“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind….You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love God. Love your neighbor. Jesus sums up all 613 commandments in the Torah and the Prophets – the Bible that Jesus read – into two basic but essential commandments: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. But while they may be easy to recite – they are not always so easy to do.
In light of what is happening now in Israel and in Gaza, I can’t help but think of the time that I visited Gaza when I was on the St. Olaf Term in the Middle East.
As we approached our Thanksgiving break, Arch Leann, the Professor in charge of the program, asked the students said if we would like to do a service project with the students from Birzeit University? We had been in Israel for two and a half months and had gotten to know the Old city and some of the shopkeepers. But we were eager to meet other students, Palestinian students. Besides, this seemed like a wonderful way to put our faith into action. This would be a way that we could “Love God and Love our Neighbor”. And so it was arranged. We would travel to Gaza, which was then little more than a refuge camp, still patrolled by the Israelis.
The students arrived with a school bus and we all climbed in, eager to meet our new friends. The trip went well – there was much good natured chatter… until we were about to reach the checkpoint. We didn’t understand why, but the Palestinian students asked the blond haired and fair skinned Americans to sit by the windows. We passed through the checkpoint easily.
When we got to Gaza we were assigned homes to go to for dinner and to sleep. The house I was assigned to was simple but clean and after dinner I joined the Palestinian women and girls in one room, and was assigned a mat on the floor in the middle of the girls. The girls did not speak English – but we got by with sign language and I was loving the experience. And isn’t learning about people who are different from you part of what it takes to “Love your neighbor as yourself?” Curled up in soft blankets and surrounded by these new sisters – I wasn’t finding it hard to love my new neighbor.
In the morning the students all gathered back together and were assigned our working groups. Some of the students were going to be working on roofing crews – there were about five groups of two or three of our students and some Palestinian students and some workers who knew what they were doing. About half of us were left and the Palestinian leader told us that we would be going to the graveyard to clean the graves of their martyrs.
I remember thinking this was odd – I thought we were there to do some real work! But who was I to say what was the most important thing was to the Palestinians?
As we were setting out to walk to the graveyard, the Palestinians handed some of us – primarily the young women – like me – signs to carry that were written in Arabic. Oh, it’s a Thanksgiving parade?! But we were guests and so, of course we would join in their parade. And while we walked, there was cheering and singing – all in Arabic of course.
When we got to the cemetery, we found the graves were covered with sand. We were in a desert after all. And, we discovered that we only had one shovel and one bucket. How were we going to clean the graves with one bucket and one shovel. But, again, in the spirit of “loving our neighbor” with American ingenuity, we organized a buck brigade to pass the bucket of sand down the line to remove the sand… in the desert…from the graves of the martyrs.
We didn’t work long however, before we were surrounded by a large group of Palestinians singing and shouting and carrying signs with the pictures of martyrs on them. And then we realized: we weren’t there to clean the graves. We had set the stage for a protest.
Jeeps with Israeli soldiers holding rifles pulled up. The rifles were not set on safety. The soldiers quickly confiscated the identity cards of the Palestinian students and ordered the Americans into the jeeps. They drove the Americans to the edge of the refuge camp – and deposited us on the side of the road. We had no bus. We had no water. We had only half of the students. Oh, and this was before anyone had cell phones. So, we had no way of communicating with the students who were left in Gaza.
Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself. It was getting harder. How do I love my neighbor when they put us in harm’s way?
I think about that time in Gaza now after Hamas has attacked Israel by land, sea and air. Militants have taken innocent people – families – and cruelly murdered some, raped others and taken still others as hostage. This is not loving the neighbor. This is not loving God. And what about Israel – cutting off water and food to ordinary people, the Palestinians families living in Gaza. The stated goal is to destroy Hamas. But since Hamas is embedded in Gaza City, that means destroying everyone else in the city too.
As I write this, the situation is grave. The hospital has been hit and humanitarian aid relief has been promised – but it is too dangerous to get to some parts of the city – like the hospital. The city is in danger of collapse without water or food and it is constantly being bombarded by rockets. There is talk of a ground invasion. By Sunday, when I preach, the situation may have changed – for better or worse. And, unfortunately, it is likely to be worse, much worse.
