It is a deep question, impossible to answer completely yet ever-beckoning our thought: How are the two great commandments connected to each other? In the four decades since I was made a deacon, I have often returned to this question. In recent years the strangeness of God’s love has borne itself upon me, and what I now think is that we need to see the two commandments not as linked in us but, rather, as linked in God himself. To put my thesis in a sentence: We are able to love God and to love our neighbor because God has loved us by making himself our neighbor.
I will lay this out in four thoughts.
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For my book On Friendship: The Heart of Being Human, I did a study of the word love in the Bible. My presuppositions were, first, to trust that the order of the canonical text is significant for understanding, and second, that this is worth doing even by a fellow largely ignorant of Hebrew. (My late professor Boyce Bennett would put me among those who will need an interpreter in heaven!) What I found was that the Bible does not start with love, and it seems slow to get to it. One does not find the word love in the creation stories. Genesis does not say God loved the world that he made or that he made the world out of love; it does not say God loved the man and the woman in the garden. We do not find love in the stories of Abraham, except once—but the context in which it appears is such as to place a giant question mark in the middle of what love is. It is the first time that the word love appears in the Bible. God tells Abraham to take “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (Gen. 22:2).
Perhaps as a result of this experience, Isaac had a greater need for love than any person before him. When he takes Rebekah to be his wife we are told “he loved her” (24:67), the second appearance of the word love in the Bible. Not much later we are told he loved his elder son: “Isaac loved Esau … but Rebekah loved Jacob” (25:28)—love here being a source of discord. Finally, unlike anyone before him, Isaac also is said to love food, namely “savory meat” (27:4, 9, 14)—a love which betrays him in the famous deception scene.
This problematic character of love persists as we move through Genesis. Jacob loves Rachel but not Leah and that leads to grave discord among his sons. Shechem, an outsider, loves Dinah, daughter of Jacob, and that leads to bloody violence. On it goes. The Book of Genesis is hesitant to speak of love; it knows love only as something between humans (except for Isaac’s unfortunate love of savory meat); and it presents love as a source of strife or a sign of blindness. Nowhere in Genesis is love connected with God.
The first inkling that we humans might be able to love God comes in Exodus. When God gives the commandment not to make graven images, he says he will show “mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments” (Ex. 20:6). Those words presume that it is possible to love God, and that a large number, “thousands,” will do so. But after this single verse, there is nothing more about human love for God, and there is nothing at all of God loving anything until we get to Deuteronomy. There, finally, Moses tells the Israelites, summarizing their 40 years in the wilderness and some 500 years of their history, that God chose them “because he loved thy fathers” (4:37). Not long thereafter, Moses states the command, here given for the first time in human history, to “love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (6:5).
So, first thought: the Bible is cautious and hesitant, slow to speak of human love and supremely hesitant about the love of God.
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Second thought: We are misled by the lawyer in Luke 10 who, having received Jesus’ approval for his summarization of the law in terms of loving God and neighbor, immediately asks “Who is my neighbor?” He asks this, Luke tells us, because he sought to justify himself. To address the lawyer’s question, Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan. And although it is a justly famous story, one can wonder what would have happened if the lawyer had not been interested in self-justification. What if he had asked instead about the first commandment, “How can I love God?” And what if he had asked what the commandment implies—what if he had asked, “How can God love me?”
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Third thought: As theologians as different as Robert Jenson and Herbert McCabe would tell us—or as we can figure out just by thinking—before you can love people, you need to talk with them. Real love involves relationship; one of the conditions of relationship is that there be communication.
There is no reason to assume that we can communicate with our creator. God could have made us and never spoken to us. If you make a chair, and then you start talking to your chair and you want your chair to talk back to you—this isn’t love, this is the stuff that gets you checked into an institution. Yet in fact, according to what the Bible shows us, God having made the world then wanted to communicate with the world. So he started speaking. God’s speaking goes back to the garden of creation. Thereafter, he kept speaking. Abraham has particular importance, because (in the matter of Sodom and Gomorrah) God put himself on Abraham’s level, telling him about his plans and thus sharing with him what it means to care for people and to judge. From the perspective of the future, which Moses takes in Deuteronomy when he says, “God loved your fathers,” we can discern that God in fact did love Abraham and Sarah and all the forebears of the people of Israel—because he talked with them.
I can love God—you, dear reader, can love God—because God has spoken to us. Implicit in God’s speech to us is that he wants to love us.
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The fourth and final thought comes from the Good Samaritan story. There was a man beaten, robbed, left for dead on the side of the road. Some people pass him by; one man, a Samaritan, stops. Although this story was prompted by the lawyer’s question (“Who is my neighbor?”) Jesus ends the story with a different question. He asks, “Who proved himself a neighbor?” By making this significant change, Jesus directs us not to ponder who is our neighbor but “How can I be neighbor, how can I prove myself a neighbor?” A further question we might ask is, “Who has done this? Who, in human history, has proven himself a neighbor?”
God did not ask himself, “Who is my neighbor?” God did not try to figure out who was his neighbor. He couldn’t—the creator has no neighbors; only creatures have neighbors. But he did set himself the task of proving himself a neighbor to us.
It is the hardest question, “How can God love me?” Although the lawyer did not ask this question, we do: in the night’s chill fever, feeling the weight of guilt, feeling our vast difference from God. We know we cannot measure up to God. We feel no one will ever love us, certainly not someone who is good like God. “I am a sinner, Lord, with dark thoughts and evil desires; and the things I’ve done! Do you really want to talk to me, to look at me?”
How can God love me? I’m like a beat-up guy, I’ve been tossed out, I’m on the side of the road, I’m on the way to the grave.
Yet it happened: God arranged it that he would come over beside us. He arranged to put healing oil on our wounds. He made provision for our care. He went away, but he promised to return. On the lips of Jesus, the Good Samaritan story (in addition to all the other things it is about) is about Jesus himself, God in the flesh, God who has pulled up beside us.
By becoming the neighbor, God loved us and made it possible for us to love him and to love our neighbor. And when he returns, he will be our neighbor forever.
The Rev. Victor Lee Austin, Ph.D. is theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. He is the author of several books including Up with Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish As Human Beings (T&T Clark, 2010).
