Father, in coming together today, though we come to study your Word, we, in a deeper sense, come to worship you, and Lord, in worshipping you, we acknowledge that love is of God, and that apart from you, Lord, there is no love. Father, we divest ourselves as we take to studying this next commandment. We divest ourselves of any sense that this is something we must or can do out of ourselves. Father, we ask you to so lead and work in and through your word that it may become wholly clear to us that our love of our neighbour is the overflow of your love for us and the love that it kindles in us. So open our hearts and refresh us in your word and in your Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Just to reiterate, if you weren't here last week, We are studying five commandments to love that we find in the New Testament. And we'll just peruse them again. Jesus said, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. And I found that in studying these five, that they interrelate and enhance each other, instruct each other. the first which we dealt with last week and if you weren't here. Liz, do we have spare copies? If you weren't there, you can get that one. That you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. Now Geoffrey, I... I searched a few commentaries on the question of why there was any reason for the addition in the New Testament, but they wouldn't engage it. That's right, particularly Mark and Luke. And today's you shall love your neighbour as yourself, a new commandment which will look at that we love one another as Christ has loved us and really you'll find that the empowerment of today's commandment comes in that next one. So we're doing neighbour because it seems to fit but in one sense we could well do it after the new commandment because That's the key to the whole thing really. Then the commandment to love our enemies and finally to love not in word or talk but in deed or truth. And so Jesus said the second is this, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these two. This commandment, interestingly, only appears once in the Old Testament in Leviticus 19. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself. I am the Lord. By contrast, in the New Testament, this second great commandment seems to permeate the ethical thinking of the New Testament. And so we find it in a number of places. Paul in Romans 13 says, I owe no one anything except to love each other for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet and any other commandment are summed up in this word, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Now in the ten commandments, the first four have to do with loving God. and the other six have to do with loving one's neighbour. So Paul is confirming what Jesus said in a sense that the ten are summed up in the two. Two great commandments if you like. Love God with your whole being and your neighbour as yourself. I think it's interesting in Paul, I've made the comment his concern seems to me to move the question of behaviour from the letter of the law to the freedom of the Holy Spirit. And if you like from negative legal constraints to unction and action. I haven't written that in there. from negative legal constraints to unction and action. What counts he says in Galatians 5.6 is faith working through love, and love in that same chapter is the fruitage of the Holy Spirit. For you are called to freedom brothers, not legalistic bondage, only Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident, and he lists those, a harrowing list, I might But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law. Now, when you're just putting it all on a leaflet, you can't put as much down as you would like to, but there's something very important here. to go, as I said, from negative legal constraints to unction and action. Unction is the anointing of the Holy Spirit, an old word, not around much today. the fruitage of the Spirit is love. It's an unction endowment of the Spirit of God in us. I think that's an important distinction because Paul is separating us out from any religious legalism that has a code of dot points to be adhered to. Does anyone want to chew that around a bit, fill it out, give it an illustration? Can you grasp what we're saying here? It's a confining attitude in law in one sense. I often say of the Ten Commandments, they define where you can't go and liberate you to go everywhere else within those boundaries, there are boundaries. It's so important, isn't it, a series of studies about commandments. Last week we sort of wrestled with this, oh gee, could he have found a better word than commandment. And I always think that society has a way of messing words up and discarding them and then having to get a new one. So you have to just be careful you've got the current word for the disabled because there have been a number that have been discarded and no doubt that one will be too and partially abled. So we discard words because we fill them with negative connotation. I don't think we do that in a scriptural context. I think we say no, the word of commandment is a beautiful word. and in the redemptive context we love God's commandments. James calls this commandment the Royal Law. The King is Jesus. He has exemplified this way of love as we shall see in the next study and has established it as the law or principle of his kingdom. So James says, if you really fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. I think