And Your Neighbor as Yourself

Welcome to Hill Country Homilies, weekly homilies from Holy Annunciation

Orthodox Church in Liberty Hill, Texas. Holy Annunciation is an

old calendar Orthodox Church, sharing the faith of the Apostles

and the love of Christ with all who seek His truth.

Now let's listen to this week's homily.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and

the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ. Have a seat

if you wish. A few years ago, when the Gospel

reading for today came around, I focused primarily on the

first of the two great commandments, that we're to love

the Lord our God with all our heart, with all

our soul, and with all our mind. And rightly so,

because Christ himself calls this the first and great commandment.

But this year, I'd like us to consider the second commandment,

because Christ himself refuses to separate the two. Indeed, one

might even say that the second commandment is the test

of the first. Today's gospel begins with another attempt by

the Jewish authorities to trap Christ. A lawyer comes forward

and asks, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

It sounds like a simple question, but it was not.

Because among the more than 600 laws and countless interpretations

that surrounded them, any answer that Christ gave could be challenged.

Somebody was going to be upset regardless of how he answered.

Yet Christ cuts through all of these arguments and reveals

the very purpose of the law itself. Thou shalt love

the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all

thy soul, and with all thy mind. And the second

is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as

thyself on these two commandments. hang all of the law

and the prophets. The lawyer asks for one commandment. Christ

gives him two. And he does this because they cannot

be separated. The law was never merely about rules, sacrifices,

or regulations. As St. Paul teaches, it was a schoolmaster

leading men to Christ. A law against murder means little

if your heart remains filled with hatred. A law against

theft means little if your heart remains filled with greed.

The law was preparing God's people to receive Christ and

to receive Christ with a heart that was capable of

loving Him, of loving God, and of loving neighbor. The

problem is that most of us find it much easier

to speak about loving God than to actually perform the

act of loving our neighbor. After all, when we think

about loving God, we think about prayer, fasting, worship, almsgiving,

participation in the Holy Mysteries, things that make us feel good.

These are all necessary things, but the real testing ground

comes when we leave the church and we start to

encounter other people. Because our neighbor is not an invisible,

incomprehensible essence that loves us and desires our salvation. Our

neighbor is usually the person standing directly in front of us.

And the people standing directly in front of us can

oftentimes be very difficult. And so we ask the same

question that's asked elsewhere in the gospel. Well, who then

is my neighbor? And that question reveals something about our

fallen human nature. We're always looking for boundaries. We want

to know where our obligation begins and where it ends.

Surely my neighbor is my family, my friends, my parish,

the people who think as I do, people who share

my values and my beliefs. But this is exactly what

Christ destroyed in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Metropolitan

Cyprian observed that the purpose of that parable was to

demolish the boundaries that men put around love. The Hebrews

had come to think of their neighbor as one belonging

to their own people or their own religion, and Christ

overturns that understanding completely because the hero in that story

is the Samaritan, the outsider, the very person who many

would have excluded from from that circle of love. And

the lesson is uncomfortable because we still create those same boundaries.

We divide people into categories. We decide who deserves our concern,

who doesn't. We allow political differences, cultural differences, personal grievance,

social division to determine who we will love on any

given day. But Christ continually expands that circle that we

keep trying to shrink. Because the neighbor is not merely

someone who belongs to our group. The neighbor is our

fellow man. God places those neighbors in front of us

every single day.

St.

Theophon the recluse teaches that we do not need to

go searching for the opportunities to fulfill this commandment because

God sends them to us. The lonely person needs encouragement,

the struggling family, the widow, the difficult relative. the stranger

asking for help, begging on the corner, even the person

who tries our patience on a daily basis, they all

become opportunities to fulfill the commandment of Christ. And God

is watching what we do. We often imagine that holiness

consists of doing great and extraordinary things, yet many times

God places before us something much simpler, a neighbor who

needs to be loved. And sometimes that love requires genuine

sacrifice on our part. One of the most remarkable examples

comes from St. Acacius of Ameda. During a war between

the Romans and the Persians, thousands of Persian prisoners were

suffering in captivity. because the Romans had imprisoned them but

refused to feed them. And St. Acacius gathered his clergy

together and he reminded them that God has no need

of gold and silver vessels and he ordered that the

church treasures be sold so that the prisoners could not

just be fed but be ransomed and set free. Consider

for a moment what St. Acacius was actually asking his

clergy to do. The men suffering in those prisons were

not members of their flock. They weren't citizens of the empire.

