Today’s first reading from Deuteronomy 10 tells us an immortal truth about the nature of the one, almighty God we worship. For it was written by and for a people who were extremely tribal, yet urges them most profoundly to act against that tribalism and see the God who chose them “in preference to all other peoples” as also the God who loves all other peoples as much as God loves them, the one true God “who has no favorites, accepts no bribes; who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and befriends the alien, feeding and clothing them.”

We too must confess, if we are to have any hope in overcoming it, that we also can harbor many of these same traits of tribalism that often influence our attitudes and behaviors towards others. When Moses urges the people to, “Circumcise your hearts and be no longer stiff-necked,” he is urging them to have a complete change of heart and cease resisting what amounts to God’s command (as well as Jesus’s) that we love everyone, without exception.

It is that “without exception” part that is often a stumbling block for us. It has been one for all peoples down through the ages. We ought not assume that simply because we call ourselves Christians and believe in the Lord Jesus and what he taught, that we have fully surrendered our own thoughts and understandings about it all. It can be summed up by two teachings of Jesus (teachings that are somehow echoed in virtually all faiths), “Do not judge,” and “Love your enemies.” In turn, those can be summed up in a third teaching, “If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that?” 

A great test of how much we embrace these teachings of Christ’s is to ask ourselves the question, can I have compassion for the child abuser, for the sex trafficker, for the mass murderer, for the leader who commits genocide? Do we simply think of such people as merely monsters, non-human and thus not worth any compassion? Do we justify our loathing by telling ourselves that such behaviors cannot be tolerated? Do we dismiss them as “evil” and thus feel justified in hating them? What if your compassion for such a person, your ability to show them love (which has nothing to do with approval of what they did) was the one thing that turned them from their terrible ways or at least led them to begin to repent?

The problem in withholding our love to those who we deem somehow worthy (not least of which is the belief that certain behaviors can have no forgiveness- and please do not quote Mark 3:28 which means something else entirely) is that the line we choose to demarcate that worthiness keeps moving. Eventually it grows to include those who radically disagree with us, then those who disturb us, then those who are foolish, annoying, troublesome or whatever. It is all a product of our fears.

Either compassion is all or it is nothing. Do you really believe that God would refuse forgiveness to whoever asked or that God ceases to continue inviting even the worst sinner to repentance, that God could cease loving us for any reason? If we refuse to even consider it possible to love the worst people of all, then we have judged, pure and simple. Do you really believe that the fact that you are not among those worst of all people has anything to do with your somehow being of more value than them? That you are innately, of yourself, somehow better? I refer you to Luke 18:9-14, as well as the saying, there, but for the grace of God, go I. As John has told us, “It is not that we have loved God, but that God has loved us.” God does not love us because we somehow merited God’s love. If that were true, we would all be quite lost forever. As Paul told the Romans, “All have sinned” and “While we were still sinners Christ died for us.” 

It is the very easiest of things to love those who delight us. The real test of love, the true love that comes only from God, is to seek to love everyone, most especially those who deeply repel us for whatever reason, those who seem so terribly unlovable. Only belief in that kind of love, the love Jesus showed us, and the willingness to seek it (for it comes only from God), will ever free us from the tyranny of our prejudices, our fears and loathing, our likes and dislikes, our pride and vanity, in other words from our “self” that forever strives to keep our hearts closed off and protected from all that causes us to fear. As long as we continue to give in to that fear, because to fear is to refuse to risk the great courage to love, we continue to separate ourselves from God who is perfect love, for perfect love casts out all fear.