Love Is Not Up for Debate (May 18, 2025)
Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Some years ago I made the mistake of watching a debate on YouTube. Having done a fair number of oral arguments as a lawyer, I am skeptical that organized, formal debates really ever change many people’s minds – debates are more likely to give us arguments and words to confirm us in the opinions that we would have had anyway, but otherwise they are rarely enlightening and more or less, in my opinion, a waste of time. And this particular debate was no exception.
The topic of the debate was: Does religion provide benefits to society? The position “yes” was being argued by the former British prime minister Tony Blair, while the argument for “no, religion is not socially beneficial” came from the late writer Christopher Hitchens. As you may know, Hitchens was a well-known atheist who wrote a book taking down Mother Teresa, of all people, but otherwise a sort of witty, charming, chatty fellow.
And what made watching this debate so memorable to me was that, the longer it went on, the more I found myself sympathizing with Christopher Hitchens. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not an atheist. I’m a believing Christian. I believe that Christian faith is good for individuals who come to faith and good for society as a whole – that the world needs more believing Christians. So I should have been on Tony Blair’s side in this debate.
But the actual arguments that Prime Minister Blair made during the debate left me cold. Most of what he said was theoretical and abstract. And his one practical example of how religion had helped society was the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland – which was a real achievement of Blair’s premiership, bringing an end to decades of violent strife between Catholic and Protestants in that part of the world. Blair was stressing that, in working for that agreement, he experienced people of faith passionately committed to one side of that conflict or the other were able to find resources within their religion to make peace with their opponents.
And that is a good thing – “Blessed are the peacemakers.” But the basic theme of Blair’s description came across to me was that usually religious people are narrow-minded and focused only on their own group of true believers against the rest of the world, but sometimes – as in Northern Ireland – they are able to rise above their prejudices. The more of that the better, of course, but I have to say that overall it just wasn’t a very inspiring picture of how most religious communities usually are.
And perhaps Blair is right – reaching understanding across cultural and religious differences is difficult. We have an example of this in the first reading today from Acts, where Peter has returned to Antioch and has to explain to a shocked congregation why he had shared a table with people who didn’t keep kosher or follow God’s law. They had been trained to look down on these religious and cultural outsiders and to avoid contact with them as much as possible and especially to avoid eating with them – and Peter had to explain to them that yes, he too, couldn’t imagine doing what he did … until he was prompted by the Holy Spirit, reminded by the teachings of Jesus, and most importantly witnessed God acting in the lives of these pagans – and if God had given pagans the same Holy Spirit that God has given us, who am I to stand in God’s way? Or as Pope Francis might have said, who am I to judge?
Yes, it is inspiring when religious people come to recognize in their neighbors who don’t share their culture and religious practices the image of God and act accordingly. But the fact that it is so difficult, and so apparently rare, for these moments of reconciliation to happen is not a very compelling argument for the social usefulness of religion. The more Tony Blaire talked about this, the more I got the impression he was saying that it was the exception rather than the norm for religious people to rise above their narrow self-righteousness, which is not a very exciting reason to be religious.
By contrast, Christopher Hitchens was not trying to make such a careful, nuanced presentation. His view was simple: A lot of human suffering has been caused by religious people. The hijackers on 9/11 were all devoutly religious and thought what they were doing was God’s will. And think of all the people whose lives were lost, and all the family members and friends and all of us whose lives were affected by this crime.
The main point Hitchens kept making was that people’s religious opinions do tend to make them judgmental of others who don’t share their views – and why can’t we just forget about arguing over theological abstractions that no one can prove one way or another, and just be nice to one another for a change? Which is not a bad point.
And in one sense, what Christopher Hitchens was arguing – that being good to other people, worrying more about real, live people who are suffering needlessly we do about our religious tribe – this is surprisingly resonant with what Jesus himself says, particularly in the gospel reading today. What Jesus wanted his disciples to be known for was their love for one another – our love for one another. Love of God is not opposed to love of neighbor, but they are fundamentally the same thing. In the gospel today Jesus tells the disciples: Where I am going, you cannot come. So don’t worry about figuring out where I’m going and how you get go there too, worry about whether you have love.
So perhaps you can understand why, as I watched this debate, I found myself more sympathetic to the atheist Christopher Hitchens, who at least seemed to know something about love for those who are suffering, than I was to the abstract political theory of Tony Blair. But, don’t worry, this does not mean that I’m about to become an atheist. Because what we think of as what makes us distinctively Christian – our beliefs about God and human life, and the Scriptures and the sacraments and all that – these are meant to help us live into what Jesus wanted to be really distinctive about us – our love for one another.
Take a look again at today’s gospel reading. It comes from the end of the Last Supper in John’s gospel, where Jesus has washed the feet of his disciples – of all of his disciples gathered at the table, including Judas Iscariot, whom he knew full well was about to betray him. After Jesus has given this example of loving service to his friends and his enemy, Judas departs on his mission, and Jesus says something very theological: “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.”
Now God has been glorified in Jesus performing loving service, even to his betrayer; and God will be glorified again in Jesus “at once” as Jesus is betrayed and goes to the cross out of co-suffering love for all people. God is glorified in humble service and in co-suffering love – that’s a theological claim about God, and if we didn’t already know that this is really who God is and what God is like, Jesus has come to teach us and to show us this about God. So that we can know that we are worthy of God’s service and love, and so that we can freely serve and love others without fear or hesitancy. In the way that we have come to understand that God has loved us, this is how we ourselves are called to love others.
I could make a case that even the most abstract and complicated Christian teachings – the Trinity, the inspiration of Scripture, creation out of nothing, the end of all things – as our reading from Revelation today suggests – in the vision of a new Jerusalem come down from heaven – all of these teachings are important precisely because they help us to love more strongly, to believe more deeply, to forgive more willingly, to bear a neighbor’s burdens while remaining at peace. The point of knowing theology, or even of knowing our catechism, is not to score debating points or get rewards for having the right ideas about God. The point of theology and our Christian practices together is, and always must be, to promote the thing that Jesus wanted more than anything to distinguish us as his followers – the love that we practice for one another.
And so I do think it matters that Christopher Hitchens was wrong in believing that God doesn’t exist. I mean, if there really is no God and no life beyond this one, then why should I worry about other people who are suffering? And why should I let their suffering bother me and my enjoyment of my own life? Why should I care about relieving the suffering of others? If Hitchens did care about the suffering of others – and indeed he seemed to be bothered quite a lot about it – that was in spite of his bad theology. And if he had better theology, he might have been even more loving, even more caring, even more passionate about standing up for the least of these. But if I could only get one thing right – theology or love – I’d choose getting love right any day of the week. The theology will eventually take care of itself.
That’s what happens in the Acts reading today – Peter knows that sharing a table with these Spirit-filled pagans is the right thing to do, sharing himself with them in love and humble service is the right thing to do. And then he and his community will figure out how to explain it later. In the meantime, they simply marvel together at what God seems to be doing. And I think we do the same. We recognize the wonders of what God has done and is doing in our midst, we remember the words of Jesus which help us to make at least a little sense of what God is doing, and then we throw ourselves into the task before us – to remember how we have been loved, and then to go and do the same.