How Much I Love You
Commentary
Young children are often fascinated by the effort to quantify love. As they become conceptually acquainted with the difference between a lot and a little, and as they are exposed to various units of measurement for size and volume and distance, they naturally begin to apply that mentality to all sorts of things, including the most important thing in life: love. They want to be able to measure it. Typically, they want to know how much their parents love them, and they want to try to give expression to how much they love their parents.
Quite an assortment of children's books explore this phenomenon and interest of childhood. The parent and child characters in those books, whether they are human beings or animals, share with one another the language of love in terms of how big, how much, how far, and such. They express measures of love. And I have found myself having those same kinds of conversations with each of my own children during their younger years; they, too, have shown that impulse to try to measure love.
And I expect we never entirely outgrow that. As adults, we no longer think that love can be quantified in terms of inches or ounces. We may sometimes fall into the fallacy, however, of thinking that it can be measured in dollars. And we instinctively know that it is often measured — or at least expressed — in minutes and hours, in days and years. Indeed, perhaps our favorite adult measurement for love is time; for in our romantic moments, we say that we’ll love this person forever, and in our sober vows we pledge to love for the rest of our lives.
Our three assigned texts for this week invite us into that theme of measuring love. It is inadequately vague, you see, simply to command love or to pledge love. We still need some way to quantify it or to make it tangible. And each of the selected passages helps us to do that.
The passages are of quite different types. From the Old Testament, we have the sweeping introduction to the story of Ruth. The assigned epistle speaks of the superiority of Christ. And the gospel pericope comes out of the efforts of the Jewish leaders to challenge and perhaps even trap Jesus. They are disparate passages, yet out of them we gain some insight into how we might measure love.
Ruth 1:1-18
It has been my good fortune to have spent my whole life in the church. I was raised in a Christian home, and our church was home away from home for me. Over the years, I have attended more worship services, Bible studies, prayer meetings, Christian festivals, and fellowship events than I could begin to count. It is blessing upon blessing, and I'm grateful to God for it all!
Across those countless gatherings of God's people, I've had opportunity to hear a lot of testimonies. Sometimes they have common in the form of more formal presentations from a pulpit; other times they have been impromptu sharings in a small group setting. But whatever the form or setting, they have been personal stories of what God has done in individuals' lives.
And as I reflect on the many testimonies I've heard, I am struck by this pattern: most testimonies begin with troubles. Whether it's chapter 1 or chapter 2, most stories of God's work in our lives have early in the narrative some sort of trouble. Trouble is the context for the saving work of God.
The story of Ruth is a testimony. It's not written in the first person, and we can give more thought to that in a moment, but it is a story of God's provident, saving, and redeeming work. Yet see where it begins. The story of the book of Ruth begins with trouble. Indeed, all kinds of trouble!
If we focus our attention just on Naomi for the first chapter of the book, we encounter an almost Job-like character. She and her family are hounded by famine so that they are forced to become refugees in a foreign land. Then she loses her husband, leaving her a widow. In that time and place, women depended primarily on men for what we would think of as financial support, and so widows were often poor. Fortunately for Naomi, she had two adult sons who could support her; but then both of them died, as well. Now she was bereft and destitute, left with two foreign daughters-in-law and unable to support any of them.
When Naomi prepared to return to her home a decade later, therefore, see what a different woman she was. She had left Bethlehem with her husband and sons. Now she returned as the only survivor of her original family. And while she has with her a devoted daughter-in-law, they have no prospects between them. The first chapter of the book of Ruth is the natural first chapter of a testimony, for the story begins with so much trouble. And trouble is the setting where God does his saving and redemptive work!
We noted above that, while the Book of Ruth has the quality of a testimony, it is not written in the first person. Perhaps a good reason for that is found in the fact that we might be hard pressed to identify just whose testimony it would be. We’ve focused our attention on Naomi, and surely it reads like her story. But we might just as easily think through the troubles and the blessings from Ruth’s point of view. And the events of the Book of Ruth might also be the story that Boaz would share as his testimony, as well. Such is so often the lovely nature of the work of God, is it not? He does not merely work providently in one life alone, but in many lives in profoundly interconnected ways.
