I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith which you have toward the Lord Jesus and all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your faith may promote the knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ. For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.
Philemon 1:4-7
In Orthodoxy, salvation is never a solo project. We don’t get to heaven alone. We are saved in community. If we only care about our own prayers, our own fasting, and our own spiritual life while ignoring the suffering or the spiritual state of the person next to us, we are missing the entire point of the Gospel.
True Christian love means that we must care about the salvation of our neighbor just as much as we care about our own. When you look at your friends, your family, and even the people who frustrated you, your ultimate goal should be: How can I help this person get to heaven? When we serve their physical and spiritual needs, we aren’t just helping them—we are clearing the path for Christ to transform us too.
And here is where we encounter the last of our battlegrounds. With two specific questions to address. Let’s start with the second question, What makes love a challenge? The biggest challenge to love in the world today is that love is all about God and other people, and the world encourages us to make it all about ourselves, not others. For many people, there is no “higher power,” there is no power higher than one’s own opinion. The idea of submitting to a higher power is seen as weak. Strong people stand on their own merits. The needs of others must fit around a personal agenda. There is no need for sacrifice when gratification can come instantly. Love requires a shift in mindset from one that is inwardly focused to one that is focused outward, first on God and then on our neighbor. This doesn’t mean that one must completely divest himself or herself of personal goals or even personal ambition. However, one’s ambition cannot interfere or be counter to one’s love for God. We cannot seek to help ourselves if it involves hurting our neighbor. To truly love means to put the needs of our neighbor in front of our own needs sometimes. To love our neighbor as we love ourselves would mean that we would never intentionally, or even unintentionally, hurt our neighbor. We don’t hurt ourselves, why would we hurt our neighbor? And hurting our neighbor doesn’t just mean the obvious big-ticket items like don’t crash our neighbor’s car or deface our neighbor’s house. Most of us will never even think of doing something like that. If our neighbor is the person closest to us, we aren’t going to say an unkind word, or be occupied on our phones while checking out at the supermarket, because being unkind to our neighbor or ignoring our neighbor doesn’t show love, it shows self-centeredness.
Now to the second question: What makes love easy? The easiest answer to this question is that we are “wired” to love. Love is not a learned behavior, it is a natural thing. Hate is a learned behavior. We naturally incline to what is good. Because God is the embodiment of goodness and because we are created in God’s image, as an icon of God, our natural inclination is to love, is for the good. To hate and to be destructive actually forces us to go against who we are intrinsically created to be. There is a phrase, “Let go and let God.” If we really let go of our agendas and our egos and let God have the wheel, this would be something our hearts and souls would really rejoice over because that is what they truly want to do. The challenge is that the voices of the world are by and large not calling us to do this. So it takes faith to believe one can do this, it takes courage to take a stand for love, for goodness and for God. And it takes strength.
I remember in high school when we were doing conditioning for our soccer season (I was a soccer player), one of our exercises involved the whole team getting in a pool of water that was four feet deep and starting to walk laps around the perimeter of the large pool. We would quickly get the current going in one direction. Just as it seemed to be getting easy, the coach would blow a whistle, we would all stop, and then go in reverse, against the current, until we got the current going in the opposite direction. This cycle would continue over and over again until we were all exhausted. One of the things we learned in this exercise was that it was hard to go against the current, and no person alone could go against the current. When we all did it, together as a team, we could change the current. And even if most of us did it, we could change the current. What makes love rewarding is when we work with our neighbors—our spouses, our children, our friends, our co-workers, our church community—and change the current in our little corner of the world.
It is probably not fair to say that love is easy. It is easy only because this is our natural inclination. Love is challenging, but also rewarding. Today’s verses from the book of Philemon, recount Paul’s greeting to Philemon, “I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith which you have towards the Lord Jesus and all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your faith may promote the knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ. For have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.” Paul wrote this letter from prison, and an important factor in his remaining faithful life while imprisoned and eventually martyred, was the strength of love through prayers that he was receiving.
Indeed, love not only helps our neighbor, but encourages him. The knowledge that we are loved by our neighbors encourages us. Love is challenging. Love is rewarding. And love is beautiful. It is indeed a beautiful feeling to know that we are loved, and to know that others are encouraged when we love them. What makes love easy is that we each have the ability to offer this gift to anyone at any time, all it takes is a desire to take from ourselves and give to someone else. Love is also a necessary thing. We need to know that we are loved, and we need to express love. It’s part of what makes us human, and part of what makes us Christian.
Lord, thank You for creating me as an icon of You. Help me to remember that I am supposed to reflect Your image and likeness to those around me. Thank You for making my natural inclination to be towards love. Help me to allow what is natural to shine in my life. Help me to have the strength and the courage to walk against the current and send people around me who will stand with me and walk with me against the current of self-centeredness that is such an ingrained part of our culture today. Help me to see my neighbors and use my intrinsic ability to love to help and encourage them. Amen.
Who are some “neighbors” you encounter every day? (i.e. the person sitting in the next office from you) And how can you express loving sentiments towards them?
