YES, HE is Talking to YOU! (continued)
Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
This saying by the Apostle Paul is at the end of a writing regarding Love. Not the love that we have for our wives or our husbands; not the kind of love we feel for our children or other close relatives; not the kind of love that we have for our possessions and for the objects of our desire; he writes about the Love one has for his neighbour. Now we know that Paul is not referring to one who lives close by as we generally understand the word, he is talking about all human kind and is reflecting on the words of the Master when He says “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Mark 12:31) of which saying the Master also calls one of the two greatest commandments. Where have we missed this? Even today at the dawning of this New Age this concept of Love is so difficult to understand and to even to accept and this even by some of the most well meaning people. Still today, the word from many a pulpit is that we should Love our Christian brothers but this is clearly not the message of the Christ here and it should not be considered such when He speaks alone to His disciples saying that: “a new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). These sayings should be seen as one and the same in intent; talking to His disciples and to us that we Love one another gives no implication of who we should Love.
We should remember as we ponder the meaning of and the extent of the Love that Jesus commands from us that who we consider our neighbour is rendered meaningless from the perspective of this; we are all the children of God and therefore brothers whether we see the next person as a neighbour or not. This is attested to by Paul, speaking to Greeks and considered heathens, as he says of God that: “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:26-28). We should know that there is no limitation to the brotherhood of man and no limitation to who should be considered our neighbour and worthy of our Love. The Master defines for us who is our true neighbour by our actions in the parable of the Good Samaritan and this is not to be seen only in the service one does or does not do for another that is in need. The universal idea behind this parable is that each of us is the neighbour of all and that we should act as the Samaritan did and not as the priest and the Levite. The priest and the Levite were not acting in the Love thy neighbour attitude taught by the Master and it is interesting to note that the Master picked these two types of people as His example.
The priests were then and are now considered, at least by the people they serve, as servants of the Lord. Today these would include all forms of church leaders in all denominations. These people were brought up in the priesthood and learned the ways of the priest much like today’s pastors and priests and evangelists are schooled in the ways of their denominations and sects. Levites in that day are similar in that they are of the tribe that was chosen to do service to the Lord, they were considered His as a people. The example that the Master is making here is that those who would have been expected to do what is right in the eyes of the Lord did not but a Samaritan, one who is considered an outsider to the Jew (like the Samaritan woman at the well and the healed leper), and whose name is used as a term of derision, did what was expected of God’s people.
The word translated as neighbour is the Greek word plesion and the lexicon ascribes to it these definitions: a neighbour; a friend; any other person, and where two are concerned, the other (thy fellow man, thy neighbour), according to the Jews, any member of the Hebrew nation and commonwealth; according to Christ, any other man irrespective of nation or religion with whom we live or whom we chance to meet**. The idea here of neighbour being one whom we live near or have chance to meet is but a planted opinion; there is no source in Christian scripture for this; it is likely derived from the parable of the Samaritan. In today’s modern world we interact with people from around the world without ever having met them. We purchase things on line, we look at others opinions, we watch video and listen to audio messages from ministers we will probably never meet; are not these people our neighbours? Strong’s says of plesion that it means: near, close by; (n) neighbour; (pp) near*** which contributes little to our understanding. Vincent explains the word plesion as: another word to which the Gospel has imparted a broader and deeper sense. Literally it means the one near (so the Eng., neighbor = nigh-bor), indicating a mere outward nearness, proximity. Thus a neighbor might be an enemy…..The Old Testament expands the meaning to cover national or tribal fellowship, and that is the sense in our Lord’s quotation here. The Christian sense is expounded by Jesus in the parable of the Good Samaritan, as including the whole brotherhood of man, and as founded in love for man as man, everywhere****. This is much closer to our understanding of this word. We should understand here that what a word means to a person is developed by what they hear and read about that word and how greatly that can vary.
Webster’s defines neighbor for us as: 1.A person who lives near another; one whose abode is not far off. Chaucer. 2.One who is near in sympathy or confidence. 3.One entitled to, or exhibiting, neighborly kindness; hence, one of the human race; a fellow being*. This again contains the idea of all humanity and is from the 1913 version of the dictionary. As we have discussed in past posts, language is not stagnant but ever changing, words take on new meaning and lose old ones. This is neighbor from today’s modern dictionary: 1.a person who lives near another. 2.a person or thing that is near another. 3.one’s fellow human being: to be generous toward one’s less fortunate neighbors. 4.a person who shows kindliness or helpfulness toward his or her fellow humans: to be a neighbor to someone in distress. 5.(used as a term of address, especially as a friendly greeting to a stranger): Tell me, neighbor, which way to town?*!*. A bit more watered down in reflecting all human kind and taking on the perspective of being a neighbor rather that what a neighbor is. Last, from the World English Dictionary we get only this: a person who lives near or next to another 2. a. a person or thing near or next to another b. ( as modifier ): neighbour states*!!*. We see here no relationship to the idea that we need in order to understand Jesus sayings and to carry it abroad.
What do we mean then when we say that we should love thy neighbour or better when the Master says that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” ? For us there should be no question as this is the essence of the message that the Christ brought to us and that has yet to come to fruition in the world but must and by our hands. We will get more into the idea of the meaning of Love as intended by Jesus and the Apostles in the next post; for today we will rely only on the Masters other words that explain what it is the He is teaching us. This is something that the world has adopted as a ‘nice saying’ and a ‘good ideal and virtue’ but has never taken to heart in any concrete way in the interrelationships between man and man, state and state, country and country and, most disappointing of all, between religion and religion. And this is what we commonly call the Golden Rule.
In the Master’s words this is: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12); and in another place this is written as “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). We should note here that Jesus words in the Gospel of Matthew include the idea that this Golden Rule “is the law and the prophets” and that this is the same ascription given to the second of the Great Commandments saying “And the second is like unto it , Thou shalt lovethy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:39-40). How beautifully this all fits together in the interrelationship between the Great Commandment and the Golden Rule.
We close this post with reference to one more saying by Paul regarding Love for one’s neighbour. He is speaking to the Galatians about how to deal with them that persecute you after the law. In this case, regarding circumcision and the arguments in the day both pro and con, Paul tells them that they have freedom in Christ not to obey the law as regards circumcision and cautions them saying: “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law” (Galatians (5:13-18). Here we have again in Paul’s words the essence of our essay and this new series, Love is the Fulfilling of the Law as well as his connection of this to our overall theme in all these posts and that is that we are to be “led of the Spirit“; focused on the Kingdom of God. If we can “walk in the Spirit” focused and striving to enter at the strait gate we “shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh” because we are pushing that part out of our consciousness and replacing it with the things of God.
Note on the Quote of the Day
This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment.
The sons of men are one and I am one with them.
I seek to love, not hate;
I seek to serve and not exact due service;
I seek to heal, not hurt.
Let pain bring due reward of light and love.
Let the Soul control the outer form, and life and all events,
And bring to light the love that underlies the happenings of the time.
Let vision come and insight.
Let the future stand revealed.
Let inner union demonstrate and outer cleavages be gone.
Let love prevail.
Let all men love.
Today’s Quote of the Day is called the Mantram of Unification and is part of the Ancient Wisdom as taught by a Master of the Wisdom who is simply called The Tibetan. We will leave this for three days to discuss its three stanzas which we will start in the next post as part of our overall theme of Love is the Fulfilling of the Law. For now, we should see in the title and in the first lines the essence of the Christ’s message.
- * Websters Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1828 and 1913
- ** New Testament Greek Lexicon on BibleStudyTools.com
- *** Strongest Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible – 2001
- **** Word Studies in the New Testament; Marvin R Vincent D.D. 2nd edition, 1888
- *!* Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc.
- *!!* Dictionary.com. Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. HarperCollins Publishers