Meanwhile, we are not assigned to preach on the whole story of the Book of Ruth this week — just the opening chapter. But we know the rest of the story. And that is sufficient for us to preach to our people the truth — the reassuring and encouraging truth — that testimonies typically begin in trouble. And if that is where this or that person in your pews finds themselves this Sunday, they may take comfort from the troubled first chapter of the Book of Ruth.
Hebrews 9:11-14
Our epistle lection is brief, but packed. Indeed, these four verses go to the very heart of the message of Hebrews. And, as such, they go to the heart of the gospel message.
I have sometimes compared the letter (if it can be called a letter) to the Hebrews to a kind of German to English dictionary. In other words, it takes something new and unfamiliar and translates it into what is already native and known. So it may be that the original audience for this piece were Jewish Christians, who had cut their teeth on the Old Testament law and the rituals and holy days of the temple. That was the stuff that was native and familiar to them. And then the writer of Hebrews helped them understand the good news of Jesus Christ in those terms that they already knew and understood.
The modern American church audience, of course, is in quite the opposite place. For many of the people in our pews, the stuff of the tabernacle, high priest, Day of Atonement, and such is only vaguely familiar, at best. And so we may have an additional layer of translating that we need to do when we preach from Hebrews.
The bottom line in Hebrews in general — and in our passage in particular — is that God had established a way of relating to his people under the old covenant. But it turns out that the elements which defined that covenant relationship were not permanent or perfect. Instead, they were a foreshadowing of what was to come. They were the foundation upon which the perfect and complete covenant relationship was to be built.
The first connection made in our passage is the principle that Jesus has become our great high priest. Again, this is potentially meaningless to people for whom “high priest” is not a critical factor in life. But the Old Testament, people of God understood that the high priest was a human intermediary — one who went into the very presence of God on their behalf in order to make atonement for the people. If that need and role have been fixed in your mind and experience for your whole life, then the news that Christ has become our perfect and final high priest proves to be beautifully good and meaningful news.
Then the author makes a platonic sort of connection between the earthly tent and the heavenly reality that it represents. The Levitical high priest performed his duties annually in a tent that was constructed by human hands and staked out in the dusty wilderness. But Christ performed his atoning work once and for all, and it is in effect in the truly holy place and the genuine presence of God.
Finally, the author makes a connection involving blood. One can hardly read Leviticus without being struck by the preponderance of blood. Everywhere you look, it seems, blood is being shed, poured out, sprinkled, and applied. Blood purifies, blood sanctifies, and we are told again and again that the life is in the blood.
Ah, but not all blood is equal.
We understand that, of course, when applied to other things. Not all wine is equally good to drink. Not all water is equally desirable for bathing in. Not all oil is of the same quality. And so, too, the writer of Hebrews wants us to understand that not all blood is equally efficacious.
Under the old covenant, the very human and inadequate high priest carried into the dusty, earthly tent the ordinary blood of goats and calves. But see what an astonishingly different high priest Christ is, for he offers his own blood — his own precious blood. And so our atonement is accomplished perfectly and eternally.
At every turn, therefore, we see that the elements of the new covenant are superior to the old. Not that the old was a bad thing; it served its purpose for its time. But “how much more” is the will of God accomplished for us and in us by the new covenant which is mediated by Jesus Christ!
Mark 12:28-34
There’s a famous story from Jewish rabbinic lore. Both Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai were asked to teach the law of God to a Gentile while standing on one leg. The idea, you see, was to be able to sum it all up. How could one succinctly capture the whole of God’s law for someone completely unfamiliar with it? According to the story, Rabbi Hillel offered the golden rule as the summation of the law, while the rest of the law serves as commentary on that golden rule. Rabbi Shammai, by contrast, chased the questioner away.
