I didn’t get past the very first line of the Romans passage before I was convicted. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” While I appreciate the message, I still owe a lot on my student loan and a car. And it is only in time that I will be able to work it off. So a little guilt came my way. I remember someone saying “the borrower is always enslaved to the lender.” (Proverbs 22:7b). Maybe that is why Paul gives this wisdom to those who are Christians in his time. It is still apt to remember now as we struggle to pay our debts.
Then Paul gets really serious. He distills four commandments into one. As a vintner takes the water out of the wine and makes it into good brandy, so does Paul. It is summed up in this word: Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is distilled to make it simple.
I know that after a conversation with a neighbor that I fairly run to my rolodex to write down their names. Otherwise I will wave to them for a year and forget their names. I am ashamed not to have written down all the names yet. After all, I could invite these folks to church to find us a seeking, open, family in Christ.
We are not called to be rule followers so much as we are called to openly love one another in what we say and do. It is God’s love for us that led to our receiving through Moses these 10 Commandments—which boil down to sensible living. They are found in Exodus 20 in paragraph form so if you look them up you will see they are numbered differently by believing traditions. We find them a comfort as we live out lives. They were just the beginning of rules for the Israelites who received well over 300 rules in the course of the Old Testament. It only starts here as the priestly order of scribes recorded them originally. It even includes directions on how priests should dress properly.
So I am not so happy to receive these distilled commandments from Paul’s letter. What I discovered is that the word ‘love’ there in the Greek is ‘agapao’—a future tense meaning ‘unconditional’ love. I am glad to think of my brothers and sisters in Christ as my neighbors and some who will be future people in the family of God. As humans we have an easier time with ‘phile’ type love. It is only God who shows us how to have the other type of unconditional love.
My heart loves that Paul wants to simplify for his Roman friends these Commandments and if we take this in context we have to know that the Romans were more often called ‘gentiles’ who do not have the Commandments as their first covenant and history, so distilling four commandments into one is welcome instead of having to study and read Hebrew or Aramaic. Not many would have done that—Hebrew was a dying language that went unspoken for centuries before a linguist revamped it from the dead so to speak. The rules are all simplified and make it a much easier language than Greek or English.
I admire Paul for looking to the future. Paul wants us all woken from our sleep and ready for salvation with good lives. Good servants are laying aside the darkness and ready for the light of the World: Christ will come again.