2026.03.01 | Great Love For God and Neighbor
“The Good News Is…Great Love for God and Neighbor”
A sermon preached at Eden United Church of Christ
in Cherryland, California,
on Sunday, March 1, 2026,
by the Rev. Brenda Loreman
Second Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Luke 7:36-50 & Matthew 25:35-40
Note: In the video—during the children’s gathering—you’ll hear that I suggested that folks count how many times my sermon mentions the word “love.” Everyone lost track after a while. The answer is 67.
The late, great philosopher and theologian, Rev. Fred Rogers once said, “Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.” (1) In his simple and straightforward way, Mr. Rogers has captured what I believe is the good news at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus: love—love for God, love for each other, and love for ourselves.
Throughout this season of Lent, rather than focusing on the traditional texts and themes of Lent, we are choosing to lift up the “good news” that was central to Jesus’ life and ministry. On Ash Wednesday, we began by pondering the good news of radical welcome and invitation. Last week, Pastor Ashley lifted up the surprising good news that even small and seemingly insignificant seeds can take root and tremendous change.
Today, we explore the good news of love. When we think about love in the gospels, we might think first of the gospel passages that have come to be known as the “Great Commandment.” In all three of the synoptic gospels—in Luke 10, Mark 12, and Matthew 22, someone asks Jesus what is the greatest commandment. And each time, Jesus responds similarly. Here is his answer in Matthew 22:37-40:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. (2)
It can be argued that John’s gospel also includes the Great Commandment—but it’s in a different format. In John 13, during Jesus’s final teaching to the disciples, he says this to them:
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. (3)
Love is at the heart of the gospel—a love that is all-encompasing and moves in a self-replicating cycle: God loves each of us, inspiring us to love ourselves, which inspires us to love each other, and to love God in return. It’s like the diagram of the hydrological cycle we learned as kids, with water as precipitation, evaporation, transpiration, and condensation. Nothing is lost; all is recycled in a constant loop of mutual benefit.
This love that is at the heart of the gospel appears in other New Testament books as well. Most familiar, perhaps is 1 Corinthians, 13, where the Apostle Paul declares:
If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. (4)
Another important mention of love is in the epistle of 1 John—one of three short letters clustered at the back of the New Testament. They were likely not written by the author of John’s gospel but were probably written by elders of the Johannine community, the community for whom the Gospel of John was written. In 1 John 4, the writer declares:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. [...] Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and [God’s] love is perfected in us. (5)
[...] There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. [...] Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (6)
About 25 years ago, the feminist scholar and writer bell hooks wrote a book called All About Love. In it, she suggested that, as much as our culture has made progress toward greater equality and freedom, we continue to live in a culture obsessed with power and domination. A system of domination, hooks says, “relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, [where] one person is strong and another is weak and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless.” (7) Such systems rely on “the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. [...] Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known.” (8)
But when we choose to live with an ethic of love, hooks reminds us, we “choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.” (9) For bell hooks, love is the antidote to living in a culture of domination and fear, and the only way to bring about change. I suspect that Jesus felt this way, too.
Choosing to love, finding ourselves in the other, and pushing against the dominant culture are themes in our scripture texts this morning.
A story about a woman anointing Jesus appears in all four gospels—one of the ways we know that this was a widespread and important story for the early Christian communities. In Mark, Matthew, and John, the story appears close to the end of Jesus’s ministry and has the implication of Jesus being anointed as Messiah or in preparation for burial. But Luke’s version is quite different, and it appears that he includes this story in his gospel for reasons that differ from the other gospel writers.
It’s important to note that some of the patriarchal assumptions made over the last 2000 years about Luke’s anointing woman are just not accurate—or even relevant to understanding the story. For one thing, interpreters have assumed that the woman, described as “a woman in the city who was a sinner,” must have been a prostitute. But there is nothing in the text to suggest that this is so, and what counted as “sinful” in Jesus’s time might have been such things as coming into contact with Gentiles, who were considered unclean, or having an illness or a disability. (10)
Her loose, unbound hair has been associated with an unkempt appearance and has led biblical commentators to assume that she was a woman of loose morals. But in the Mediterranean world of the first century, “unbound, loose hair [...] was associated with intense grief, not with wayward morals. (11)
Luke makes it clear that what the woman has done in the past is not what matters to Jesus. What matters is the way her life has been transformed and the way she shows that transformation through acts of love. He contrasts her acts of love with Simon’s lack of hospitality:
Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. (12)
The woman’s love pushes against the culture of domination that the Pharisee Simon represents. Simon lives in a culture that assumes he is superior to the “sinful” woman. But Jesus rebukes this and lifts up the personal and cultural transformation that exists when we turn toward each other in love.
Acts of love are also the priority in our text from Matthew’s gospel. This passage is part of a long, apocalyptic discourse towards the end of Matthew's gospel, where Jesus describes what the final judgment will be like. For early Christians, including those in the community that read Matthew’s gospel, the fact that this second coming of Jesus had been delayed was a growing concern. But the message of this passage suggests that what really matters in the final judgment is not what people believe or whether they’re Jews or Gentiles, but what they were doing with their time while they waited for Jesus.
Did they show compassion? Did they practice the love of their neighbor? Did they attend to the needs of those who were most in need of help? If so, then Jesus had already come among them! Christ is already in our midst now, and comes to us again and again, in the form of those we are called to love.
Friends, this is the good news of the gospel. Love is the heart of Jesus’s teaching, and it is transformational. When we choose to live in an ethic of love, to love God, ourselves, and each other, we choose to turn away from the culture of domination and fear that is so much a part of our lives today. And love is the only way to cast out fear.
May we love with the intensity of Luke’s anointing woman, and with deep compassion for Matthew’s “least of these.” And may we love like Mr. Rogers, who said, “Love is like infinity: You can’t have more or less infinity, and you can’t compare two things to see if they’re ‘equally infinite.’ Infinity just is, and that’s the way I think love is, too.” (13) Amen.
Danya Ruttenberg, “The Radical Theology of Mr. Rogers,” Life Is a Sacred Text, June 26, 2023. https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/the-radical-theology-of-mr-rogers/ Accessed February 28, 2026.
Matthew 22:37-40 (NRSVUE)
John 13:34-35 (NRSVUE)
1 Corinthians 13:1-7 (NRSVUE)
1 John 4:7-8, 11-12 (NRSVUE)
1 John 4:18, 20-21 (NRSVUE)
bell hooks, all about love: new visions (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 97.
Ibid., 93
Ibid.
Mary Ann Getty-Sullivan, Women in the New Testament (Colleville, MN: LIturgical Press, 2001), 109.
Joan Taylor and Helen Bond, Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2022), 115.
Luke 7:44b-47a (NRSVUE)
Ruttenberg, ibid.