Hillel and Shammai were contemporaries, and both were prominent rabbis in Palestine just a generation or so before the time of Jesus. It may well be, therefore, that the legendary story recalled above was known to both Jesus and the scribe who made the inquiry recorded in our Gospel lection. Yet while many scholars have explored parallels between Hillel and Jesus, we observe that their responses to the sum-it-all-up questions posed to them were substantively different.
Hillel’s answer is sound, to be sure. It resonates with something that Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12). Still, Jesus’ response to this particular question in Mark 12 (as well as (Matthew 22:34—40 and Luke 10:25—28 ) goes beyond the golden rule in crucial ways.
First, we observe that Jesus frames the answer in terms of love. That is not the “summary” that many American Christians would give to the Old Testament law. Yet that was Jesus’ own take on it: that the fulfillment of the law is to love. And so we are reminded that the heart of God, from beginning to end of scripture, is a reflection of his nature, his quintessential attribute.
Second, we note that Jesus is asked for one commandment, but he gives two. Is that just bonus material — a sort of “BOGO” deal? Is it a failure to answer the question? Is it indecisiveness? No, but rather it strikes me as an affirmation that you cannot have one without the other.
I am reminded of an experience I had building some storage shelves in our garage. Before I would permanently attach a shelf to an upright, I broke out a level in order to make sure that both pieces — both the vertical post and the horizontal shelf — were straight. And this, it seems to me, is what is involved in a whole and healthy Christian life: both the vertical and the horizontal need to be properly in place.
The vertical pertains to our relationship with God, while the horizontal pertains to our relationships with other human beings. We recall that the Ten Commandments seem to be organized with both axes in view. And surely a review of the hundreds of commandments that make up the Old Testament law would reveal instructions that apply to both directions.
Life becomes impoverished when an individual or group live at one level only and neglect the other. One senses, for example, that the Pharisees (and they have had many companions in this throughout church history) were piously attentive to the vertical concerns of life, but did not reliably do right by their fellow man. In our present culture, however, the imbalance is quite the opposite. We are practically obsessed with measuring all human behavior by how it affects others, while giving no thought to the will of a holy God.
Hillel’s answer — the so-called golden rule — is a solely horizontal standard. It gives consideration only to the you-and-me axis. But that lacks the crucial vertical element of our love for God. And Jesus’ answer — which is succinct enough to be expressed while standing on one leg! — reminds us that to build a right and sturdy Christian life requires that both the vertical and horizontal components are as they should be.
Application
The Old Testament people of God had a convenient method for measuring things. They used the cubit, which is generally thought to have been the distance from the elbow to the tip of one’s middle finger. This was not a precise or universal unit of measurement, to be sure, but it was handy, for you always had it with you. You might not always have a tape measure in your pocket, but you’ve always got a cubit up your sleeve!
In a sense, the Old Testament law offered a similarly convenient method for measuring love. “As yourself.” That was the Levitical command, which Jesus quoted in our Gospel lection: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” That’s handy, you see, in much the same way as the cubit, for every individual has one, and you always have it with you.
To love my neighbor as I love myself is a high bar, and it is not what comes naturally to us. The natural human reflex is simply to love in response. That is to say, it is the people who love me well that I am also inclined to love well. It does not come naturally, however, to love well the people who neglect or disappoint or criticize or oppose. Yet I am not called to love them as they love me, but to love them as I love myself.
As measurements go, this sort of love is a tall order, indeed. After all, when I think of how concerned I am about my own needs, my own feelings, my own preferences, it would be truly generous for me to be equally concerned about your needs, your feelings, and your preferences. If I walk through life loving each neighbor that way, I will be loving well.
Meanwhile, there is a different love commandment that Jesus also cited in our assigned gospel passage. Indeed, it is the commandment that he called the first and the greatest of all the commandments: to love God. And how much shall we love him? With all that we are and with everything we’ve got.
