Holy Week is the time we retrace the steps of Christ on his last week on earth We examine through Lent our adherence to the Great Commandment–to love God above all. However, this is through the lens that Jesus gave when he combined forever the Second Commandment with the First. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This Second Command forever connects with loving God making our public life of justice an outflow of an inward love for God. It is not a private thing to be a Christian, in other words. Our social acts are connected to our inward piety. In fact, Jesus raises the ante when he gives a new command: “Love each other as I have loved you.” Not only does our personal devotion find proof in our love of neighbor our true obedience is to love each other like Christ loves—sacrificial, serving, condescending, empowering, forgiving, love. This is especially true because this is our mark as Christians: our love for each other.
Our faith in America now bears the fruit of our division of piety and justice in excluding people from being in the “neighbor” category. We often practice disembodying our affection for God from our neighbor’s plight because we easily dehumanize with our Facebook reactions. Can we sing “Amazing Grace” when we offer little to no measurable empathy to the widow, immigrant, orphan, incarcerated, brown, black, and “other” in our world? Are we any better than those in our past who enslaved our neighbors? Before we can love God, we have to consider loving our neighbor. But, even if we attain that, do we love each other like Christ loves us? Do we even love each other?
The world will know we are followers of Jesus by our love for each other. Refugee colonial Christians escaping European state controlled churches in the 1600s would have their descendants become their own worst nightmare–turning away scores of fellow Christians at our Southern border in 2019. Nearly 35% of asylum seekers are reportedly Evangelicals, with even more being Catholic brothers and sisters. We literally are hurting our own Christian family through some of our draconian political polices and harsh public sentiment. Forget loving our neighbor–Muslim, foriegner, incarcerated, and enemies of our nation. Do we love our fellow Christian?
Our American hearts are dark this Holy Week and the cross bore more because of us. We can for a moment forget history and examine simply ourselves here in the moment. Christ’s decent into hell might as well be our modern city streets, our border, our VA hospitals, or anyplace where forgotten souls reside. Our greatest sin, and arguably the root of most sin, is to regard our fellow people undeserving of full dignity as creatures made in the image of God. A brown woman, a black man, a downs-syndrome boy, a gay girl, an uneducated foreigner, a diseased migrant, a fallen hero do not share in the spoils of our great nation with equality. But, we even sin further by not loving our own MAGA-hat-wearing Christian, or snowflake-progressive Christian. We don’t like our fellow Jesus followers very much these days, do we?
Will we condescend like Christ condescends? We are bearers of good news. The problem we all have is about this new command Jesus gave us. Will we love each other like Christ loves us? How amazing is Christ’s love for us. If we can love each other, maybe we can love our neighbor, too. We must willingly descend into hell to save those in it–whether it be one they made themselves or one we created for them. Would we sacrifice our power, position, and privilege and spend a even a dime of it on our Christian brothers and sisters who are need of our support and love? The story is not over. If we follow Christ on Good Friday into the dark hell here on earth we might indeed rise from it on Easter Day. Death is our enemy but one who is about to be defeated on Sunday. Christ’s promise allows us to go where he went and end up living like he lives. And, we then we might love like he loves