Sam Bush, “The Princess and the Patient”
A few years ago, a study on the psychology of music determined that most song lyrics since 1960 were about one thing. There are plenty of songs about money, partying and loss. Apparently there’s only one song about the boys being back in town (which is a shame). But 67% of modern song lyrics are about love. Love is what makes the world go ‘round. Love is all you need. Love is what the world needs now. When Brian Wilson was asked why he wrote the album Pet Sounds in 1966 he said "to increase the love vibe" and it appears he succeeded. This morning, we find that love was not just an invention of the 60s. Our Gospel reading shows that love is at the heart of why we exist.
Today’s passage is the last of a series in which Jesus is challenged by the religious leaders to a round of verbal jousting. They have been trying to entangle Jesus in his own words without success. For this final round, they have brought out the big guns. It says, “One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.” Now, when a lawyer asks you something - like, “Where were you last Tuesday?” - it’s best to answer carefully. At that time, a lawyer was an expert in the law of the Old Testament. He says, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Without hesitating, Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” He’s not rocking the boat. These words are part of what was called the Shema, or the summary of the law. They come straight out of Deuteronomy and would have been repeated twice daily
by faithful Jews. Likewise, “Love your neighbor as yourself” is taken directly from Leviticus. In other words, Jesus takes the Law seriously. It has not changed one iota since God established a relationship with human beings. These two commandments fulfill the deepest longing of what it means to be a person. This is why you were born. We do not exist for ourselves or our own gain, but for God and for each other.
And yet, knowing this truth is not the same as living it, is it? The religious leaders may have known these laws by heart, but, as Pascal said, “The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.” To go one step further, human love is often very far from the divine variety.
In personal relationships, we often treat love like a commodity or a consumer product. When we make relational commitments, be it a friend or romantic interest, we see people as a means to self-fulfillment, as either assets or liabilities and if our own needs aren’t being met, it’s not long before we drop them. This is what Plato meant when he said, “Human love is the child of poverty.” We all have a hunger for someone to complete whatever is missing in ourselves.
In a recent interview, the psychotherapist Esther Perel talked about the idea that opposites attract, that we inevitably look for a person who has the part we’re missing in our own repertoire. What inevitably ends up happening, she says, is that, “Everybody forgets why they chose each other in the first place.” If shyness was endearing, it’s later perceived as weak. If you were attracted to someone’s confidence, years later, you might wish that person was a little less headstrong.
Even the love we genuinely offer each other gets lost in translation. What is your love language? I’m constantly giving Maddy words of affirmation because that’s my love language. I’ll say, “You’re such an amazing mother. I’m so lucky to be your husband.” She appreciates the gesture but acts of service are the key to her heart. When she kindly asks me to clean the bathrooms, I will say, “The bathrooms look fine, but not as beautiful as you.” I only get the message after she lovingly hands me a scrub brush. When we love, we often do so on our own terms, but, in order for love to actually connect, it must be on the terms of the recipient.
In the end, love is not the experience of getting everything we want but the desire to give everything we have away for the sake of another. It is sacrificing your own schedule so that your baby can take a nap, it is forgiving your friend for canceling
on you again. It is giving generously to someone in need without expecting any repayment. It always comes at a cost and it’s always paid up front, otherwise, it’s just a favor.
Perhaps this is why love is such a terrifying ordeal. Loving someone leaves you exposed to rejection, exclusion and injury. As Robert Capon put it, “What is love if it is not the indulgence of the ultimate risk of giving one’s self to another over whom we have no control?”
This morning, Jesus takes it to the extreme. It is all or nothing. Like Toni Morrison writes in her novel Beloved, “Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.” All too often, our love for God and for each other grows thin. This is why every Sunday we confess to God, “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” We may know these commandments by heart, but a command cannot make a heart love.
This is why our hope is not in the law that you shall love God with every fiber of your being, but in the gospel - the good news that God has loved you with every fiber of His being. The law may not have changed, but Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of the law has changed everything. In him, the shape of love is cruciform. It is laying down one’s own life for the other.
If human love is the child of poverty, we will never be filled, which means we often think we need to fend for ourselves. This is why the world says “Eat or be eaten.” Jesus, however, says, I choose to be eaten. “Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you.” His priority is not his own survival, but to lay down his life so that you may know the extent to which God loves you.
At the end of this passage, after Jesus answers the lawyer, he gets to ask a question. At that time, everyone was hoping for the coming of the Messiah and the Scriptures prophesied that the Messiah would come from King David’s lineage. And Jesus checks that box; he is a descendent of David. He then asks, “If you say that the Messiah is the son of David, why, in the Psalms, does David call the Messiah his Lord?” It’s confusing, but here’s the upshot: Jesus is dangerously close to claiming that he is God, that He is not just King David’s descendant but King David’s Lord. And yet, he is not a king that anyone would have expected. Rather than a king who pursues his own self-fulfillment, he lays down his life out of self-sacrifice. Rather than rule from on high, he descends to the lowly.
In 1989, Princess Diana, then the future queen of England with whom the entire world had fallen in love, visited New York City. She spent three days attending galas and parties with the rich and famous. On the last day, however, she visited the pediatric AIDS unit at Harlem Hospital, one of the most overlooked hospitals in the country. This was when it was widely believed that AIDS could be contracted by touch. The unit’s nursing director said that people were afraid to even go into the children’s ward, that even the housekeepers didn’t want to go inside.
In walks the Princess of Wales, dressed in a red wool suit and shining blonde hair. As she is walking around the unit, she sees a 7-year-old boy standing in blue pajamas with his nurse and she stops. “Are you very heavy?” she asks, and then bends down, picks up the child and hugs him. The next day, a journalist for the LA Times wrote, “For two or three minutes, the worlds of poverty and plenty were united as the princess and the patient stood in the hallway, the little boy’s head on Diana’s shoulder, his arms around her neck.” Here, the future sovereign queen was seen laying down her power out of love.
It would have been one thing for Diana to simply say the words, “I love you,” to this boy. It was a completely other thing to pick him up and embrace him. Likewise, it would have been one thing for God to simply say, “I love you” to you and me. It was a completely other thing to surrender his body and die the death that we deserved. As Paul says in Romans, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” The depth of his love came at the cost of his majesty. While human love is the child of poverty, God’s love is more than plenty. It is a wedding banquet.
Of all the song lyrics about love, a favorite of mine comes from our hymnal, number 516. I’ll close with its lyrics as a prayer: “Come down, O Love Divine, seek thou this soul of mine and visit it with thine own ardor glowing. For none can guess your grace, till Love create a place where in the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.” Amen.
