Love is the obligation

Many people know the front half of John 6 because it’s Jesus feeding the 5,000 and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Top 10 Jesus story, surely, whether you’re a Christian or a church-goer or not. We forget about the back half of that chapter, where Jesus explains that Christians are going to be eating his body and drinking his blood. To which a whole bunch of Jesus’ followers said, effectively and understandably, “I’m out” in response. Even the 12 disciples say “Who can accept this?!?” (Exclamation mark and second question mark are mine.)

Jesus doesn’t let on until the last supper later in the story that he meant it as a metaphor with “This bread is my body. This wine is my blood.” (And that’s in Matthew’s version of the Christ story. In John’s version, he just leaves them hanging entirely, as far as I can tell. Crimeny.)

This morning, our pastor addressed Jeff Session quoting Romans 13:1 to justify separating children from parents at the border. He used John 6, and here’s what he said:

“No single verse gets close to knowing Jesus completely. [Romans 13:1] in particular has a really nasty history. It was used by churches in the American south to justify slavery. It was used by churches in Nazi Germany to condone the atrocities that the Germans were committing. [Cherry-picking a single verse] proves grossly inadequate because it completely fails to take Jesus in all his fullness and let that shape us…If we keep reading Romans 13, we come to this line ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to your neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.’ [He then hit on several other passages about how we are to treat neighbors and children and foreigners.]

Love is the obligation. Love is the law we are bound to honor…

[In John 6, with the eating flesh and drinking blood,] Jesus is saying ‘In the whole entirety of me, that’s where you’ll find the truth.’ From that perspective, I don’t know what else to say other than: In the context of the fullness of scripture, I find these practices happening at our southern border to be an atrocity. Just a gross evil. There is no part of scriptures that match what’s going on there. There’s no part of what’s happening on our southern borders that looks like or sounds like things Jesus said or did…

I am so leery of the church trying to define government policy. I don’t think that’s our role. I don’t think it’s our place. But it is our role, absolutely, to speak out when those policies take a shape that is unjust and destructive. And these are…There’s no part of me that sees any part of Jesus that would be OK with it.

This is not about politics…I know that this and every political issue is complicated, and I don’t understand them very well…But there are times when we, as people of Jesus, we just gotta stand up and say ‘That’s not OK.’”