On the one hand, that sounds impossible. How can a person love that much? How can a person give their whole selves like that? And yet, on the other hand, we know that this is also love’s best and most natural instinct. For real love, you see, doesn’t hold back. Love nature is not to be a halfway sort of thing. When we think of the people in our lives whom we love most and best, we know that on a scale of 1 to 10, we’d never say that our love is a 5. Love wants to be all in, and scripture says that that is precisely how we are to love God.
And that sort of all-in love is exactly what we see in our other two assigned texts.
The story of Ruth begins as the story of Naomi, and Naomi’s story is a manifestly unhappy one. She herself gives voice to her unhappy fate when she tells her townspeople to name her “Bitter.” The first chapter of the book of Ruth catalogs the tragedies of Naomi’s circumstances, and the only bright spot within that chapter is Ruth’s love for her mother-in-law. And it is that love, in the end, that turns the whole story from a terribly sad one to a marvelously happy one.
And just how much did Ruth love Naomi? All in! She would devotedly stay with Naomi, and she would make Naomi’s land, Naomi’s people, and Naomi’s God her own.
Finally, there in our text from Hebrews is the ultimate embodiment of love. The author of that New Testament book writes of Christ’s self-sacrifice. And as we begin to see the magnitude of his sacrifice, we see, too, the magnitude of his love. How can we measure Christ’s love? In terms of distance, it made the trip from heaven to earth, from equality with God to babe in a manger, from throne to cross. When we see the all-in quality of his love for us, the logic of the command that we should be all-in in our love for God makes that much more sense. And we discover that, in this instance, it works well for us to follow our natural reflex and to love the other in response to how he has loved us!
Alternative Application(s)
Ruth 1:1-18 — “Uncertain Future”
The three women came to a kind of fork in the road. They were all living in Moab at the time, which was home for two of them: young widows named Orpah and Ruth. It was not home, however, for the other woman. Naomi was an older widow who had moved to Moab because of a famine in her own land. Now she had determined to return home, to Bethlehem in Judah, and she was saying goodbye to these her Moabite daughters-in-law.
Naomi reasonably expected that “home” would be everyone’s choice. She would go home, and they would stay home. That made sense. But the daughters-in-law were reluctant to say goodbye. They wanted to stay with Naomi.
It’s always a sweet and poignant scene when love hangs on, when affection results in long and reluctant goodbyes. But Naomi reasoned with the young women, urging them to stay home. They had more of a future, she insisted, by staying in Moab than by hitching their wagons to her.
Naomi’s was a perfectly plausible argument. And it represents the sort of calculation that human beings are making all the time. Which choice will work out better for me? Which fork in the road will lead to a better future? Naomi didn’t have much hope for her own future, but she reckoned it should be in her homeland. Meanwhile, she coveted the best possible future for her daughters-in-law, and she was certain it would be found in their homeland.
Ruth did not dispute Naomi’s reasoning. She didn’t really make a counter argument. But out of sheer love and devotion, she chose to take the other fork in the road. Orpah stayed in Moab — the sensible choice — but Ruth traveled to the foreign territory of Judah with her mother-in-law Naomi.
We don’t know anything about Orpah from that moment on. Whatever her future featured, it is lost to us. But Ruth — Ruth is different. The whole world knows Ruth’s story. And her future proved not only to be blessed and fulfilling in a personal way; we know that it was also impactful in a national, global, and eternal way!
Does it always work out that way? Probably not. But Ruth’s profile is not unique in scripture. Imagine, for example, how time would have erased the memory of that nobody from Ur, Abram, if he had chosen a more reasonable path and hadn’t pulled up stakes to follow God’s call. Imagine Moses simply living and dying as a shepherd in Midian, having declined the invitation at the burning bush. Or consider the difference between the unknown but predictable future of the rich young ruler who made the sensible choice compared to Peter and company who made the choice of loving and devoted discipleship.
