Love Is a Decision

Notice what Jesus does not say in today’s Gospel.

When religious leaders ask what matters most, he does not say, “Believe the right things,” or “Worship this way,” or “Belong to that church.” He doesn’t even say, “Read your Bible” or “Pray every day.” He says one word: love. Love God. Love your neighbor. That’s it.

We use that word “love” for everything. We “love” movies, football, our iPhones, Taylor Swift, maybe not the Dodgers this year. What we’ve learned about love comes less from Scripture and more from Hollywood and social media, where love is presented as something that happens to us. We fall in love. Love is blind. Love at first sight. Love breaks our hearts. In this popularized understanding, love is a power that carries us off, and we are just along for the ride.

That is not the love Jesus is talking about. Jesus never says, “I hope you fall in love someday.” He says, “This is the greatest and the first commandment.” You don’t command a feeling. You can’t order a spark. But you can command a decision. For Jesus, love is something we choose, and keep choosing, again and again, even when we don’t feel like it. It is the choice to follow him on the only sure road to happiness with God and one another.

You don’t command a feeling. You can’t order a spark. But you can command a decision.

Love is what God wants from us. Not our fear. Not our guilt. Not even our perfect religious performance. God wants our love. And God wants every one of God’s children to feel loved. By us. Not shamed. Not judged. Not shut out, put down, or made small. Loved. By us.

Today’s first reading says the same thing in plainer words: “You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.” Notice the reason God gives. Not “because it’s the law,” but because we remember. We know what it is to be the stranger, the one with no one to speak for us. For many of us here, that is not ancient history. It is our parents’ story, our grandparents’ story, maybe our own story.

This is one of the oldest mandates in the Bible. It is why our bishops, last November, in a rare special message, spoke out against the mass deportation and inhumane treatment of immigrants and endorsed a nation’s right to regulate its borders. Both are true. But no one’s dignity is ever denied or up for negotiation.

The same Scripture won’t let us look away from the widow and the orphan: the elderly neighbor who eats alone, the child who goes to bed hungry, the family one paycheck from the street. God doesn’t ask us to fix every policy by Monday. God asks us not to wrong them, and not to walk past.

What does that look like? We have an example from someone who once sat where you are sitting. Greg Boyle graduated from Loyola High School and became a Jesuit in 1972. In 1986, he was named pastor of Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights; it was the poorest parish in Los Angeles, and the neighborhood with the most gang activity in the city.

Most of the city decided that gang members were threats to be locked up, problems to be eliminated, people one crossed the street to avoid. Greg made a different decision. He opened the parish to them and started a program called Jobs for a Future. Then came a bakery, where opposing gang members who had been trying to kill each other put on aprons and worked side by side baking bread. Nobody asked him to do it. No policy required it, and no one was applauding. He decided to love the people everyone else had stopped seeing. That bakery grew into Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention and re-entry program in the country. Thousands walk through its doors every year, looking for one thing: a chance to start over.

That is today’s Gospel. To love with our whole heart, soul, and mind is to decide to move past our fears, our wounds, our stereotypes, and our small wants to comfort, support, seek out, and welcome the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the lost and the lonely. To whom can we offer a fresh start, an open hand, an understanding heart?

We almost always underestimate what we can do when we love like that. Not a warm, fuzzy feeling, but a decision to trust God and care for someone else, with no motive except their good. That kind of love comes from God. In fact, it is God, leading us all safely home.

There is no clearer sign of that love than the meal God sets for us here, at this table. So let us come, receive, and go out to share all that God gives us.