The basic principle of all religion is the desire to know where you stand with God, or with the gods. In one form or another, every religion in the world simply provides us with a list of do’s and don’ts by which we can gauge how good we are in the eyes of the deity we have chosen to pursue. Religion provides the mechanism by which we climb the spiritual ladder until we have reached the top as defined by that particular set of rules and observances.

This mindset has lead to the diminishing and/or oppression of people groups throughout world history. From the Egyptians and their form of slavery and caste systems, to Rome and their social class system, to India’s caste system, to Nazi Germany and Hitler’s view of the Arian nation that justified the murder of 6 million Jews, to even many so called Christian “churches” today that simply slap the name of Christ on their own moralistic deism in an attempt to prove their own righteousness as compared to all the “bad sinners” out there in the world. Religion has contributed to various forms of racism, genocide, wars, and slavery throughout history because, from the religious mindset, the only way you can truly know that God, or the gods, approve of you is not only by jumping through all the moral hoops, but simultaneously being able to look down your nose at “those people” who are not as righteous, awesome, or “holy” as you are. And, once you have determined who those people are, then your higher standing with God gives you permission to treat others they way you feel they deserve to be treated for not being like you.

The reason people will choose the route of religion over truly following Jesus is because the grace of the Gospel takes away your ability to control the god whom you seek. It takes away your ability to gauge where you stand in comparison to others based on your performance, and because it is so difficult to believe that God could actually love you unconditionally, the way the Gospel tells us He does, we would rather chase after the false sense of stability and predictability religion promises to provide us.

The kind of love Jesus is calling us to in this passage is an incarnational love. It is a love that seeks to enter into the world of another. It is a love that seeks to empathize and sympathize with the pain and perspectives of another. It’s a love that seeks to reconcile and fight for unity. It’s a love that looks for ways to serve and elevate the status of others.

To love someone of a different ethnicity in that way would mean seeking to better understand their experience in our nation, their struggles, their joys, their perceptions in a way that allows you to appreciate and value those perceptions even if you don’t necessarily agree with them. It means seeking to serve that person in a way that the know you love them for who God has made them to be and not for some future version of them that you have conjured up in your own mind.

To love someone from a different political party looks pretty much the same. It is seeking to walk in unity as God’s image-bearers at least, and as brothers/sisters in Christ if that person is also a follower of Jesus. It means basing the relationship on that greater commonality rather than on the lesser differences in political views. It means seeking to understand why that person views the world the way he/she does and seeing if there might be something gained by learning from that perspective.

Loving the person who has offended you or hurt you means going to that person in humility and grace seeking to reconcile, to forgive, to fight for that relationship. It means understanding that the pain they have caused you is likely coming from a place of pain in their own life and that the lovingkindness of God is what will lead them to repentance, not the vengeful and sharp-tongued words on a social media post. In short it means responding to them in their offending you the same way Jesus responded to you in your offending Him. It’s a crucified kind of love that longs to be reconciled rather than right.

Loving others the way Christ has loved us is incredibly difficult because everything in us wants to be proven right and justified in our anger and resentment. But, that is just another form of religion, a desire in our hearts to prove that we are morally superior to that person so we can know that we are worthy of love, that we are significant. The Gospel calls us to pursue the opposite. The Gospel calls us to pursue love over self-preservation. It calls us to pursue the glory of God (reflecting who He is to the world) over our own glory. It calls us to die to ourselves so that Christ might live in and through us. This is what it means to follow Jesus, and if our hearts are arguing against that then the problem isn’t with someone else, it’s with us. We have to truly ask ourselves, “Am I willing to follow Jesus to the cross?” Because that is what it takes if we are going to make it through the testing of our faith in this moment in history.