Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. - Romans 12:9-13
The very first line of this passage lays out the overarching theme for rest of the chapter - Love. In particular, genuine Christian love for others.
"Love must be sincere." The Greek word that is translated sincere of genuine, is anuopkritos, and it means, “without mask”. This is a reference to the masks that ancient play actors would wear in Greek tragedies and comedies. So, Paul is telling us that as Christ followers, we must practice “unmasked love”, love without pretense or hypocrisy.
Our English word sincere comes from the Latin sincerus, which means "without wax." It stems from a practice of the early Roman merchants who set their earthen and porcelain jars out for sale. If a crack appeared in one, they would fill it with wax the same color as the jar, so a buyer would not be aware that it was cracked. But astute buyers learned to hold these jars out in the sun, and if the jar was cracked, the wax would melt and the crack would be revealed. So the honest merchants would test their wares this way and mark them sincerus -- without wax. The word literally reflects what the Greek says here, "Let love be without hypocrisy." The Revised Standard Version translates it, "Let love be genuine." J. B. Philips says, "Let us have no imitation Christian love."
The primary character of the early Christian community was that it was a place where love was authentically lived out - so much so that people began to be attracted to it in large numbers. You can see this emphasis in the New Testament. Every writer in the New Testament stresses the need for love. In First Timothy 1:5, Paul writes to his young son in the faith and says, "The goal of this command is love." That is what it all boils down to. Peter says (1 Peter 4:8), "Above all else put on love."
Jesus himself said that love is the greatest of all the commandments, (Matthew 22:37-39) Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Paul reminds us here, and in many other places, that this love must be a genuine love, not phony, not hypocritical. We are living in an age in which this is the very spirit of the times - to project an image, to pretend you are something that you are not. All the world holds that up before us, and he rise of social media in our culture has only intensified this dynamic. twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. can actually encourage and enable us to create our own image, to pretend to be someone that we are not. Few people seem to recognize how ridiculous, and dangerous this can be.
In the community of faith, it is unacceptable that we should pretend. That we should be in any sense phony in our love is a violation of all that the Lord came to do. The root issue comes from that pretender that is down inside all of us that wants to be thought well of even though we really are not worthy of it.
Ah, but this is the whole point of the Gospel, we don’t have to pretend in order to be loved or accepted, because we are already loved with the perfect love of Jesus Christ!
Jeff Frazier
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