Sept 6, 2026; Romans 13: 8-10; 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Paul’s teaching in today’s second reading seems impossible to follow. He calls us to follow the commandment of Jewish Torah to love our neighbor as ourselves. But how can you command someone to love? When someone hurts us, when a person does evil, when our neighbor is offensive or disgusting, we react immediately and feel what we feel. How can we love in such circumstances? Even if God commands it, even if the Bible insists that we do it, we can not change the way we feel.
We cannot change the way we feel, but God’s command to love is not about a feeling. The Bible’s injunction that we love our neighbor is not talking about an emotion but about a way to live. Paul knows this. This is why he says to the Romans, “Love does no evil to the neighbor.” God’s command then is not that we change our feelings, but that we control our actions. Even if we are full of hate, anger, or displeasure with a neighbor, we are still commanded not to say or do anything evil against them.
Such an understanding of the command to love is a variation on Jesus’ command to non-violence. We are to turn the other cheek. Regardless of how we feel, we are not to do harm to our neighbor. Now, this is not an easy commandment, but it is a possible one. We cannot change the way that we feel, but we can decide how we are going to act. I am convinced that it is because people associate the command to love with a feeling that people dismiss this commandment as impossible, instead of getting down to the hard work of making sure that our violent feelings do not move into violent actions.
Our American culture provides us with many vivid examples of violence running wild. I look with dread at the upcoming weeks before the elections because every political ad that I see is aimed at denigrating and tearing down the other candidate. The purpose of the ad is not to inform us but to manipulate us. I look with fear as more and more people are allowing their deep seated political, racial, and economic beliefs to be expressed in violent action, in mass shootings and bombings which harm us all. In a general sense, it is frightening how more and more people are finding it acceptable to vent their feelings in violent language that denigrates and slurs those think differently. At this rate we will soon all be at one another’s throats.
This why God commands us to love our neighbor, to assure that whatever violent feelings we may have are not turned to violent words and actions. God commands us to love our neighbor, not so that we might have warm feelings for everyone around us—but so all of us may survive.