The future is always uncertain for human beings. Sometimes we can kid ourselves into thinking that we can control it or predict it, but the reality is that the future remains beyond both our vision and our reach. When we come to a fork in the road, therefore, and consider the best possible future for ourselves, we do well to consider Ruth, Orpah, and others. If we know God’s will or call, that’s the choice to make. And if we don’t, then doing the most loving thing seems to be the way to go.
Quite an assortment of children's books explore this phenomenon and interest of childhood. The parent and child characters in those books, whether they are human beings or animals, share with one another the language of love in terms of how big, how much, how far, and such. They express measures of love. And I have found myself having those same kinds of conversations with each of my own children during their younger years; they, too, have shown that impulse to try to measure love.
And I expect we never entirely outgrow that. As adults, we no longer think that love can be quantified in terms of inches or ounces. We may sometimes fall into the fallacy, however, of thinking that it can be measured in dollars. And we instinctively know that it is often measured — or at least expressed — in minutes and hours, in days and years. Indeed, perhaps our favorite adult measurement for love is time; for in our romantic moments, we say that we’ll love this person forever, and in our sober vows we pledge to love for the rest of our lives.
Our three assigned texts for this week invite us into that theme of measuring love. It is inadequately vague, you see, simply to command love or to pledge love. We still need some way to quantify it or to make it tangible. And each of the selected passages helps us to do that.
The passages are of quite different types. From the Old Testament, we have the sweeping introduction to the story of Ruth. The assigned epistle speaks of the superiority of Christ. And the gospel pericope comes out of the efforts of the Jewish leaders to challenge and perhaps even trap Jesus. They are disparate passages, yet out of them we gain some insight into how we might measure love.
Ruth 1:1-18
It has been my good fortune to have spent my whole life in the church. I was raised in a Christian home, and our church was home away from home for me. Over the years, I have attended more worship services, Bible studies, prayer meetings, Christian festivals, and fellowship events than I could begin to count. It is blessing upon blessing, and I'm grateful to God for it all!
Across those countless gatherings of God's people, I've had opportunity to hear a lot of testimonies. Sometimes they have common in the form of more formal presentations from a pulpit; other times they have been impromptu sharings in a small group setting. But whatever the form or setting, they have been personal stories of what God has done in individuals' lives.
And as I reflect on the many testimonies I've heard, I am struck by this pattern: most testimonies begin with troubles. Whether it's chapter 1 or chapter 2, most stories of God's work in our lives have early in the narrative some sort of trouble. Trouble is the context for the saving work of God.
The story of Ruth is a testimony. It's not written in the first person, and we can give more thought to that in a moment, but it is a story of God's provident, saving, and redeeming work. Yet see where it begins. The story of the book of Ruth begins with trouble. Indeed, all kinds of trouble!
If we focus our attention just on Naomi for the first chapter of the book, we encounter an almost Job-like character. She and her family are hounded by famine so that they are forced to become refugees in a foreign land. Then she loses her husband, leaving her a widow. In that time and place, women depended primarily on men for what we would think of as financial support, and so widows were often poor. Fortunately for Naomi, she had two adult sons who could support her; but then both of them died, as well. Now she was bereft and destitute, left with two foreign daughters-in-law and unable to support any of them.
When Naomi prepared to return to her home a decade later, therefore, see what a different woman she was. She had left Bethlehem with her husband and sons. Now she returned as the only survivor of her original family. And while she has with her a devoted daughter-in-law, they have no prospects between them. The first chapter of the book of Ruth is the natural first chapter of a testimony, for the story begins with so much trouble. And trouble is the setting where God does his saving and redemptive work!
We noted above that, while the Book of Ruth has the quality of a testimony, it is not written in the first person. Perhaps a good reason for that is found in the fact that we might be hard pressed to identify just whose testimony it would be. We’ve focused our attention on Naomi, and surely it reads like her story. But we might just as easily think through the troubles and the blessings from Ruth’s point of view. And the events of the Book of Ruth might also be the story that Boaz would share as his testimony, as well. Such is so often the lovely nature of the work of God, is it not? He does not merely work providently in one life alone, but in many lives in profoundly interconnected ways.
