“Love does no harm to a neighbor…” - Paul, Romans 13:10
A few weeks ago I had the chance to preach a sermon on Romans 13:8-10. This passage is a beautiful depiction of Biblical love. Paul expresses the deep relationship between the Law of God and the fulfillment of that Law, which is found in the expression and lifestyle of love. Best depicted by Jesus, who chose to give up His life daily and eventually in totality upon a Roman cross, love is a limitless well of self-giving and self-sacrificing.
Tucked in the middle of these three potent verses is a statement that can easily be overlooked, or entirely blown out of proportion in our culture. Paul explains that love is the path that does no harm to a neighbor. What exactly does this mean?
As a teenager, I was a sort of pseudo, a la carte, pick-what-sounds-good-today, Christian. I loved love (although I had no idea what that meant). I was ready to claim Jesus as an historical fact, and His gift of grace as a beautiful expression of what we all need. I understood the Gospel and saw my need for it. I liked it, but I was unwilling to submit myself to much of it. As I looked at the unavoidable moral claims, I continually tried to wiggle out of what I saw as antiquated and repressive. This perspective led to my teenage mantra: Live and let love. Do what you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else.
At first glance, my worldview seemed to be the same as Paul’s statement, which expresses that failing to harm a neighbor is, in fact, love. Most of us learned the Commutative Property of math in elementary school: the equation is the same forward as backward, right?
If love = no harm, then no harm = love. And if love = no harm, then harm = no love. It has to add up!
Everything changes when we define our terms, however. What is harm? What is love? For me, it was easy to express what love was not, but I could not readily define what love is. I was convinced that anything that created any degree of harm meant that it totally negated love. It might feel like splitting hairs, but stick with me!
Before training physicians are given the nod to practice medicine, they are required to say the Hippocratic oath, which colloquially claims: first, do no harm. We inherently agree that doctors armed with chemicals, needles, and a brain full of information most of us cannot begin to comprehend, should have some boundaries. Their gifts and training should be regulated by a conscientious recognition that they have been equipped and commissioned to heal, not hurt. Amen and Hallelujah!
Although this commitment to do no harm feels intuitive, is it really that simple? I recently ran across an argument that called the Hippocratic oath, “the impossible oath.” Let me explain… I am no stranger to doctors. My sweet mother took me to the Emergency Room on more occasions than I am ready to confess. If you knew the number of concussions I achieved you would stop reading my words right now, or just be impressed that I know how to use punctuation marks. I’ve spent 15 of the last 16 years on crutches or in a walking boot at least once annually. Six lower body joint surgeries have helped to buy a couple of Teslas for local surgeons. In other words, I’m an insurance nightmare.
That being said, on several of these occasions, someone who swore the oath of Hippocrates had to hurt me in order to help me. A broken shinbone to realign my knee. A medicine that made me physically ill in the short term to make me healthier in the long term. Numerous doctors have harmed me, at least from my perspective as the suffering patient, to show me love.
If you asked me in high school if this was loving, I would plug it into my equation and tell you that it did not compute. Unfortunately, this is in a lot of ways, the climate in which we live. Many of us are tempted to claim that harm is unequivocally antithetical to love. If someone feels poorly about what you did or said, love is absent or, at best, poorly directed. The intent holds very little weight. The emotional outcome outweighs the intent or the truth of what was said or done.
One thing we need to see is that life is not as simple as many of us (myself included) want to boil it down to. Just because someone does something nice, or says something that does not ruffle our feathers, it does not make that action good for us. Simply because something hurts our feelings, or even makes us deal with some pain, that does not prove it to be unloving.
I do not think Paul was using my equation because Jesus didn’t seem to sympathize with my math. His first words in His very first sermon, as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, could be seen as harmful in our society: “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matt. 4:17)
God has to lovingly break our will to give us the blessed gift of grace. He must show us that we are irrefutably incorrect and impossibly dead to give us truth and life. Put simply, he has to harm a man, at least from a psychological perspective, to heal him on the deepest, spiritual level.
The sweet aroma of the Gospel exposes that although we must be harmed to be saved, God Himself was crushed. He incurred the resolute and final harm, furnished with the judgment that you deserved, to love you. Love does no harm, in the sense that it does not leave you broken and empty. Love sacrifices self to experience the ultimate harm to lift another from the ashes. Love holds a mirror that may lead to pain, to offer the solution.
So the next time you are in a situation when you are tempted to believe that speaking up or prodding someone towards Jesus, is a harmful act, do not use my equation. I was never all that good at math anyway.