Matthew 5. 45: be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous.
I am not going to speak about our readings this mornong; a little while ago, a friend in the congregation asked me if I would preach about Christian love, and I am fulfilling my promise to do so today. God is love and made us originally in his image, so that we have a natural disposition to love. But also, Jesus told us we ought to love God and our neighbour; so that for all Christians love is an obligation. It’s a must, and that means it doesn’t necessarily produce a glow. Only a few people get worked up about God; and that isn’t what Jesus was talking about. As for our neighbour, the suggestion that our love should be comprehensive implies that it should be undiscriminating, and that immediately strikes us as not at all the kind of thing we go in for. We are generally encouraged by the media today to think of love as a spontaneous emotion, independent of the will. Thus, the most admired version is love at first sight. I do not believe that Christian love is an emotion at all; indeed, I think it has everything to do with the will. Jesus wanted us to choose to love God and our neighbour. That implies something very different from romance.
As I understand it, loving God means wanting to behave as he would wish. It is a matter of aligning ourselves with his will as far as we can comprehend it and of deepening that comprehension in every way we can. Loving God does not require us to think beautiful thoughts about him. You understand, I do not object to beautiful thoughts; I just don’t regard them as a vital part of Christianity, and I believe that all that ‘Bride of Christ’ scenario is not about religion but sex, though I am not objecting to sex either. If we are to love God with the kind of determination I am talking about, we need the assistance of the Holy Spirit. In the end we shall find that it is God working in us who helps us to understand what he wants us to do and gives us the strength to do it. To take a practical example, we shall not persist in a programme of daily prayer unless we begin by seeking aid from God. We shall not live in accordance with Christian principles unless we give God the kind of serious attention which, for me, represents Christian love.
If the love of God is dependant on God’s help, how much more dependant on him we are in trying to love our neighbour. This is in part because relations with human beings always have a personal content. Emotion we cannot control often gets in the way. We are so made that our day to day contacts with strangers are frequently governed by instinctive reactions, while our relatives and friends have an infinite capacity for calling forth responses contrary to our intentions. Again, we shall go wrong if we believe we have to start by reforming our feelings. We need to redirect our wills first, and we cannot do so without the help of God. It is easy enough to appear considerate to strangers. It is more difficult actually to consider the interests of our acquaintances. People we know well are by definition not the same as us and can be infuriating in so many ways; just because we are familiar with their inevitable quirks and eccentricities, they require more forgiveness and thoughtfulness.
When we get to our enemies, then we need God most. We need God to remind us that young men who blow themselves up on public transport in hopes of killing people are ordinary human beings, even though they are wrong. They are not despicable, even though they are criminal; they are killing themselves and others in support of their ideals, however much we may disagree with them. They are human beings for whom Christ died. I had to think about this a lot when I was personally, for three years and more, in danger of assassination by political fanatics. I do not want to mislead you. I think they are mistaken and wicked. But that is no reason why we should not pray for them, and no reason why we should not examine their grievances with care and urge our Government to consider them. God sends his sun and rain on us all. The real problem about Christian love, I think, is that it is so uncomfortable and frustrating to have to be considerate to everyone. It feels much more natural to let our feelings run free, to enjoy a good gossip, to tell a damaging story at the expense of someone we know, to make a cutting remark, even to withhold a kindness from someone we do not care for. We have to ask God to overcome the weakness of our nature if he is to strengthen our will to love everyone.
And we have to be good all the time. In fact, the only way to bear the demands of Christian love is to make it an automatic response. If you can manage, with the help of God, to make it a habit continually to treat God with as much consideration as you devote to the people around you, and to consider them all the time, I believe it will gradually become engrained. I do not assert that you will become saintly. The task is too far contrary to our natural instincts for that. I am sure you can still shock yourself with unthinking antagonisms. It is at least an advance to be able to recognize where we are going wrong and not to indulge our baser instincts automatically. But patience, an honest self-reckoning, a constant willingness to forgive and to be forgiven, can become a habit as much as self-indulgence can. All it needs is for us to turn round and, with the help of God, to choose a different direction, which is what the Bible means when it talks about repentance.
Amen A C G