that's a lovely way of thinking of that particular reference, the royal law, that it's King Jesus' law and no one does it or exemplifies it or demonstrates what it means better than he does and we are in him. It's a royal rule. Are you happy to continue? I'm happy to be interrupted at any time. Let's look then at this word agape. The word agape, as most of us know, had little secular use at the time of the New Testament's writing, but it seems to have been taken up by Christians and given the same currency as the love of God. So really, as the Christians saw God loving them in Christ, love kind of filled out in a beautiful way for them. And so it conveyed in the New Testament the essence of the commandment to love someone as yourself. That is, an unrelenting goodwill which doesn't depend on the worthiness of the beloved or the attitude of the beloved to the one loving. It always seeks the highest good for the beloved and cannot be put off. In short, It steadfastly loves the beloved for their own sake and benefit. We could perhaps summarise by saying then that this love is other person centred or other person focused. It's I think useful to have that definition because I love ice cream. And I could say that there are quite a few other things I love, but in that desiring sense. And that's good. That's part of being the creation. But to love your neighbour doesn't mean that. If you see somebody move in across the road and you notice that in addition to their belongings parked on the front lawn is a very creditable speedboat for skiing and being a skier yourself but not having a boat you think I reckon it would be a good idea if I got to know my new neighbour. You know, love your neighbour. The meaning of loving your neighbour as yourself is behind what has been called the Golden Rule in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. So whatever you wish that others would do to you, Do also to them for this is the law and the prophets." A principle which is found in other religious and ethical literature but most commonly in the negative. Don't do to another that you wouldn't like them to do to you. But it's here in this context of unction and action that it's not a prohibitive. It's an imperative, if that's not too linguistically complicated to put it like that. I keep going back to that quotation of James, where he ends up by saying, you are doing the work. The emphasis is not on you have been obedient, you have done the right thing. It is obviously going to live the life as expected because when you do away, it has a sort of a shame effect. And you are doing the right thing. Good encouragement. You've just drawn to my mind a thought that I've had this week that could have been included in those things that we looked at about commandments. Commandments being promises and commandments being in the context of covenant. Another one is that obeying God's commandments is fellowship with God. That's an experiential thing we know. When we know we are walking in obedience to God, we know the fellowship of God and we also know the converse too. Here's an illustration. President Kennedy in 1963 appealed to the Golden Rule in an anti-segregation speech at the time of the first black enrollment at the University of Alabama. That was an incredible time. They nearly had a civil war between the federal police and the Alabama police. They really didn't know what was going to happen. He asked whites to consider what it would be like to be treated as second-class citizens because of skin colour. Whites were to imagine themselves being black and being told that they couldn't vote, or go to the best public schools, or eat at most public restaurants, or sit in the front of the bus. It's incredible to think that that's the way it was then. Would whites be content to be treated in that way? He was sure that they wouldn't. And yet this is how they treated others. He said, the heart of the question is whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. And I think that was a powerful corrective to people's thought. They thought, well, no, we wouldn't. And if we are indeed to treat other people as we want to be treated, then we have to change. President Kennedy's appeal demonstrates that this second great commandment has to do with a large part of our living. And it raises the question, who is my neighbour? The context of the Old Testament The context of the commandment in the Old Testament suggests that an Israelite's neighbour was his fellow Israelite. Just turn back to that commandment on the first page, Leviticus 19.18. Moses says, You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself. So clearly this was an injunction related to how Israelites related to their fellow Israelites. However, when asked to identify who is our neighbour and answer this question we are asking, Jesus broadened the definition considerably. Desiring to justify himself, the Pharisee said to Jesus, and who is my neighbour? That's our question in hand. Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road and when he saw him he passed on the other side. We'll just pause there. Why did he pass on the other side? Well maybe he was busy and maybe he didn't think it was. But you see this could be a trap. This man had been abused by robbers. They may be nearby. They may have done this to him and left him there as bait. Someone comes along, does what Good Samaritan does, boom, got him too. So the moral of the story is, don't get involved. Do you know that one? Don't get involved. And we see that in society, in big cities don't we? Horrendous things happen and people steer clear. Likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him pass by on the other side, but a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, he went to him. So he got involved. He went into this crime scene even though the perpetrators could be lurking. He went to him and bound up his wounds pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I get back. Now, Sir Jesus, which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers? He said, the one who showed mercy on him. So Jesus said, you go and do likewise. Now, what I have said about getting involved raises, I think, a very difficult question. And we had a valuable discussion in our home group last week about this, where one of the members of the home group, a woman, travelling across to another part of town that was a part that had some dangers in it, and there was a circumstance with a woman there, and she became involved and we discussed the question of doing that. And you certainly have to be cautious. You have to be cautious picking up somebody off the side of the road, hitchhiking. and in a number of other situations and the police certainly say don't stand in the way of an armed robber or something like that. And again I think it's a question of unction and action and my response in the home group was we need to be led of God, we can't make rules that fit every occasion and sometimes we find like the Good Samaritan we are led to go over and become involved. Are you happy with that? I don't think that gives you a rule of thumb. I think the point before we go on here that I'm lingering on is that loving your neighbour is going to cost you sometimes. It's going to be inconvenient, could touch your hip nerve, hip pocket nerve, and we are involved in a society that says don't get involved, just look after your own. Perhaps we could summarise Jesus' definition by saying that our neighbour Rather than being the one who is one of us, that was the case in Leviticus. Among the sons of Israel, they are us, and love your neighbour, he's one of us. Rather than our neighbour being the one who is one of us as Jesus, our neighbour could be described as the one who is near us but is different from us. The one who is near us but is different from us. And there are lots of differences among human beings that distinctions and separations, barriers and so on. Perhaps this means for men, for a man, your neighbour is woman. She is near to you, but she is different from you. And for woman, your neighbour is man. He is near to you, but he is different from you. And it's easy to stay with those who are one of us in our affections and actions. Perhaps for adults, it is children. And for children, adults. In similar fashion, our neighbours may include aborigines, prisoners, refugees, Muslims, people of other races, other religions, other moral outlooks, other political persuasions, or dare I say, sporting allegiances. Don't turn over yet, we're not finished with this. Would it be true to say that among your neighbours, in your street and surrounds, there are those who are our kind of people? Sometimes you think there's nobody in our street that's our kind of people. What I'm driving at is that it can be easier for you to go the distance to visit your family in Sydney than it can be to go the distance to visit the Muslim family across the road. Alongside us for many years here at Mawful Vale we had a lady who suffered from schizophrenia and lived in a basically deplorable state and so on. And we would help her and she would abuse us and so on. It was very easy for us to say, well, glass wall. To her very great credit, my wife did a wonderful job in caring for her right through to her death. and I think she might have taken the funeral. Now we've got some young lads living there. And it would be easy to say, oh yeah, another world. When we lived in Port Augusta, We became involved in the reconciliation thing in the church. We had Aboriginal people in the church, the Aboriginal Congress was part of the United Church. There were a few Aboriginal people in the church, the United Church of Portugal, along of course with a lot of non-Aboriginal people, and we came to realise that the Non-Aboriginal Christians in the Uniting Church in Port Augusta had never been in the home of an Aboriginal family. So we started a program called About Time, which was a weekend where people would come from all over the state and spend a week staying with an Aboriginal family, a weekend staying with an Aboriginal family, which is pretty minimal thing to do, but do you know it was huge? It was huge for the people who did it, non-Aboriginal people, and it was even huger for the Aboriginal people. I was visiting one of these families one day and it was about 5 o'clock and the lady at the house was peeling the potatoes at the table. kitchen table and that's where they were, so I sat down with them and grabbed a knife and started to peel the potatoes and I started to laugh. I said, what are you laughing at? The minister's peeling our potatoes. In one sense a totally ordinary thing, another sense a totally unusual thing, never seen anything like it. Do you see what I'm working at when I say that your neighbour is the one who is near to you, but different from you in many instances. Beware the glass wall and be sensitive to the