Meanwhile, we are not assigned to preach on the whole story of the Book of Ruth this week — just the opening chapter. But we know the rest of the story. And that is sufficient for us to preach to our people the truth — the reassuring and encouraging truth — that testimonies typically begin in trouble. And if that is where this or that person in your pews finds themselves this Sunday, they may take comfort from the troubled first chapter of the Book of Ruth.
Hebrews 9:11-14
Our epistle lection is brief, but packed. Indeed, these four verses go to the very heart of the message of Hebrews. And, as such, they go to the heart of the gospel message.
I have sometimes compared the letter (if it can be called a letter) to the Hebrews to a kind of German to English dictionary. In other words, it takes something new and unfamiliar and translates it into what is already native and known. So it may be that the original audience for this piece were Jewish Christians, who had cut their teeth on the Old Testament law and the rituals and holy days of the temple. That was the stuff that was native and familiar to them. And then the writer of Hebrews helped them understand the good news of Jesus Christ in those terms that they already knew and understood.
The modern American church audience, of course, is in quite the opposite place. For many of the people in our pews, the stuff of the tabernacle, high priest, Day of Atonement, and such is only vaguely familiar, at best. And so we may have an additional layer of translating that we need to do when we preach from Hebrews.
The bottom line in Hebrews in general — and in our passage in particular — is that God had established a way of relating to his people under the old covenant. But it turns out that the elements which defined that covenant relationship were not permanent or perfect. Instead, they were a foreshadowing of what was to come. They were the foundation upon which the perfect and complete covenant relationship was to be built.
The first connection made in our passage is the principle that Jesus has become our great high priest. Again, this is potentially meaningless to people for whom “high priest” is not a critical factor in life. But the Old Testament, people of God understood that the high priest was a human intermediary — one who went into the very presence of God on their behalf in order to make atonement for the people. If that need and role have been fixed in your mind and experience for your whole life, then the news that Christ has become our perfect and final high priest proves to be beautifully good and meaningful news.
Then the author makes a platonic sort of connection between the earthly tent and the heavenly reality that it represents. The Levitical high priest performed his duties annually in a tent that was constructed by human hands and staked out in the dusty wilderness. But Christ performed his atoning work once and for all, and it is in effect in the truly holy place and the genuine presence of God.
Finally, the author makes a connection involving blood. One can hardly read Leviticus without being struck by the preponderance of blood. Everywhere you look, it seems, blood is being shed, poured out, sprinkled, and applied. Blood purifies, blood sanctifies, and we are told again and again that the life is in the blood.
Ah, but not all blood is equal.
We understand that, of course, when applied to other things. Not all wine is equally good to drink. Not all water is equally desirable for bathing in. Not all oil is of the same quality. And so, too, the writer of Hebrews wants us to understand that not all blood is equally efficacious.
Under the old covenant, the very human and inadequate high priest carried into the dusty, earthly tent the ordinary blood of goats and calves. But see what an astonishingly different high priest Christ is, for he offers his own blood — his own precious blood. And so our atonement is accomplished perfectly and eternally.
At every turn, therefore, we see that the elements of the new covenant are superior to the old. Not that the old was a bad thing; it served its purpose for its time. But “how much more” is the will of God accomplished for us and in us by the new covenant which is mediated by Jesus Christ!
Mark 12:28-34
There’s a famous story from Jewish rabbinic lore. Both Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai were asked to teach the law of God to a Gentile while standing on one leg. The idea, you see, was to be able to sum it all up. How could one succinctly capture the whole of God’s law for someone completely unfamiliar with it? According to the story, Rabbi Hillel offered the golden rule as the summation of the law, while the rest of the law serves as commentary on that golden rule. Rabbi Shammai, by contrast, chased the questioner away.
Hillel and Shammai were contemporaries, and both were prominent rabbis in Palestine just a generation or so before the time of Jesus. It may well be, therefore, that the legendary story recalled above was known to both Jesus and the scribe who made the inquiry recorded in our Gospel lection. Yet while many scholars have explored parallels between Hillel and Jesus, we observe that their responses to the sum-it-all-up questions posed to them were substantively different.
Hillel’s answer is sound, to be sure. It resonates with something that Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12). Still, Jesus’ response to this particular question in Mark 12 (as well as (Matthew 22:34—40 and Luke 10:25—28 ) goes beyond the golden rule in crucial ways.
First, we observe that Jesus frames the answer in terms of love. That is not the “summary” that many American Christians would give to the Old Testament law. Yet that was Jesus’ own take on it: that the fulfillment of the law is to love. And so we are reminded that the heart of God, from beginning to end of scripture, is a reflection of his nature, his quintessential attribute.
Second, we note that Jesus is asked for one commandment, but he gives two. Is that just bonus material — a sort of “BOGO” deal? Is it a failure to answer the question? Is it indecisiveness? No, but rather it strikes me as an affirmation that you cannot have one without the other.
I am reminded of an experience I had building some storage shelves in our garage. Before I would permanently attach a shelf to an upright, I broke out a level in order to make sure that both pieces — both the vertical post and the horizontal shelf — were straight. And this, it seems to me, is what is involved in a whole and healthy Christian life: both the vertical and the horizontal need to be properly in place.
The vertical pertains to our relationship with God, while the horizontal pertains to our relationships with other human beings. We recall that the Ten Commandments seem to be organized with both axes in view. And surely a review of the hundreds of commandments that make up the Old Testament law would reveal instructions that apply to both directions.
Life becomes impoverished when an individual or group live at one level only and neglect the other. One senses, for example, that the Pharisees (and they have had many companions in this throughout church history) were piously attentive to the vertical concerns of life, but did not reliably do right by their fellow man. In our present culture, however, the imbalance is quite the opposite. We are practically obsessed with measuring all human behavior by how it affects others, while giving no thought to the will of a holy God.
Hillel’s answer — the so-called golden rule — is a solely horizontal standard. It gives consideration only to the you-and-me axis. But that lacks the crucial vertical element of our love for God. And Jesus’ answer — which is succinct enough to be expressed while standing on one leg! — reminds us that to build a right and sturdy Christian life requires that both the vertical and horizontal components are as they should be.
Application
The Old Testament people of God had a convenient method for measuring things. They used the cubit, which is generally thought to have been the distance from the elbow to the tip of one’s middle finger. This was not a precise or universal unit of measurement, to be sure, but it was handy, for you always had it with you. You might not always have a tape measure in your pocket, but you’ve always got a cubit up your sleeve!
In a sense, the Old Testament law offered a similarly convenient method for measuring love. “As yourself.” That was the Levitical command, which Jesus quoted in our Gospel lection: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” That’s handy, you see, in much the same way as the cubit, for every individual has one, and you always have it with you.
To love my neighbor as I love myself is a high bar, and it is not what comes naturally to us. The natural human reflex is simply to love in response. That is to say, it is the people who love me well that I am also inclined to love well. It does not come naturally, however, to love well the people who neglect or disappoint or criticize or oppose. Yet I am not called to love them as they love me, but to love them as I love myself.
As measurements go, this sort of love is a tall order, indeed. After all, when I think of how concerned I am about my own needs, my own feelings, my own preferences, it would be truly generous for me to be equally concerned about your needs, your feelings, and your preferences. If I walk through life loving each neighbor that way, I will be loving well.
Meanwhile, there is a different love commandment that Jesus also cited in our assigned gospel passage. Indeed, it is the commandment that he called the first and the greatest of all the commandments: to love God. And how much shall we love him? With all that we are and with everything we’ve got.
On the one hand, that sounds impossible. How can a person love that much? How can a person give their whole selves like that? And yet, on the other hand, we know that this is also love’s best and most natural instinct. For real love, you see, doesn’t hold back. Love nature is not to be a halfway sort of thing. When we think of the people in our lives whom we love most and best, we know that on a scale of 1 to 10, we’d never say that our love is a 5. Love wants to be all in, and scripture says that that is precisely how we are to love God.
