Third Sunday after Pentecost
Is Love a Luxury?
Jesus is determined to walk to Jerusalem. Jesus invites persons to follow him. Jesus warns about looking back when you are plowing.
These details from Luke 9 ask us, Do we know where we are going? Are we following Jesus and his loving way?
Erich Fromm, a leading psychologist of the twentieth century, observes that education in our society urges each of us primarily to learn those skills that can provide us with money and prestige. Fromm declares that implicitly the world we live in tells us that love is “a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on.”*
Most of the time we do what those around us expect us to do. So, most of the time we think of love as a luxury.
Jesus says that our society is wrong: that we need to know our priorities, that we need to know what is really important, that we need to know what is really valuable, that we need to know that love is not a luxury. It is, rather, a necessity in order to live our lives well. In fact, it is what we are made for.
I write this soon after the death of Jimmy Carter, president of the United States 1977–1981.Usually I think that celebrities are not very good models, because they seem so distant from us. But I thank Jimmy Carter for saying with his actions, more than with his words, that being president was not the most important part of his life.
Do we really think that love is a luxury? Or are we people who want to follow Jesus and his way of love?
Hermann Weinlick, retired pastor
Minneapolis, Minnesota
* Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (reprint, HarperCollins, 2006), 6.