October 25, 2026
MCCNY
But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?” Jesus said to him, “You shall love the ruler your gods with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
We’ve just been told that the only whole and true way to obey the call of discipleship to Jesus’ Way is to love our neighbor. That’s the main thing, and everything else I say for the next few minutes depends on it. We cannot love god or goodness if we will not love our neighbor.
Jesus models that love here as he says it.
And he models it with his enemies, people trying to trick him, who have been trying to kill him and will eventually succeed in killing him.
These are people he also has called hypocrites and widow robbers. That will come in handy later.
This whole business is a test and has been for weeks with Matthew. Twenty verses ago, Pharisees and Herodians asked Jesus, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor” to put Jesus in the crosshairs of the state and get him killed. Ten verses ago, Sadducees asked him, “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be” to wedge him between competing religious groups and get him killed. That one was a story problem. The Pharisees tap back in today, and one asks, “What’s the best commandment” to set up a political-religious kickboxing free-for-all and get him killed. It would be like naming the most important constitutional amendment. The first Amendment? The second? Thirteenth?
They’ve been trying to undermine and kill Jesus from the get. Leading up to this passage in all three gospels that have it, Jesus foretells or alludes to his death a number of times and the Pharisees or Sadducees or scribes are always implicated. Not in a good way. He will be rejected by them. He will be handed over to them. And yet he answers this question, and the answer he gives to them is love in every sense.
He answers that no part of the law is separate from love of neighbor. Neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything in the law can be separated from love of neighbor. Rabbi Hillel, a near contemporary of Jesus, said it, too, “What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” Paul wrote in Romans 13, “Love works no ill to its neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” This is not a new commandment, no matter what the much loved and deeply problematic John gospel says. The parameters of “neighbor” is also well known throughout scripture, detailed often in the Leviticus tradition as actions – always behavior rather than emotion – acts of chesed and non-exploitation: leave your field for the traveler to glean; do not steal, deal falsely, or profane; do not oppress the neighbor, exploit employees, or discriminate against the disabled; do no injustice or show partiality in judgment, do not slander or bear false witness against the neighbor.
Jesus goes on to clarify that the neighbor does in fact include hated neighbors. It’s after this story in the Luke gospel that a lawyer, probably also a scribe, asks Jesus to specify, please, and please dramatically limit who counts as a neighbor. And we know Jesus answers with a parable about a hated enemy, and repeats that point elsewhere saying to love our enemies, and do good to those who hate our guts, and bless those who cuss at us and reject us, and pray for those who treat us like we aren’t human.
Which also is not unique and does not originate with Jesus or Christianity. Jesus was a Jew, and loving the hated enemy has roots in the prophets and poems of Hebrew scripture and its Exodus laws. Those verses say if you find your enemy’s donkey or ox (or wife?) wandering around you’re supposed to return it to them safely. Also if you see your enemy’s ox or donkey (or wife) fallen down under its burden and you don’t want to help your enemy, don’t leave it (or her) lying there. You must help anyway (Ex 23). The law actually includes language for our resistance to help someone we hate. The law says in its words that we don’t want to help them, and it requires that we do, anyway. That is so cool; I love it like I love the Tao. It feels real, it feels lived in. It underscores both that “neighbor” includes hated neighbor, and it underlines that love is an action, not a feeling. Love is an action, not a feeling, both in Exodus and in Matthew. As hard as it will be to love someone we don’t like and kind of hate, it’s a bit easier – thanks, Obama – because we don’t have to like them or feel love for them. We just have to do the thing. This is the Jewish principle in Sefer HaChinuch that “after our actions, our hearts follow” (2/11/26 18Forty Parsha Guide). I feel like it’s also the Taoist principle of wu wei, doing without forcing. The water flows around the rock.
It’s worth saying that the Pharisees and Sadducees and the scribes of Judaism are men who love the law and love god. Using them in aphorisms as less obedient to the law than, say, tax collectors is profound because of its surprising reversal. They are also men trying repeatedly to trick and kill Jesus. Jesus challenges them – again and again – to be more obedient to god and the law, and again and again he does it by challenging them to love their neighbor.
I assume in this lesson that we’re mostly identifying with Jesus and with those persecuted by the powerful elite, then and now, and rightly so. We need to and it’s an honor and a pleasure to love ourselves and other people hated and hunted, trans and documented and undocumented immigrants, Latine folks born here just like me and my brothers, Black folks trying to survive in any day in the history of this country. We are the widows and the traveler gleaning the field. The righteous. We are those led into the Bethesda pool and up from our bedroll and lowered to Jesus through the roof. We’re at the heart of the law and the heart of Jesus’s ministry. But that is not the lesson of today. We’re not Jesus today. We aren’t learning to unlearn not loving us today, not to love the widows and strangers. Today we’re learning the lesson of the Pharisees. I think today’s lesson is to recognize that we cannot be faithful or followers of Jesus or Christians or however we call ourselves if we do not love even our enemies, to recognize this, and then to love them.
So.
I don’t know how to do that. Here’s some stuff I’ve done.
I was thinking about several toxic bosses I had over the years, who I practiced Lovingkindness meditation for. One of them, we got through it and were okay. One of them I’m embarrassed to admit how angry I still am, and I’ve been wondering all week whether I could love my neighbor if I ever see her again. But Lovingkindness meditation is a thing that can hold a space for loving an enemy, and I did it that other time by simply wishing them wellness, safety, and ease again and again. I worked up to it in increments, because the practice actually has me start with people I actually wished well, to loosen the soil. But I never had to actually feel it for the people I didn’t feel it for yet. Lovingkindness is behavior, too, not feeling. Thank god. The feeling is extra. It’s fine and good, but it’s not the commandment, it’s not the practice. The commandment is the behavior. Thank god.
Another thing I do happened a couple weeks ago. I try to do this other thing as a practice. A toxic anti-choice speaker came to campus and said deliberately provoking and provocative things about abortion and women’s bodies at the invitation of a student group. And I’m pro-abortion, because I’m pro-healthcare and pro-body autonomy. After the speaker left and students mostly drifted off, I was talking with a few students who had arranged for the event. I introduced myself, and I listened for a while as they told me what they believe, and I said a couple affirming things when it felt true, and I asked kind of carefully about things that seemed inconsistent or inaccurate. I never called anything dumb or false, and I tried to construct the questions to really be questions and not accusations. I definitely have an external motivation in this case because these students might get sexually assaulted or need EC or DV safety planning and will need to feel safe enough with me to ask for help. And I want everyone who needs that help to feel safe enough with me to ask for it. So I tried to get through the conversation with honesty and conviction and giving a rat about people bleeding out in the doctor’s parking lot from ectopic pregnancy; without breaking my integrity, but without breaking relationship.
These don’t feel like hated neighbors, though. Well, that one boss I do wonder. It feels different though than people who are actively trying to disenfranchise and disempower and kill us with legislation and executive orders and election interference. It feels different than people who are straight up calling Muslims jihadists in ads and calling childhood sexual abuse survivors liars because their mom didn’t believe them and didn’t protect them and is willing to say so in a campaign ad. Do you know about these ads in the Ohio governor’s race? Lovingkindness practice and respectful clarifying questions feel inadequate to me for the moms who choose to live with and believe and protect a child sexual abuser and the political candidate who gives her a microphone. I don’t know if Lovingkindness mindfulness can hold that kind of space. It probably can; it probably totally can. It’s probably user error; it’s probably me unwilling to try. And I am unwilling. These are the people for me that feel like the hated enemy Jesus and Exodus is describing. I want to leave that donkey lying in the field. I have no built-in external pressure to retain relationship with these terrible, violent, self-dealing people, other than that I think Jesus actually said that we can’t love god or goodness without loving our enemies. I think he meant it literally. And I want to love goodness.
If I call myself good, or a follower of Jesus, or faithful. If I come to church or show up to chaplain at a hospital. If I let it be known that I preach regularly at Christian churches but do not try to love my enemies, if I leave their ox and donkey (and wife) fallen under its load, I don’t know how I’m different than the ones I hate. I don’t know.
But I don’t know how to preach loving this level of hated neighbor. I’ve been struggling to try to say. After DOGE got into the social security files, I received a dozen pieces of mail with my full deadname, first middle, and last, that my mother gave me and haven’t used for thirty years. They think not just that we don’t get to say who we are, they think we don’t get to name ourselves. They didn’t care what that did to me, or they did and taunting was the point. And that’s just the tip. Some of these people are literally killing us and literally don’t care if we die. People born here are being arrested and held for days and weeks. People are being released and left in the woods to die. Decorated officers are being fired.