And that sort of all-in love is exactly what we see in our other two assigned texts.
The story of Ruth begins as the story of Naomi, and Naomi’s story is a manifestly unhappy one. She herself gives voice to her unhappy fate when she tells her townspeople to name her “Bitter.” The first chapter of the book of Ruth catalogs the tragedies of Naomi’s circumstances, and the only bright spot within that chapter is Ruth’s love for her mother-in-law. And it is that love, in the end, that turns the whole story from a terribly sad one to a marvelously happy one.
And just how much did Ruth love Naomi? All in! She would devotedly stay with Naomi, and she would make Naomi’s land, Naomi’s people, and Naomi’s God her own.
Finally, there in our text from Hebrews is the ultimate embodiment of love. The author of that New Testament book writes of Christ’s self-sacrifice. And as we begin to see the magnitude of his sacrifice, we see, too, the magnitude of his love. How can we measure Christ’s love? In terms of distance, it made the trip from heaven to earth, from equality with God to babe in a manger, from throne to cross. When we see the all-in quality of his love for us, the logic of the command that we should be all-in in our love for God makes that much more sense. And we discover that, in this instance, it works well for us to follow our natural reflex and to love the other in response to how he has loved us!
Alternative Application(s)
Ruth 1:1-18 — “Uncertain Future”
The three women came to a kind of fork in the road. They were all living in Moab at the time, which was home for two of them: young widows named Orpah and Ruth. It was not home, however, for the other woman. Naomi was an older widow who had moved to Moab because of a famine in her own land. Now she had determined to return home, to Bethlehem in Judah, and she was saying goodbye to these her Moabite daughters-in-law.
Naomi reasonably expected that “home” would be everyone’s choice. She would go home, and they would stay home. That made sense. But the daughters-in-law were reluctant to say goodbye. They wanted to stay with Naomi.
It’s always a sweet and poignant scene when love hangs on, when affection results in long and reluctant goodbyes. But Naomi reasoned with the young women, urging them to stay home. They had more of a future, she insisted, by staying in Moab than by hitching their wagons to her.
Naomi’s was a perfectly plausible argument. And it represents the sort of calculation that human beings are making all the time. Which choice will work out better for me? Which fork in the road will lead to a better future? Naomi didn’t have much hope for her own future, but she reckoned it should be in her homeland. Meanwhile, she coveted the best possible future for her daughters-in-law, and she was certain it would be found in their homeland.
Ruth did not dispute Naomi’s reasoning. She didn’t really make a counter argument. But out of sheer love and devotion, she chose to take the other fork in the road. Orpah stayed in Moab — the sensible choice — but Ruth traveled to the foreign territory of Judah with her mother-in-law Naomi.
We don’t know anything about Orpah from that moment on. Whatever her future featured, it is lost to us. But Ruth — Ruth is different. The whole world knows Ruth’s story. And her future proved not only to be blessed and fulfilling in a personal way; we know that it was also impactful in a national, global, and eternal way!
Does it always work out that way? Probably not. But Ruth’s profile is not unique in scripture. Imagine, for example, how time would have erased the memory of that nobody from Ur, Abram, if he had chosen a more reasonable path and hadn’t pulled up stakes to follow God’s call. Imagine Moses simply living and dying as a shepherd in Midian, having declined the invitation at the burning bush. Or consider the difference between the unknown but predictable future of the rich young ruler who made the sensible choice compared to Peter and company who made the choice of loving and devoted discipleship.
The future is always uncertain for human beings. Sometimes we can kid ourselves into thinking that we can control it or predict it, but the reality is that the future remains beyond both our vision and our reach. When we come to a fork in the road, therefore, and consider the best possible future for ourselves, we do well to consider Ruth, Orpah, and others. If we know God’s will or call, that’s the choice to make. And if we don’t, then doing the most loving thing seems to be the way to go.
