The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

St. Matthew 22:34-46

October 19, 2025

“Love is love” was the slogan that carried same-sex marriage across the goal-line. It meant that whatever love is, it’s the same regardless of subject and object. A husband’s love for his wife is the same as two members of a same-sex partnering.

The effect was to diminish love to lust. “Love is love” meant every kind of lust, every kind of desire is equally valid and beyond critique. The same arguments could—and indeed already are being made for pedophilia.

In the ethics of contemporary liberalism, love is the highest virtue. Love your neighbor as yourself means never criticize your neighbor. Love, in the modern religion, means permissiveness. Love will not say there is such a thing as adultery. Neither will love say there is such a thing as idolatry.

In the Church of Liberalism, Love is permissiveness. But it is a narrow permissiveness.

For what is not permitted?

It is not love (says the Church of Liberalism)—it is not love but hate to say marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman. All other unions are not marriage. To say that will label you as unloving.

Likewise it is not loving, says the culture, to say, “You must repent, you must turn to Jesus; not everyone will enter the kingdom of heaven.” That is hate, not love. And “hate has no home here,” the slogan goes.

Love the lovers, hate the haters, and never confront the internal contradictions.

The Bible operates with an entirely different notion of love. Now it’s true there are multiple words for different kinds of love in the New Testament – there are different words for loving a friend and loving a spouse – but that’s not a topic for today. Rather, what is the underlying idea of love as the Bible describes it?

But that’s a bad way to put it, for love is not an idea. Love is not a feeling. Love is an action.

And that changes everything. It tears down the foundation of the slogan “Love is love.” For love is not lust. It is not desire. It is not a feeling. It is not an experience. Love is a commitment to act. Love acts in the best interest of the object of love. The lover—the one doing the love—puts the beloved—the receiving person—ahead of himself.

One effect of the fall, one consequence of Adam’s sin, is we put ourselves first. What I really love, by nature, is what benefits me. So the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” turns us outward.

But before that comes the greater commandment: Love YHWH, love the LORD with everything you are and have.

So we have these universal commands to love. But what does it look like when we deal with different kinds of relationships? The Bible doesn’t tell children to love their parents. It tells them to honor. “Honor your father and your mother.” And the Bible doesn’t tell wives to love their husbands. It tells them to submit. “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Shortly after that, in his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul tells children to obey their parents.

Now should a child love his father? Of course? And should a wife love her husband? Definitely. But using these different verbs, honor and submit, indicates a unique and particular kind of relationship, a particular form of love.

Our own selfish desires immediately start looking for the injustice, the inequity. In the heart of every person is a toddler lashing out at God and every earthly authority, “You’re not the boss of me!”

But words like love and submit, along with obey, apply to everyone, even Jesus. There is a kind of hierarchy of love and submission that flows up and down the chain, with God the Father alone at the top who does not submit, but always loves.

Let’s start with the immediate family relationship. There the specific office of love is given to a husband. “Husbands, love your wives,” says the Apostle. How? “As Christ loved the church.” Love therefore is not how you feel but what you do. The husband gives up everything he has and is for his wife. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.”

And to this one, the wife submits.

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

So the child honors and obeys father and mother. The wife submits to the husband. The husband submits to Christ. And even Christ submits to the Father. 1 Cor. 15:27f says,

For “He has put all things under His feet.” But when He says “all things are put under Him,” it is evident that He who put all things under Him is excepted. Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.

In Hebrews 5, Jesus is described as learning obedience:

Who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him

So if Jesus obeys, we should not shy away from the same thing. Children submit to their parents, wives to their husbands, husbands to Christ, Christ to the Father.

And what does the Father do? He loves the Son. “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And in the Son, the Father loves the world. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”

The Son’s work also is described in John’s Gospel as love: “Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end” [13:1].

The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the disciples, husbands love their wives, parents love their children.

But not everything is in a hierarchy. Many of our relationships are in that bottom level, horizontal, where we live together as brothers and sisters. And in that realm we think not of anything owed to us, but only what we owe others. St. Paul says, “Owe no one anything except to love one another.” And after the footwashing, Jesus says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” [13:34f].

What does that look like? It means we don’t keep track, we don’t calculate what others do or owe us.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. (1 Cor. 13:4f, NIV 2011)

We are commanded to love. And as disciples of Jesus, we do so with eyes always on Him.

We all must answer the question Jesus poses today in the Gospel: “What do you think about the Christ?”

Our answer to that question is, “He is the Son of David, a true man, and He is the Son of God, but more than that, He is not just any lord but He is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil. He did this not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death, so that I may be His own, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, just as He is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.”

Today Jesus says to you, “Have you kept these Commandments, to love God and your neighbor?” And we reply, “Dear Lord, you know I have been a loveless person, always putting myself first, and everyone around me last. Yet You loved me even before You made me, even before I was a tiny embryo in my mother's womb. You sent Your Son Jesus, true man and true God, and He loved me by dying for me. Teach me and send me Your Holy Spirit, and help me to love the stranger and the orphan, and even those who don't show me any love. Unite this church in Your love, and keep us faithful to the end.” +inj+