Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time—Romans 13:8-10

Last week, we read Saint Paul’s introduction to the final section of Romans, his moral catechesis. This week, he digs into the foundational principal of the moral life: love. In the wider context of Romans 13, he uses the analogy of debts, of things owed to another. He says that we owe respectful obedience to civil authorities—unless they demand that we do something immoral—and we also owe them taxes.

Then he encourages us not to owe anyone else anything else, expect for the one debt that is never paid off, namely, to love our neighbor.

This is a strange way to speak of love. Strictly speaking, love is a free gift. It is not something that is earned or owed. From the perspective of the beloved, true love is pure grace. From the perspective of the lover, it is a choice to love even when the beloved does not deserve it, even on their less than lovely days. Here is Saint Paul’s crucial insight. When I choose to love you, I choose to owe you my love. Think of wedding vows: in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, etc. True love is a choice to love even when you are unlovable. In that sense, it is a debt that can never be paid off and excused.

The Spirit does not call us to love only the often-unlovable people who are closest to us. He calls us to love the unlovables we meet everywhere. When we choose to follow Jesus, to recognize the inherit dignity in which he created every single person we will ever meet, we choose to be indebted in love to everyone we meet. That includes your crazy and estranged uncle and the cashier at the grocery store who drives you crazy, your spouse and that guy who just cut you off in traffic, the politician you can’t stand and your neighbor with the political signs that you also can’t stand. We are called to love them all, even and especially when they don’t deserve it. We owe it to them because we are Christians, living tabernacles of the God who is Love.

Saint Paul says that this fulfills the Law. Much of what strikes us as odd in the Pentateuch’s laws turns out to be regulations and recourses designed to keep people from harming each other or society at large. Love fulfills that by not doing harm to another and elevates it by requiring us to go beyond simply not harming our neighbor. By the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas would define love as willing the good to the beloved. How do you love the unloveables in your life? You do no harm to them and you will good for them. You just will good, but you act for their good.

Jesus himself called us to love another as he has loved us (see John 13:34), which was to die for us. At times, it might feel like death to love the unloveables in your life. That death is another way to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.