In that very limited sense (I'm not comparing Obama to Jesus, just comparing Fox to his narrow minded opponents), Fox News functions a bit like the Sadducees and Pharisees in today's gospel. These opponents have already made their judgments about Jesus. They "know" they are right and are only interested in making Jesus look bad. And so they ask questions, not to learn anything, but in hopes of catching Jesus in a mistake. It's not unlike our political scene today, and people on the left and the right are equally skilled at this game.
The Pharisees' mean-spirited questioning produces one of Jesus better known statements, but nothing he says is original. He is asked about "the law" and his answer quotes from that law, in this case from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. To paraphrase, Jesus says, "Love God with every fiber or your being, and love your neighbor as yourself." And then he adds, "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
For a Jew such as Jesus, "the law and the prophets" was shorthand for the bulk of what Christians call the Old Testament. This also spoke of what it meant to live in covenant relationship with God. Jesus is asked for a single commandment, but he will not stop with one. For Jesus, loving God cannot be separated from loving those around us, and anyone who imagines that a personal relationship with God (or with Jesus for that matter) can happen without it transforming social relationships is sadly mistaken.
Loving neighbor as self gets a lot of lip service from both Christians and non-Christians, but I'm not sure we reflect very much on what it actually means. To love others as myself means that my needs, wants, and desires are no more important than those of the neighbor, the other. This of course means that the needs of my family, or my community, or my nation, are not more important than those of other families, communities, or nations. But despite how easily we have slapped the Judeo-Christian label on our American culture, we've never really imagined that our national neighbors counted nearly so much as we do.
The call to love one's neighbor has nothing to do with warm and fuzzy sentimentalism. Jesus is not saying that I must have sweet, warm feelings toward everyone, no matter how they act or what they do. But he is saying that I must have their best interest at heart, just as much as I have my own. That clearly would preclude the sort of pettiness that Fox News is so good at, as well as the pettiness that marks a lot of politically motivated action from conservatives and liberals alike.
But I can't stop there. There are plenty of reasons for the rapid rise of the "Nones" in American religious life, people whose respond, "None of the above" when asked for a religious preference. Some reasons are external to church and faith and beyond our control. But failure of so many Christians to embody what Jesus insists is at the core of a faithful life surely has done tremendous damage to our image. Fox News and a cadre of religious conservatives are often prime examples of a pettiness and an "us versus them" mentality that seems devoid of any love or real concern for the other. However, this cannot be said of all religious conservatives, and such behavior is hardly restricted to conservatives.
The arrogance of some liberal Christians and their total dismissal of conservatives and evangelicals as dimwitted Neanderthals can be something to behold. And if you have enough liberal, Christian "friends" on Facebook, you will see more than enough posts featuring character assassination and out-of-context quotes to make you wonder if Fox News has switched sides. It seems that neither the left nor the right has quite realized what a radical thing it is to love your neighbor as yourself.
All ideologies - right, left, and everything in between - are false gods when they garner too much trust, hope, or loyalty. Christians should be very suspicious of those who cannot step outside of their ideology. If an ideology is the highest authority in someone's life, then it is that person's idol, his or her god, no matter what faith may be formally professed. That so many Christians on both left and right confuse their ideology with God has a great deal to do with the church's current low public esteem.
Much of the current fascination with Pope Francis is precisely because he seems an exception to this. He appears more captive to Jesus' gospel of love than to any ideology. He has a quite conservative theology on a number of social issues, but his loyalty to Jesus seems paramount. As a good Protestant, I understand the pope as a sinful human who is a debtor to God's grace, but I also see him as one whose faithfulness is an inspiration, demonstrating something of the radical nature of loving neighbor as self.
So too, Nelson Mandela seemed to understand something of what it means and requires to love the other as oneself. Though not a religious figure per se, he embodied Jesus' command in a way that few have. That he was able to stay focused on the best interests of his nation as a whole, including those who had tortured him and imprisoned him for nearly 30 years, speaks volumes about a loyalty to love that trumped ideology.
"You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus says this commandment is "like" the one on loving God. If that is so, then any concern for "getting right with God" must be matched by a concern for getting right with the neighbor. Have we really thought about what a radical idea that is?
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