Only Love heals the hurt

A sermon on Matthew 22:34-46 by Jill Friebel, 23 October 2005
© http://www.laughingbird.net

Several years ago I had a one of those sort conversations with a young woman
that affected me and has stayed with me. She was in her early 30's and it
was in the Canadian office of the mission society that David and I belonged
to when we worked in Niger. She had attended the same boarding school in
Nigeria that our 5 children had attended and our situations were similar.
She told me how hurt she had been by the feelings of abandonment and
desperate loneliness that she had experienced as a little girl when she had
been sent off to Kent Academy the mission boarding school in Nigeria and
even as she spoke I was connecting with my own pain because my own girls
were angry with me at the time. As she had grown up the hurt just grew and
the anger against her parents grew with it. Not only was she angry at them
but she was really angry with God because her pain was caused by her parents
doing God's work. It is bad enough to be abandoned but to be abandoned in
the name of God is doubly hurtful. Where was God for her in the dark nights
when she was frightened and lonely and there were no loving arms to comfort
her? Why didn't God intervene and do something to help her, all this talk
about God loving you - how come she never experienced it? I wanted to come
to her mother's defense but thankfully I didn't.

This dilemma comes up again and again in my conversations with people. Just
this week another woman asked me a similar question.

"If God really loves me why didn't he intervene and do something about my
situation? When you tell me that God loves me it doesn't mean anything to
me. My parents never loved me, my husband never loved me and I prayed over
and over for God to intervene and help me. So when Jesus says to love the
Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind it just doesn't mean
much to me."

This is a constantly repeated human dilemma for many. The fact that life's
circumstances can bring so much sadness and disappointment makes it terribly
difficult for some to really believe that God really loves them. They hear
the words and even if they try to believe it, it just doesn't have much
effect on them. You can't make yourself feel loved.

Now the amazing thing about this woman is the way I see her love her own
children and the compassion and love she shows to people in her life who
have fallen between the cracks. The ones most have no time for and who are
not really acceptable to good Christian company, and she doesn't talk about
loving them at all, she just does it. She speaks volumes to me about love
not by what she says but by what she does. And it is truly amazing
because she has hardly received any love from the important people in her
life and she has been abandoned in every sense of the word. The abuse and
neglect started from the time she was born but she still knows how to love.
And so she continues to struggle with the question of whether God really
loves her and how can she can really love God. But she seems determined to
hang in on the journey because there is longing deep within her that she
can't really explain.

When the Pharisees ask Jesus which commandment in the law is the most
important he replied with the best-known commandment of all. They already
knew this well. "You will love the Lord your God with everything you are - all your passion,
all your deepest desire, and all your brainpower." This is the most
important and number one commandment. And this next one comes second only to
it:
You will love your neighbour as attentively as you love yourself.
Everything else in the law and the prophets hangs on these two
commandments."
There is nothing our community here at South Yarra needs more than to love
God and then to love each other as we love ourselves. We all believe it
intellectually just as the Pharisees did, but we have so much trouble doing
it. We each struggle with it in different ways. Some of us find it easier
to love God but not our neighbour, and others of us find it easier to love
our neighbour and not God. And to be really honest all of us find it hard
to do both at times. And yet we are told to love even when we don't feel
like it. Love does not come from a feeling but from a commitment and
action. We can only love God like this because God loves us first. Being
commanded to love is like telling a child to be grateful. You can make a
child say thank you but you can't make them grateful. You just hope that in
time this will happen. God knows how much we struggle with loving action,
but we are commanded to do it because in time we will be changed in the
process and we will become more and more loving because of our commitment to
do it.
The times when love flows more easily will be the times when we see the
truth of God's love for us or experience it though the love of another. The
young woman who felt so angry with God because of the abandonment and
separation as a child, went on to tell me how she had a complete change of
heart one day in her mid twenties. She happened to enter the ladies
bathroom at the airport and found a mother weeping uncontrollably. She knew
her to be the mother of several younger children who now attended Kent
Academy and she had just said good-bye to them. She was surprised at the
distress of this mother, and realized for the first time that her own mother
must have suffered like this in the times of separation. It was in that
moment that her anger against her own parents and against God was calmed and
diffused by the knowledge that her parents didn't do it deliberately to hurt
her. It had been as hard for them as it was for her. She felt healed in
her spirit and the abandonment was transformed into a powerful experience of
identification with Jesus. Jesus too had suffered abandonment because of
his great love for his children. God grieves with those abused and
abandoned for it has never been his desire for anyone to suffer at the hands
of another. Indeed the command to love is like the Holy Loving Father
begging his children to stop fighting and see how much they are loved and
accepted and forgiven and to then love him their Father and each other.
We have a high level of hurt in our community and the hurt becomes a barrier
to the receiving and the giving of love. The more hurt we are the more
defences we need to protect ourselves from any more hurt. And this makes us
even more sensitive and fragile and makes it even more difficult to receive
love. We have become critical and it has a way of boomeranging. It is a
vicious circle. We come from all over town because the liturgy and theology
offers us hope for our hurts. We hear the words of love over and over and
they draw us. We can't get enough of them. We pray for all who bear the
wounds of a broken world and yearn for healing and renewal and with all who
suffer with Christ under the weight of the sin of the world. We are
praying for ourselves as much as we pray for others. This is a good place
to come to, to hear the words and participate in the love feast around the
table. But we can remain as stuck and blocked as the Pharisees if the love
that God has for us can't penetrate our defences and heal our hurts and
diffuse our cynicism and criticism.
Matthew's gospel is written to the post resurrection church about Jesus.
But it is as much about God as it about Jesus. Jesus appears in almost
every scene of the Gospel of Matthew and the narrative is 'about' Jesus only
in the sense of Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus is not chosen to be elected to
be the Christ by his admirers or is even the Christ because of what he did
and said. Matthews's narrative focuses on how God has intervened in worldly
human affairs powerfully in Jesus. He demonstrates his love to each one of
us that we might become the beloved and love both God and neighbour.

God has heard the cry of the lost and broken and has come in time and space
and contrary to all expectations anointed Jesus to be the Messiah. What is
at stake here is not who Jesus is but who God is.
We are broken by the sin of the world, but we also participate in that sin.
God has now intervened in our lives in Jesus to heal us of all the hurts.
Jesus is the human face of God. He did not escape the hurts of life and yet
he never participated in the sin. He knew what it was to be rejected,
misunderstood, betrayed and even tortured to death. But never did he turn
away from his commitment and action to love us, even when we had no love for
him. The only way for the hurt to be healed is to keep talking and sharing
your pain with Christ. This is what it means to have a relationship with
God. A relationship where you can let down your defences and be completely
honest and dialogue with someone who knows everything about you and cares
deeply for you. It is in this conversation that you will hear Jesus speak
into your hurts and this is different to believing that he can. Keep on with
this journey, it can take a very long time. Jesus said earlier in Mat 7
"Don't look for shortcuts to God. The way to life - to God! - is vigorous
and requires total attention."
God is never impatient or critical of your efforts to respond, but he has a
lot to say about those who claim to be religious and talk a lot about God
but keep their defences high and keep God out.
We are not commanded to love a God who is remote and uninvolved in our
lives. That would be an impossible command. Matthew's gospel sets out
clearly the historical background of Jesus, the OT scriptures that spoke
about his coming, the compassion of God shown through the God-human Jesus
towards his people.
Through his wounds may you find healing;
Through his pain may you find relief;
Through his suffering may you find freedom'
Through his cross may you find victory