“Never cease to love your fellow-Christians”

(Hebrews 13:1 [Revised English Bible])

“Let brotherly love continue”

(Hebrews 13:1 [King James Version])

Once two Presbyterians were not seeing eye to eye on a matter of considerable concern. In fact, they were working as hard as they could on opposite sides. They were canceling out each other’s efforts. In exasperation one Presbyterian remarked about his brother, “I know he is a good man. I suppose he means well. Certainly he is a Christian, but I do believe that he is the most awkward Christian I’ve ever known.”

Most of us, one way or another, are awkward Christians in the eyes of some of our fellow Christians. We cannot always agree. We get in each other’s way. We stir up hostile feelings against each other. We work at cross-purposes.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews sets down as his most important ethical demand for those first-century Christians to whom he was writing, “Never cease to love your fellow-Christians.” Or, as the old King James Version has it, “Let brotherly love continue.” Sometimes it is pretty difficult to let brotherly love continue with some of the brethren we have. Presumably, even in those idyllic days of the early church where the love of Christ still was very strong, brotherly love among fellow Christians was not always an easy achievement, else the writer of this epistle would not have thought it necessary to include the exhortation, “Never cease to love your fellow-Christians.”

Certainly Jesus had repeatedly emphasized this cardinal moral and ethical demand. He said all the requirements of religion could be summed up in the Old Testament command to love God with all one’s mind and heart and soul and strength, and one’s neighbor as oneself. He charged his disciples never to cease to love one another, because in the eyes of the world their love for one another was to be their badge of Christian discipleship: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

And the Elder John wrote to the Ephesian Christians, “It’s no new commandment but an old one, one we had from the beginning of our Christian experience: Love one another.”

But always, in every age, it has been difficult for Christians to let brotherly love continue. Paul and Barnabas fell out over John Mark and for a while could not work together. Doctrinal differences from time to time have separated Christians. During the Arian controversy in the fourth century, when the church fathers were debating the human and divine nature of Christ, it was said, “All Christendom is split over a diphthong,” referring to the controversy over two similar Greek words defining the human-divine nature of Christ. Christians in the separate denominations for a long time differed sharply in their views of how to worship: to kneel or not to kneel to pray, to be immersed or to be sprinkled at baptism.

But I suppose there has never been a time more difficult for Christians to let brotherly love continue than today in our American churches. Christians differ widely in their views on social, political, economic, and environmental questions. Conscience demands that sincere Christians contend for their convictions. In the controversy that develops, some Christians appear to be very awkward to other Christians, and brotherly love is often the first casualty.

The mother of the governor of Massachusetts listened to her minister one Sunday not so very many years ago and immediately was persuaded to go to Florida and demonstrate against what appeared to her to be unjust laws and inhumane customs. But some of the sincere Christian people in Florida were outraged at her conduct. They saw to it that she was put in jail for her trouble. The feeling of the Floridians was that Mary Parkman Peabody and her kind were just buttinskies who could better use their energies in cleaning up the wrongs and inhumanities in their own backyards.

When the World Council of Churches, headquartered in Geneva, Swit­zerland, appropriated $160,000 for financing the first missionary project ever undertaken in the United States — a project for educational and relief work among the black people of Mississippi — the Christian people in the whole mid-South viewed this “foreign mission” effort with consternation. We had been in the habit of thinking of the needy areas as being far away. It stirred us up.

Conscientious Christians in our time are finding themselves on opposite sides of the burning issues of abortion, homosexuality, and conservation of our planet’s resources and people.

John Beifuss, reporting in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, noted:

Many of the country’s major Protestant denominations are grappling with social issues from sexuality to racism to the environment. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and others are publicly struggling with their responsibilities during national conventions this year. Not surprisingly, sex has been the subject of the most heated debates.

Many Christians believe the church is obligated to tackle social problems, even if it means becoming involved in political issues. Others think the church should stick to spreading the word that Jesus Christ is the savior of mankind.

Why should churches take on the world and the flesh as well as the devil?

It’s difficult enough for us to get along with our fellow Christians in the most placid of times — what with our varying temperaments and conflicting convictions and awkward ways of being able to see the mote in the other fellow’s eye or the pigsty in our neighbor’s yard better than in our own — but when a social revolution is in progress all over the world, and one of the hottest of the hot spots is developing right under us, and sincere Christians of widely divergent views begin to act on their convictions, we have double trouble on our hands. No wonder the storm warnings are out.

How can we now let brotherly love continue? How now never cease to love our fellow Christians? What will reconcile our differences? Who’s to give in? The Christian answer, and the only Christian answer, is for us all to be reconciled to Christ. My brother and I, who see things differently, need to bring our convictions and our expressions of them to Jesus Christ and learn of him and of him be corrected. As we become more and more reconciled to Christ, his teachings, and his spirit, the closer we will find ourselves together at all points.

Never before have Christians so much needed Jesus’ parable of the vine and the branches.

“Ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”

“If any man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

“If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you….”

“If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love….”

“This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.” (John 15:5-7, 10, 12).

This parable of the vine declares the moral and ethical nature of Christian love, not its sentimentality. Christian love is something entirely different from just liking someone, even from liking someone very much, even devotedly. Christian love is willing the good for another as one wills good for oneself, as Jesus wills good for all people whether they deserve it or not. Remember, Paul says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Christian love is affirming the fact of another’s sonship to God. Christian love is working for another’s welfare as one works for his own welfare. This is loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Such love is more an act of the mind and the will than of the emotions, and it is not possible unless we abide in Christ, unless the teachings of Christ about God and God’s love for all people abide in us.

Philip Vollmer, in his Life of John Calvin, records that Calvin, writing about his own personal religious experience, said, “God, by a sudden con­version, subdued my heart to teachableness.” And John T. McNeill, in The History and Character of Calvinism, says of Calvin that when God made him teachable, the textbook used was the Bible.

So it is understandable why Calvin chose as his emblem a burning heart in an open hand — the hand of God. Once, in a passage about the Holy Spirit, Calvin wrote, “The Spirit inflames our hearts with the love of God.”

And what is the result of such a God-subdued life? When the little council that ruled Geneva met after Calvin’s death, it placed on record the impression the great reformer had left on those about him: “God marked him with a character of singular majesty.” Those men who had worked most closely with Calvin sensed that a personal awareness of the directing and sustaining presence of the living God was for Calvin an almost uninterrupted state of mind.

Who of us is not troubled by what is most troubling the minds and hearts of Christian people today? Who does not deplore the excesses and sharp differences and the hostilities of these days? Do we really want brotherly love to continue among us, or do we thrive on contention? William Temple, Britain’s great war-time archbishop of Canterbury, said in Readings From St. John that “love is not at our command. We cannot generate it from within ourselves. We can win it only by surrender to it.”

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” and it is for us to abide in him and in his love and in his teachings rather than declaiming our prejudices and arguing our rights and fomenting our fears. When we abide in him, then by the miracle of his grace we shall be obedient to his love commandment, and our God-subdued lives will let brotherly love continue.