Are you paper-clipped?

I read that a well-known psychologist asserted that loving another human being is the most challenging of all human enterprises because of the demands it makes on us. Because of these demands, many of us never have loved another person deeply. Or perhaps we have loved one or two deeply and have been hurt by it, and so we have retreated. One of the greatest needs today is the strength to be able to move in and love another person at a profound level. We know the tragedy of so many husbands and wives who live together for years and never really get to know each other as persons. We know how commonplace it is for men and women to miss the fantastic opportunity which marriage and family life and good friendship present: to move down to deep levels of sharing this life we have on earth.

For many of us, the boundaries of our love are narrow and very exclusive. Perhaps we love the members of our family to some degree, and maybe a few other people. Maybe we talk about loving the poor and the lonely and the disadvantaged, but not always with a great deal of conviction. And probably we never talk about loving our enemies. For many of us, it is as though there is a large paper clip around our life, which prevents us from growing and expanding.

Consequently, our life is closed to “outsiders,” “foreigners,” people who are “different.” It is easier to categorize them than to love them. For some of us, the only area of growth in life is our “Enemies List.”

But God, in His great Love, keeps on working on us. God wants to liberate us from this narrowness. God wants us to be free to live life in its fullness. And Jesus is tells us in

Matthew, Chapter 5, that there can be no peace on earth and no peace in our hearts until those giant paper clips are removed.

The Old Testament story of Jonah is a classic case of a paperclipped man. Jonah refused to obey the command to proclaim God’s love and mercy to the people in the City of Nineveh. Why? Because, they were on Israel’s “Enemies List.” They were “outsiders,” “foreigners.” Jonah’s potential as a human being had been squeezed into a tightly drawn area. In the story, he represents a narrow and often vindictive nationalism. He represents a “chosen people” mentality, which places limits on God’s love and mercy.

The situation is the same in the New Testament too. From the beginning, Jesus’ disciples had this problem. When Jesus stopped to befriend the Samaritan woman, the disciples were outraged, and for two reasons. First, it was considered improper for a pious, male Jew to be seen talking with a strange woman. Secondly, she was not an Israelite. She was an outsider, a foreigner, one of the enemy.

“Why in the world is Jesus wasting His time with her? She is not one of us.” But Jesus had come to change all that. They had yet to learn that Jesus would not organize them into a privileged elite. Jesus had come to enlist them in a ministry of reconciliation. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets, Jesus said... I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them”