They weren't even Christians. They were Persians. The enemy nation

against whom Rome had recently been at war. Most people

would have looked at those prisoners and seen foreigners, enemies,

perhaps even a problem best left to somebody else. St.

Acacius looked at them and saw something else. He saw

men created in the image of God. Men for whom

Christ had died. Men whose suffering had been placed before

Him by God's providence. And that is what makes this

commandment so difficult. It's one thing to love those who

naturally attract our affection. It's one thing to love our family,

our friends, those who are kind for us. It's entirely

another thing to love the stranger, the outsider, the person

from whom we derive no benefit, or even the person

whom we have every worldly reason to dislike. Yet this

is precisely what Christ commands us to do. Because Christian

love is not just affection. It's the recognition of the

image of God in that other person, even when everything

else about that person screams at us to look away.

And if we're honest... This is where the gospel begins

to examine ourselves rather than to comfort us. Most Christians

would readily say that they love God. We say our prayers,

we attend the services, we keep the fast as best

we can. We seek to live according to the faith.

But how do we know whether our love for God

is genuine and not just something that we profess with

our lips? St. John the Theologian answers that question well.

with startling directness in his first epistle. If someone says,

I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar.

For he who does not love his brother whom he

has seen, how can he love God whom he has

not seen? There really is no escaping the force of

the Apostle's word. He does not tell us that such

a man is struggling or confused or partially mistaken. He

says that the man is deceiving himself. Why? Because our

neighbor is where our love for God becomes visible. The

invisible God has placed before us men and women created

in His image. And the manner in which we treat

them reveals the true condition of our own heart. The

second commandment is not merely something that accompanies the first.

It becomes the proof of it. If we love God,

that love must eventually be seen in the way that

we love our neighbor. Otherwise, St. John says, our claim

is nothing but words. And let us be very careful

when we hear the word neighbor. Most of us immediately

think of the people we already love, our family, our friends,

the people who sit beside us in church. That's the

easy one. People whose company we enjoy. But Christ did

not command us to love those people because he had

no need. Even sinners love those who love them. When

you hear the word neighbor, your mind should not go

first to your friends. It should go to the people

whom society discards, ignores, avoids. It should go to the

stranger who makes us uncomfortable, the poor man standing at

the roadside, the person whose politics infuriate us, the person

whose sins disgust us, the person who we have nothing

to gain from, and even just that really unpleasant guy

that you have to work with. Those are the neighbors

who reveal whether we have understood Christ's commandment at all.

For it is precisely there among those whom the world

finds easiest to overlook and discard that our professed love

for God is put to the test. If we can't

see the image of God in them, We should not

be too quick to assume that we're seeing God clearly either.

Brothers and sisters, the first commandment tells us whom we

must love. The second one reveals whether we actually do it.

Your neighbor is not just your tribesman and reject any

heretic who tells you otherwise. Your neighbor is whoever God

places before you. Sometimes he arrives as a friend, sometimes

a stranger. Sometimes he's an interruption to your day. Sometimes

he's an enemy. But each encounter becomes an opportunity to

fulfill the commandment of Christ. Brothers and sisters, as we

depart today, let us be attentive to those opportunities. Let

us refuse to draw boundaries where Christ has drawn none.

Let us remember that every person we encounter bears that

image of God in them just as we do. And

let us prove our love for God by showing love, mercy, patience, forgiveness,

and charity to all those that He places in our

path because He's put them there for a reason. For

if we truly love our neighbor, we demonstrate that we

love God. And if we do not love our neighbor,

then we convict ourselves. If someone says, I love God

and hates his brother, he is a liar. In the

name of the Father, and of the Son, and of

the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Thanks for listening to Hill Country Homilies. For more information,

visit Holy Annunciation Orthodox Church at www.annunciationtx.com. And please join

us again next week.