Love Is the Law
Thursday, October 29, 2026
Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) considers how Jesus understood love as the ultimate fulfillment of God’s law:
Jesus made it clear that he did not come to abolish the laws of the Torah, “but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). The life and teachings of Jesus, then, embody all that these laws were intended to be. Jesus is what the living, breathing will of God looks like. This includes compassion for the poor, esteem for women, healing for the sick, and solidarity with the suffering. It means breaking bread with outcasts and embracing little children. It means choosing forgiveness over retribution, the cross over revenge, and cooking breakfast for the friend who betrayed you. As Elton Trueblood put it, “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.” [1]
When Jesus was challenged by the experts on the Law to give an answer for what Scripture is all about, he offered a very straightforward, very Jewish response. Quoting Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, he replied, “Love the Lord your God 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: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37–40).
This is the point of every liberation, every wandering through the desert, every law about oxen and yeast and blood. To love is to honor God and keep God’s commandments. Love is the law that liberates slave and slaveholder alike. Love is the ultimate deliverance story, for only love can sustain the sojourner out of Egypt, through the desert, up the mountain, and into the promised land.
The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say…. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?…
This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, What does this say? but, What am I looking for? I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).
If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm. With Scripture, we’ve been entrusted with some of the most powerful stories ever told. How we harness that power, whether for good or evil, oppression or liberation, changes everything.
References:
[1] Elton Trueblood, cited in Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity (HarperCollins, 2010), 114.
Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again (Nelson Books, 2018), 55–57.
Image credit and inspiration: Samuel Oakes, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Broadway, UK. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like bread offered to someone beyond the frame, we are invited to reach out to an unseen neighbor, both giving and receiving blessing.
Love Indivisible: John the Beloved on the Union of God, neighbor, and sibling
| BRADLEY JERSAKOCT 25 |
Love Indivisible in John the Beloved
The First Epistle of John the Beloved is a treasury of challenges to every assumption that would sabotage Love’s work in our lives and world. Read closely, it calls for a fearless self-examination that rattles religious presumptions and prepares us to hear the radical claims of divine love. Along those lines, I invite you to notice the “fusion of two loves” that push our notions of “divine union” to the nth degree.
The Fusion of Divine and Human Love
First, let’s notice how John fuses divine and human love. John learned from Jesus that the whole of the Law and Prophets can be expressed in a two-fold summary command: love God with your whole heart and love your neighbor with the same concern you have for yourself. John had witnessed Jesus unite love for God and neighbor in practice, such that the two loves became an indivisible fusion.
John boldly asserts that we cannot claim to love God while we still hate our human siblings. To imagine love for God but not our neighbor is, to John, a delusion. And living as if we could is hypocrisy—a lie. Strong words, but consider: in John, loving our neighbor IS loving God; it’s how you love God. More than a “should,” an obligation, or implication. More than an application or corollary to the Great Commandment. John has moved beyond a two-step “first you love God (via devotion), then you love your neighbor (via kindness, etc.).”
No. That would still imply a separation between God and humanity. It would overlook the radical union of Christ with his human family with whom he shares “one substance.” Jesus showed us that to love the poor, naked, hungry, sick, and imprisoned is to love him. In Christ and to Christ, ‘they’ are ‘Me.’
So too, he interrogates Paul, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” Notby way of analogy. And not indirectly. To persecute ‘them’ is to ‘murder Me.’To kill the other—whether the foreign enemy, the murderer on death row, or the war child—is to murder him.
The union of God and humanity is complete. We literally cannot know or love God apart from encountering him in every ‘them’ Jesus calls ‘Me.’ Cannot. I don’t just mean we should not see them as separate. They just aren’t. The union of God and humanity makes the separation impossible. Eventually, hopefully, unthinkable.
There is no “Love God” category AND “love neighbor.”
In Christ, the two loves are fused in hypostatic union.
The Fusion of Neighbor and Sibling
When I spoke of fusing love for God and neighbor in John’s epistle, I deliberately imported the language of neighbor. But that’s not right; John does not mention our neighbor. He speaks of “one another” (allēlōn – 6x) and “brother(s)/sister(s)” (adelphos/adelphē – 15x). Since John’s heart and theology are gender universal, I’ll use the inclusive term “siblings.”
As a child literalist with a King James Bible, I knew John was at least addressing my relationship with my one and only actual human brother, Rodney. I’ve told the story somewhere of the Sunday School poster I posted on my wall, “You cannot love God and hate your brother.” That’s short for the admonition:
“Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate a brother or sister are liars,
for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen,
cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:20, NRSVUE)
I left the poster on my wall for months, undergoing its work on me because I genuinely wanted to love God, but I knew I was often impatient, unkind, and sometimes cruel to Rodney. I wanted to do better.
While John didn’t mean for my obedience to be that exclusive, many of us still assumed “brother” referred to our Christian brothers and sisters. In fact, some streams of Christian theology not only narrow our love from all our neighbors to ‘the elect,’ but pull the same stunt with God! They claim that “God is notlove” by nature and does not love everyone—God, they say, is only love in the experience of the elect.
In this model, God’s love and ours are directed not at our neighbor, but specifically at our Christian brothers and sisters—John seems to urge love for a specific faith community of Christian believers. But history demonstrates this constricted love reopens the door to misuse and violence toward the feared minority, the despised stranger, and enemy other (a worrisome trend again today).
Universal Siblings
I want to offer an alternative reading of 1 John that I believe better reflects the same author who proclaimed, “God so loved the world.” This is John’s transformative takeaway from the revelation of God’s love in Christ. So I propose a second fusion: rather than seeing “siblings” as the faith-bearing subgroup within the broader human population, John’s vision of love is that in Christ, all neighbors are now revealed as siblings.
Practically, the Sikh hymn (and title of Valarie Kaur’s book) teaches us to “See no stranger.” Just as John sees love of God and neighbor as one indivisible act, so he replaces the language of neighbor with sibling because there is no difference. We look at the world in terms of strangers, enemies, and neighbors (categories of difference), but in Christ, we are one, a united family of siblings—including Jesus. He is not ashamed to call us siblings, and we must honor all humanity as siblings too.
In Christ, my neighbor is now my sibling.
And all are in Christ, not because they ‘became Christian,’
but because in his incarnation, he became human,
united to every human person.
My Brother’s Keeper?
I’ll close by revisiting the biblical archetype of Cain, who famously asked God (ever so defensively), “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Today, I hear Jesus, piercing our eyes and hearts with this sober reply, “No. You are their sibling. And they are Me.”