Jesus called his enemies hypocrites and widow killers as he loved them, but getting to also name them hypocrites and widow thieves doesn’t feel like enough of a trade-off.
In the several drafts of this sermon that I started and deleted and started, I knew that I was going to get to this point eventually. And I knew that all I was going to have to offer you would be a couple of things I don’t do, like that list in Leviticus of how not to treat a neighbor, and then a few koans and parables and puzzles that I think about when I wish I could love better. Or, let’s just call a spade a spade, when I’m trying to hate people in a more loving way. I want to be real and say how embarrassed I am about how glibly I’ve preached this passage in the past. I know nothing, Jon Snow. Here’s what I got:
I’m not going to talk about forgiveness. I won’t even mention it after this. Forgiveness is so deliberately misused and weaponized, and so many of us misunderstand it. I’d say that’s for another sermon, but I pretty much just said all I ever say about forgiveness.
I do not make fun of people’s bodies, or their age, or their mental capacity, even if I hate them. Corrine taught me that when I was twenty-six. (Corrine has always been a good person.)
I cannot wish these folks wellness, safety, and ease. And they don’t need it from me since they’re wresting it from the rest of us to our peril. You know, though, Lovingkindness practice isn’t to give anyone else wellness, safety, and ease; it’s to give me those things. Still can’t do it. But I don’t wish them violence. I don’t wish for it out loud and I try not to let myself think it.
I don’t deny people their humanity, even when I hate them. There’s a parable I heard from Tara Brach that I think about a lot. A teacher gave two disciples each a chicken and an axe and told them to go someplace where no one could see, and kill the chicken. The first disciple was back very quickly, and had taken the chicken behind a barn and killed it. The second disciple was gone a very long time and finally returned with the chicken still alive. The teacher asked, “What happened?” The student replied, “I couldn’t find a place to kill the chicken where no one could see. Every place I go, the chicken sees.”
I think a lot about Thich Nhat Hahn when I’m angry. I think a lot about how much my wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of others. King said none of us are free until we all are, and it meant in part that the oppressor to some extent is harming themselves. Like I care. Jesus says I have to care. Thich Nhat Hahn says so many things that I roll my eyes at and don’t want to do anything with. He says, If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in a sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. I know that there is no place where I stop and my hated neighbor starts. I know that I am not separate from even the neighbor I hate for cause.
The last story puzzle example I want to give is about a man determined to get rid of his negative emotions. I think Pema Chodron tells this story. Mostly he wanted to get rid of his fear, but I’d like us to be thinking about today’s lesson, about our hate and anger for the enemies who are trying to kill and erase us. His teacher told him to stop struggling, but he didn’t understand. Finally his teacher sent him to a hut in the hills to meditate. He settled to practice, and when it got dark he lit three candles. At midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room, and in the darkness he saw a large king cobra, right in front of him, swaying. All night he sat alert, unable to sleep, keeping his eyes on the snake. He was so afraid he couldn’t move; there was just the snake, himself, and the hate. Just before dawn the last candle went out. With no candle, no sight, he began to cry. He cried not in despair but from tenderness, from the longing of all creatures and all people. From knowing their alienation and struggle. He finally, fully accepted that he was angry, that he resisted and struggled, that he hated. He accepted also that he was precious, wise and foolish, rich and poor, and unfathomable. He felt such gratitude that he stood, walked to the snake, and bowed to it. Then he was able to sleep.
I think these are things we could do. We don’t have to feel. Not a thing, we only have to behave as if. And maybe after our actions, our hearts can follow. There may be room for compassion as we work toward compassion, but all we have to do is work toward it.
It’s supposed to be hard. But I want to circle back to wu wei. We can wu wei the heck out of it. The water flows around the rock. In tai chi, it’s letting the opponent ramp up and take their own self out. Wu wei is stepping aside as much as it is blocking.
A.A. Milne himself described wu wei in the House at Pooh Corner, doing without doing, or doing by going along with the nature of things with his description of the river: by the time it came up to the edge of the forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “there is no hurry. we shall get there some day.”
I love you. Peace.
