On June 1, 1967, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, further cementing their status as the most popular rock band in the world. Two weeks later, they started work on their next musical event: participating in the Our World TV show on June 25, employing newly constructed satellite technology to deliver a live global broadcast.
The Beatles agreed to perform a new song as representatives of the United Kingdom. “It was the first worldwide satellite broadcast ever,” Ringo Starr said years later. “It’s a standard thing that people do now, but then, when we did it, it was a first.”
The song they contributed to the show and to the world was written almost at the last minute by John Lennon. In July, “All You Need Is Love” hit Number One all over the world, providing the sing-song anthem for theSummer of Love, with a sentiment described as “simple but profound.” Echoing that sentiment, Paul McCartney later said, “The chorus ‘All you need is love’ is simple, but the verse is quite complex. In fact, I never really understood it.”
A Sunday school class was recently discussing a rather complex issue. Someone, trying to boil the subject down to something that was palatable to all, suggested, “All you need is love.” Everyone nodded their heads.
On one hand, the comment was an attempt to be concise, conclusive. On the other hand, such a reply may minimize and understate what is actually galactic in proportion; it trivializes something that is truly significant beyond measure.
Jesus was once asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” His response was similar to “all you need is love.” He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God withall 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.” In part, Jesus was reiterating Leviticus 19: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.”
The man who asked Jesus the question was not satisfied. He then asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus’ response was a story that has come to be known as The Good Samaritan—the story of a man who was beaten and robbed, but whose life was saved by a stranger.
What I find interesting about the commandment “Love your neighbor” and Jesus’ story, is that Jesus never informs us if our neighbor is good or bad, a neighbor to whom we are attracted or a neighbor who revolts us. He just said, “Love your neighbor.”In fact, in another portion of the Gospel, Jesus commands, “love your enemies!”
What do we do with that? Something so “simple but profound,” “complex,” something we “never really understood?” All you need is love. Does that mean all we need ourselves is to be loved? Does it mean all we need to do is love one another? And if it’s the latter, consider the enormity of such love that Jesus desires of us. No small thing, indeed. It cannot really be encapsulated, condensed, or tamed into something like a motto.
In her poem, Love Is Not All, Sonnet XXX, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain . . . Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone.” But then she added: “Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.”
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.