteristic of kenotic love.” Not just a matter of curiosity, this love
“. . . seeks to win the other for a new life in a new creation. The kenotic love of God seeks a new covenantal relationship—without boundaries, without exclusion, but with the divine purpose to win the beloved one for participation in the divine life and in the divine plans for creation. The life of Christ offers guidance to help us become familiar with these plans” (Welker, p. 134).
How can we—Christians and congregations—not love and care for creation?
With this assertion we profoundly agree, in light of our course of discovery of such guidance in our comments on the readings for Year A of the lectionary. We can perhaps sum up his argument this way: If love of neighborhood is inherent in love of neighbor, so also is love for God’s creation inherent in love for God. To love God is to respect God’s work of love, the whole creation. It is to love what God loves, with the love with which God wants it to be loved, the love which is ours in and through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. This love can be exercised most directly and effectively in relationship to one’s neighbor and the ‘hood’ that we and our neighbors share. Surely it belongs to the practice of every Christian congregation to demonstrate to the community surrounding it that this is very much what Christian faith is about.
Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2011.
dennisormseth@gmail.com