Love Thy Neighbor . . . Or Else

Today's gospel passage, for those of us who use the BCP lectionary, was from the Gospel according to Matthew. One of the lines from that passage was the following:

`You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'

This passage describes when Jesus was quizzed by the Pharisees in one of their attempts to trap him into betraying himself as a false prophet or an enemy of the state. They had asked Jesus what is the greatest of the commandments. In response, Jesus names two commandments, equating the commandment admonishing folks to love their neighbors to the commandment to love God with one's whole heart, mind and soul.

This is (I believe) a fairly well known passage from the New Testament, and I'm sure I've read and heard it read many times. What struck me today, as this lesson was being preached on by Sarah+, the assistant rector at my parish, was the tidbit of linguistic information she shared with those of us in th pews. In this passage, the word for love that Matthew uses is the Greek word "agapo," which describes the love a human would feel for God. This is opposed to the Greek "philos," a word for love more akin to human-human neighborly or brotherly love.

Think about this for a second. Jesus is telling us that the greatest commandments are, essentially, to love God and our neighbors in the same way. I don't know that I'm capable of such an undertaking.

I mean, it's easy to love God, right? God sits somewhere upon high, being all majestic and omniscient. God doesn't sit next to me on the train and talk too loudly on a cell phone, or cut me off in traffic, or take too long at the automated check-out line at the grocery store (like it's so complicated to use!) Sure, there's the little things, like everything I every prayed for that never happened, or all the things I prayed against that did happen (2004 NCSU vs. Vanderbilt NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Second Round game? Ring a bell up there? HMM???) But I understand that the point of prayer is not to get things or to change the natural course of events. I'm therefore not so much annoyed with God as much as I am left wondering how the eventualities unfolding around me relate to God's master plan for the world, which I am not supposed to understand anyway.

Right now, right here, I'm left with this dilemma of trying to love all the annoying people around me with the same sort of love I feel towards God. Maybe the secret to living into this calling is to accept that people around me are going to do things I don't want them to do, and will fail to do things I want them to do. Perhaps this ties in to God's master plan out of whose loop I am blissfully kept. Maybe when my neighbor steals my newspaper, he or she is protecting me from seeing some bit of discomfiting news. That guy who crossed the street against the light in front of me and made me slam on my brakes to avoid hitting him? A neccessary stimulus to test my brakes and ensure my continued safety (they felt not at all mushy, thank you very much.)

Don't get me wrong. I love lots of people. There are some people I even love in a similar way as I love God. But there are some people I decidedly do not love. I can only name a few people I actively HATE, but there's a pretty wide gulf between agapo love and bitter hatred. (The divide between hate and passionate love, as we all know, is much more like a hairline fracture.) That means there's a whole bunch of people who lie somewhere in that chasm between me loving them to pieces and just wishing they would spontaneously combust, and now I have to move them all into the agapo love column, just like that.

The good news is this -- it takes too much energy to dislike people, far more energy than I have and more time than I am willing to invest. Keeping that in mind, and with the awareness that the stress of actively disliking people invariably leads to wrinkles, my course is clear. Look for a newer, happier, more agapo-crazy Harold to hit the mean streets of Chicago in the very near future.

Just try not to piss me off.