If you have a deep aspiration, a goal for your life, then your loving of others is part of this aspiration and not a distraction from it. If you and your partner both want to do things to relieve the suffering in this world, then your love for each other is connected to your love for others, and it expands exponentially to cover the whole world.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love, p. 74
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, July 31, 2019
One interesting note about Jesus’ fulfillment of the law is that there is no recorded instruction from Jesus to His own disciples for them to obey and follow the Law of Moses. Why not? Because He was modelling love, which is God’s ultimate goal and purpose for our lives anyway. Where there is love, law becomes unnecessary. Loving God and loving others naturally leads to the fulfillment of the law (Matt 22:37; Mark 12:30-31; Luke 10:27). If loving God and loving others is the fulfillment of the law, then the law is “followed” simply by loving God and loving others. If we are guided by love, then we do not need the law to guide us, because love guides us to do the things commanded by the law.
Jesus, through His life and ministry, revealed what it looks like to live according to love. In so doing, He not only fulfilled the spirit and purpose of the law, but also did away with it in the sense that He showed that where there is love, law is not needed. Of course, where there is no love, the law is still better than nothing as a way to guide people into proper behavior. This is why Jesus said He did not come to destroy or abolish the law. He knew that love takes time to grow and spread, and that not everyone will live in love toward everyone else. Therefore law, as defective as it is, still guides human behavior when there is no love. This was not only true of the Mosaic Law for the Israelite people, but it is also true for the laws of any country or community today. The reason nations, businesses, and families have laws today is because love is not fully formed among us.
So what is clear from the rest of Scripture, as well as from Jesus’ own words, is that love is the fulfillment of the law. Most Christians would agree that the law is accomplished and fulfilled when we love God and love others (Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8; Rom 13:8-10; 1 Tim 1:5; Deut 6:5; Matt 22:37; Luke 10:27; Mark 12:30-31). The way of love is the “more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31). When Jesus said that He had come to fulfill the law, this was best seen in the fact that love was the defining characteristic of Jesus. Since love is the fulfillment of the law, and since Jesus loved God and loved everyone perfectly, he therefore fulfilled the law. This is what Jesus meant in Matthew 5:17. The rest of the Sermon on the Mount provides numerous examples of how love fulfills the law.
— J. D. Myers, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus, p. 97-98
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, July 26, 2019
Recognizing that no one else can complete us actually enhances our capacity to love and receive the love of others.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 293
Photo:Â Barefoot Park, Germany, July 2003
The real issue, though, is how to understand divine anger in the context of overwhelming graciousness and mercy. The danger is that within a patriarchal, punitive setting, speaking of a wrathful God has been used to justify holy wars and torture, hostility to outsiders, and debilitating guilt in sensitive consciences. But righteous anger is a different breed of cat. It is profoundly ethical. It waxes hot in moral outrage because something good is being violated. Arising from love, it awakens energy to act to change the situation. Editing a powerful book of photographs of African American women, Barbara Summers was struck by the creative power of anger of even the most accomplished of these women: “A truly beautifying discovery for me was to find so much love in anger. It was a fist-up, death-defying love that challenged the unfair conditions of life and muscled in on injustice as it nursed both sides of a nation.” This is not anger with the spirit of murder in it, but fury that is creative of life. Much feminist in-depth analysis, such as Beverly Harrison’s influential essay “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” makes clear that far from being the opposite of love, righteous anger is a vivid, moral form of caring that empowers transformation.
In the context of God’s graciousness and mercy, divine anger functions for justice. It bespeaks a mode of caring response in the face of what harms beloved human beings or the created world itself. “The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God it is a disaster,” writes Abraham Heschel. Divine wrath is a worthy response. True, it lasts but a moment; true, it is instrumental, aimed at change and conversion. But it stands as an antidote to sentimentality.
— Elizabeth A. Johnson, Creation and the Cross, p. 39-40
Photo: Sky Meadows State Park, Virginia, July 3, 2017
The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget — that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.
— Rachel Held Evans, Inspired, p. 186
Photo: Prague, July 16, 2004
I learned a long time ago that the most God-honoring, most Jesus-reflecting act is to err on the side of loving people. When you simply accept those around you in whatever condition they come to you, the table naturally expands and relationship happens and God does stuff that you couldn’t predict or control.
— John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table, p. 43
Photo: Staffa Island, Scotland, July 13, 2003
We come in love. I would submit that the teaching of Jesus to love God and love our neighbor is at the core and the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. And we must be people who reclaim Christianity from its popular modality, from the way it is often perceived and presented, to a way of Christianity that looks something like Jesus. And Jesus said, Love God and love your neighbor, so we come in love.
That is the core of our faith. That is the heart of it. And we come, because we are Christian and the way of love calls for us to be humanitarian. It calls for us to care for those who have no one to care for them.
— Michael Curry, The Power of Love, p. 60-61
Photo: Above Spittal an der Drau, Austria, July 29, 1998
Often, our pride stands in the way of our asking for help. In true love there is no place for pride. To love each other means to trust each other. If you don’t tell the person you love of your suffering, it means you don’t love this person enough to trust her. You have to realize that this person is the best person to help you. We need to be able to get help from the person we love.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love, p. 54
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 20, 2017
Though many people assume that the primary message of the prophets was to call the people back to obedience of the law, the real message of the prophets was to call people back to the goal of the law, which was love. We see this by the fact that many of the prophets are quite critical of how the people ignore justice and righteousness in the land. The prophets show that many of the people are quite observant when it comes to the law, but they neglect the greater goals of care for the poor, protection for the weak, and love for the outcast. A quick reading of some key prophetic texts reveals that their true concern was not adherence to the law, but living according to love (cf. Isa 1:10-20; 61:8; Jer 14:12; Hos 6:6; Amos 4:4-5; 5:21-25; Mic 6:6-8). Jesus, as the greatest prophet, reveals this same truth through His life, ministry, and teachings.
— J. D. Myers, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus, p. 96-97
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, June 14, 2019
Letting go is essential in love – it is the opposite of clinging to expectations about how things should be and allows us to accept others (and ourselves!) as they are.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 293