Theology and AIDS

He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all 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 neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law
and the prophets.”
Matthew 22: 37-40 (NRSV)

Love.

Simply put, the life of the Christian is the life of love. The verse commands the Christian to love the neighbor. Who is the neighbor? Paradoxically simple and profound, the concept of neighbor encompasses everyone. There are no stipulations to what the neighbor looks like, how the neighbor acts, or who the neighbor is. The neighbor is anyone who might cross the path of a Christian. In the context of HIV/AIDS, this means understanding that it is not the Christian’s job to ask why a person has HIV/AIDS. Regardless of whether someone acquired HIV/AIDS due to unjust circumstance or poor choices, it is necessary to understand that the person living with HIV/AIDS is your neighbor. It is not the task of a Christian to go about lecturing on just rewards or divine wrath; rather, we are to enter into relationships recognizing the radical equality of all of humanity before the eternal. We are loved. We are to love in a radical way that transcends constructed barriers of race, gender, religion, sexuality, gender identification, class or nationality. We are all bound up in the same fate; we are all interconnected in a journey towards peace and wholeness.

In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr:

 Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the children of God, and our brothers and sisters wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the focus of American life militates against their arrival as full women and men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearning, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. 


His words resound as a compelling force towards action on behalf of those who are suffering. We live in solidarity with those that are pushed to the margins, the voiceless…the neighbor. Now is the time we as the Church enter into the struggle against this ferocious killer, proclaiming that in this struggle for life we chose life.