How do Christian Palestinians who are caught in this struggle between militant Palestinian and angry and now militant Jewish neighbors follow Jesus’ command to love the neighbor as yourself? How do Israelis follow the commands in the Hebrew Bible that Jesus cites? For later in the chapter, the words of Leviticus get even more specific about how to treat the foreigner. Continuing in Leviticus 19 it says, ‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 19: 33-34
Loving the neighbor is sometimes really, really difficult.
Theologian Clayton Schmit writes that part of our difficulty in living into Jesus’ command is our understanding of the word “Love.” We say we love a movie, a dress, or a color. We did an ice cream survey with our Greater St. John neighbors and were surprised to discover that many people love butter pecan. Many of you love chocolate. We say that we love things because we enjoy them, they make us feel good. On a deeper, emotional level, we profess love for our family and friends. This is all good.
But Schmit distinguishes biblical love from a passive or emotional love, writing that in the Old Testament, God’s love is active and this is the love that God asks from us, “the active response of the faithful person to the love of God… To love God with all one’s heart, and soul, and mind, is to choose to respond to God even as God chooses to love us. Feelings and emotions do not enter into the equation.” 1
In the New Testament, Schmit says, love most often “refers to what can be called loving-kindness. It is not passive emotion, but active mercy. It is marked by patience and generosity, again, both acts generated by the one who loves. In short, loving is a choice, not a feeling.”
So, if loving is a choice – not just a feeling or an emotion – that means that even when I do not feel emotionally loving to my neighbors who are fighting and acting in ways that I do not like or support – Jesus still calls on us to choose to love the neighbor.
Jesus never said it would be easy.
After our group was dumped by the side of the road outside the Gaza refugee camp, I watched as my professor worked – for hours – trying to get the bus to return early and to gather all of the American students and the Palestinian students and their identity cards (IDs) – without which they could not work or go to school or travel. negotiate a positive outcome. It wasn’t easy.
The soldiers wanted us to leave as soon as the bus arrived. But Arch refused. He was not going to leave some of his students behind. The American students were unwitting hostages in the negotiation. I say unwitting, because they were told they were being protected from the soldiers and so they needed to hide. But unlike the hostages today, they were treated well and given lunch – which was fortunate because one of the students had diabetes and needed to eat. But the Palestinian students were not willing to let our students go until they had their IDS back and were also allowed to go back on the bus – I think some of them had been thrown in jail.
Through this whole ordeal, our leader Arch maintained a firm but steadfast loving kindness to both the Palestinians and the Israelis with whom he was negotiating. Eventually, through the prayers and dogged determination of Arch that he would not leave until all of the American and Palestinian students and their IDs were safely on the bus, he succeeded.
On the way back to Jerusalem, the Palestinian students were jubilant at being released and having had a rally. They said to us, “See what we go through? See how terrible the soldiers are?” But we American students were silent – we thought we were friends – but we felt used and discouraged. We no longer trusted our Palestinian “friends” but we also saw the poverty and frustration amongst ordinary Palestinians who wanted to live good lives and yet were constantly living in a potential war zone. We also saw how quickly the soldiers moved into conflict mode – even to what had been a peaceful protest. One of my friends noted – did you notice that the soldiers’ guns were not on safety when they escorted us out of Gaza?
Love God and love our neighbors – all of our neighbors. It is not easy to love some of our neighbors – especially in the midst of conflict, war and violence. But Jesus does. And Jesus calls us to follow. Love the neighbor. It’s not an emotion. It’s a choice. And it is one that we cannot do on our own. We need God’s help to love our neighbor and to help our neighbors to love and care for one another. And the way we can do this – even though it seems so little an action at times – is to pray. For God hears our prayers and we know that God not only listens but acts – in love – for all of God’s children.
So let us pray: Loving God, teach us, help us, to love our neighbor. Even when – and especially when – it is hard for us to do. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
October 22, 2023 Faith-Lilac Way Lutheran Church Pastor Pam Stalheim Lane
Clayton Schmit, provost of Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary School of Theology, Lenoir-Rhyne University in Columbia, S.C. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-30/commentary-on-matthew-2234-46-2