action of the unction. Yes, good. He certainly gives an illustration. He says well, the Samaritan is your neighbour and you are his. to which the Jews' attitude was that the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans, even though they were neighbours. Turning the page now, as yourself. I have often pondered what as yourself means. Does it mean in the same way as you love yourself, so you are to love your neighbour? Or does it mean, instead of thinking of yourself, think of your neighbour as though he were yourself. There is truth in saying that we need to love ourselves to be healthy and at peace. However, when we come to the new commandment next week that Jesus gave us, we will see that love is other person focused and self-sacrificing. So the main focus here I don't think is to love your neighbour in the way that you love yourself. You do love yourself and you love your neighbour in the way that you love yourself. But to love your neighbour as though he or she were yourself. We are to love our neighbour as though he or she were ourselves and to love them often at cost to ourselves. I want to share something with you that I call interior hospitality. Whatever could that be? Have you ever thought how we human beings are spatial within our person? Now you're spatial within your body and you have to fill the space from time to time. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about your person, your very self. You are in a sense spatial within yourself. We know that because we sometimes say of someone, oh he's full of himself. And that's a very real thing. There are some people you can ask, how are you going? And for 40 minutes. And they are absolutely chockers full of themselves and their situation and their story and their stuff. It's all about me. Which is a very sad thing. By contrast the person who loves another as themselves is other person focused and has an interior hospitality within their person for the other person. That is A welcoming space within their heart for the other person, their stuff and their story. If you encounter someone like this, it's a lovely thing. You can just feel them welcoming you into their consciousness. with their interest and their care and their concern. It's a lovely thing to be entertained in that interior hospitality. Do you get it? Do you understand? In fact it can be so nice in there, you can end up thinking all about yourself, because they let you. St Paul had an interior hospitality for those he visited in his apostolic ministry. He wrote to the Corinthian Christians, you are in our hearts to die together and to live together. That's a beautiful thing he said. But if we have a genuine interior hospitality within us, Indeed, if we have such, for another person, their story and their concerns, they will be glad of our love for them. It will be a good experience. They will appreciate it. They will say, thanks for listening. Thanks for caring. On the other hand, if we are full of ourselves, We will be continually matching their story with our own. Yeah, I know what you mean, that happened to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hello? Now a qualification, matching can be useful to a degree to identify, but watch out for changing the subject from their stuff and story. to yours, because they will know that you have cut them off and transferred the focus to their pet topic themselves. If we are full of ourselves, we will not be content with matching the other person's situation, but we'll also need to top it. You think that's tough. You should have seen what happened to me, blah blah blah blah blah. Hello? You think that's a bushfire? Man, you should have been up our way when... It's easy to say, oh that's really quite horrible, matching and topping. We wouldn't do that. But I'll tell you what, it's very easy to do. Sometimes in church stuff, people say, I could never do pastoral visiting. I think that's for people who are specially gifted or specially trained. But really, pastoral visiting and caring is just having an interior hospitality. Go the distance that separates you from that person, be it geographic or economic or ethnic or whatever and come with an interior hospitality to that person and hear and seek to understand and then very simply you may say, do you mind if I pray for you? And you simply pray to the things they talk about, which are obviously the things that are concerning them and important to them. And they will say, thank you for coming. Yes, that's true. To have that interior hospitality and to accommodate that, and to do it creatively so you're not just creating an opportunity for the person to indulge their woes, yes it is demanding. As we shall see then in the next study, Jesus himself so fully and beautifully lives this commandment. Indeed, we would never know the meaning and depth of loving our neighbour as ourself apart from him loving us as himself. Let's pray. Heavenly Father in a way that's a fairly simple little study, and yet Lord, how much is there for us. Indeed a lifetime of being human, in our home, in our family, in our community, in our nation, in our world. Father, we pray that you will so grant us your divine unction in the love of Christ that we may indeed live perpetually in the action of loving our neighbour as ourselves. and grant to us to be those of whom people say, oh no, not him again, but rather, thanks for coming. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen.