In your mind’s eye, picture Niagara Falls. Imagine how much water flows over the falls. I googled this: 3160 tons of water flow over the falls every second. That’s 75,750 gallons over the American and Bridal Falls and 681,750 gallons over the Horseshoe Falls every second. Those figures are so large they are hard to process. But those gigantic figures are exactly what we need to imagine God’s love.
When St. Paul wrote about the love of Jesus, he used the term pour out or emptied himself (Phil 2:7). We might imagine a pitcher pouring a small stream into a glass. But that image does not consider an eternal, infinite God. God as Creator pours forth His love to create and sustain our universe. With the help of the new space-based telescopes, scientists now estimate there are two trillion galaxies. I googled that too. And if you add together all homo sapiens who have ever lived or who live now, you have about fifteen billion people, each one unique, each one made in God’s image. We need Niagara Falls to imagine what God creates and sustains: First, God’s love fills the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then, it overflows outward to create and sustain our universe and to create and sustain humanity. And there’s even more: In Christ Jesus, the loving God saves us for eternal life.
Today’s Gospel begins with two conflicting images of God. We’ll get to the one of Jesus Christ in a moment. The other image of God comes from first-century Israel’s political and religious leadership. That leadership used religion to coerce and dominate people. Failure to keep the 613 laws often resulted in exclusion from polite society. The one who failed might be excommunicated from worship, from the synagogue and temple. They might not even be permitted to go home. Please don’t judge those leaders harshly. They were trying to keep order so that the vicious Roman oppressors would not do even more harm.
On that day, Monday after the first Palm Sunday, that angry and hate-filled leadership wanted Jesus to flub his answer about the law so that they could arrest him and hand him over to the Romans. Knowing how brutal the Romans were, the leadership knew that they would crucify him. There is a sad lesson in this: Believers have often used the same version of the faith, judging, excluding, even hating and resorting to violence. You say you have not met such people; I’m glad. But in a minor way, everyone who gossips—who repeats bad things about their neighbor—is using their self-righteous faith to judge and abuse another. Even to our own day, people use religion to exclude, judge, condemn, and abuse others.
Keep all that in mind and listen to how Jesus responds to hatred. “You shall love the Lord, your God,” he said, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The God of Jesus Christ is the God of love. During the Lord’s ministry, Jesus converts love into various practices: forgiveness and mercy, inclusion, acceptance, kindness and gentleness, generosity, reconciliation and peace.
Those who translate the Gospel sometimes miss the mark. Our translation reads that the second commandment is like the first. The better translation would be of equal importance or of the same quality. Love of neighbor is of equal importance to the love of God. Now, here is how far Jesus would take us. Greek has three words for love. The most intense is agape, a self-sacrificing, self-giving love. Agape unites the Trinity, Father to the Son and the Father and Son to the Spirit. That love pours forth to us—like Niagara Falls. It is the love Jesus thinks we must return to God. And it is agape that Jesus says we must have for neighbors. In two other places, Matthew records that Jesus teaches self-giving love. In chapter 5, he teaches that we must have such love for all humankind, even for our enemies. And in chapter 19, Jesus teaches that we must have agape for the poor and the needy. Instead of using the word like in “the second is like it,” I would use the word participate. Since God’s love overflows like Niagara Falls, then God’s love floods over us. We can but swim in that love; we can but participate in it. Our self-sacrificing love must stream forth from us to all others.
Back to that Gospel scene: By Friday of that week, those who questioned Jesus probably thought they won. We call that Friday Good Friday. In the name of a false god of hate and violence, they turned Jesus over to the Romans who crucified him. I bet they thought they had done their duty. They thought that God vindicated their hatred and violence.
On the following Sunday, however, the true God burst their bubble. The God of life and love raised Jesus from the dead. When He did, God revealed that the one true religion is self-giving, self-sacrificing love. There can be no other. Worship the God of Jesus Christ. My friends, love your neighbor with the same love God has for you.