If anyone knows about credit and debt, that would be Warren Buffett.  This week I watched the  HBO documentary "Becoming Warren Buffett" (2017).  I definitely recommend it.

We know the stories about Buffett as a regular guy who eats breakfast at McDonalds every morning, takes his grand kids to Dairy Queen once a month, and who has lived in the same Omaha house for 58 years. Ditto about his stupendous wealth ($73 billion). 

But what really animates this HBO documentary is how Buffett has worked at improving his relationships with the people he loves the most. According to his three children and his first wife Susie, for most of his life he was emotionally aloof. "I was a lopsided person," Buffett admits.  He was more comfortable with numbers than with people. "My dad is a solitary guy," says his son Peter.  

Buffett calls money and finance "the easy part."  He's learned that "it’s the human problems that are the tough ones." He then reflects on the paradox of love — "I've learned that the more you give love away, the more it multiplies back to you, but the more you withhold it, the more it shrivels."

According to Jewish rabbinic tradition, there are 613 commandments in the Torah. Jesus, Paul, James and John all say that when we love our neighbor, we fulfill the entire law.

In Romans 13 for this week, Paul compares love to a debt that we can never fully repay. It's one of six texts that link our claim to love God with evidence that we love our neighbor.

Buffett and Obama in 2011.

Paul writes: "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law." The entire Old Testament law, says Paul, "may be summed up in this one rule: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

Writing to the Galatians, he said, "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

James 2:8 repeats this message almost verbatim: "If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, 'Love your neighbor as yourself,' you are doing right."

And then there's John: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother" (1 John 4:20–21).

Loving your neighbor, Jesus said, is the greatest commandment. In his last words to his disciples, Jesus called this a new commandment. "Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. All people will know that you are my disciples if you love one another." God's redemption of the world is mediated through the love of his people.

It's not obvious in what sense Jesus's commandment is "new." It's an ancient commandment that goes back 3000 years to the founding of the Hebrew community: "Love your neighbor as yourself," says Leviticus 19:18.

Love, said Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, is the greatest gift, without which I'm just whistling in the dark.

Just as this ancient commandment was repeated throughout the New Testament, it was repeated in the centuries after the first believers. "Our care for the derelict and our active love," writes the African Tertullian, "have become our distinctive sign… See, they say, how they love one another and how ready they are to die for each other."

"Blessed is the one who can love all people equally," said Maximos the Confessor, "always thinking good of everyone."

In his commentary on Galatians 6:10, the church father Jerome describes how John the evangelist, author of the gospel and book of Revelation, preached at Ephesus into his nineties. Christian tradition holds that he died in about the year 100 CE.

Buffett in 2015.

At that age, John was so feeble that he had to be carried into the church at Ephesus on a stretcher. Then, when he could no longer preach a normal sermon, he would lean up on one elbow. The only thing he said was, “Little children, love one another.” People would then carry him back out of the church.

This continued for weeks, says Jerome. And every week he repeated his one-sentence sermon: “Little children, love one another.”

Weary of the repetition, the congregation finally asked, "Master, why do you always say this?"

"Because," John replied, "it is the Lord's command, and if this only is done, it is enough."

As the chaplain at Yale University, William Sloan Coffin (1924–2006), pushed back against intellectual idolatry. He observed how students at Yale “thought cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) was what it was all about, and Yale was encouraging them to think that." Coffin suggested a subversive counter-proposal: "I felt very deeply that it’s amo ergo sum (I love, therefore I am).”

This Latin phrase, which is actually the title of a 2002 book by the German Christina Kessler, can be translated slightly differently to make the point more radical: "I am because I love." Or as Wendell Berry put it, I only live to the extent that I love.

In his book of poetry called Leavings (2012), Berry points the way for us in a short poem-prayer:

           "I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.

           I have no love
except it come from Thee.

           Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind."

Image credits: (1) Wikipedia.org and (2) Wikipedia.org.