And 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 great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. -- Matthew 22:37-39
Why didn’t Jesus tell us to love God as we love
ourselves? Our love toward God is based
on God’s goodness. We love God in
obedience. We love God in adulation and
adoration. We love God based on
knowledge, i.e., with all the mind, through revelation, with all of the
soul. God is deserving of love. Apart from God, humanity would have no love,
only protective instincts, something that evolved to preserve the species and propagate our selfish genes.
Why then did the Lord say we are to love our neighbors as we
love ourselves? I don’t love myself
because I deserve love. I don’t love
myself because I am good, not even because I am better than other people. I know my faults. I may think I’m smarter than some other
people, smarter even than some Nobel Laureates and graduates of Harvard and
Yale. But I know a lot of other people
who are smarter than I am, so I don’t love myself because of my intelligence,
my athletic ability, my rugged good looks, the size of my biceps, or any of my
many and varied skills.
I love myself “in spite of”.
I can’t really help it. Sure,
there are times when I screw up so monumentally that I say I hate myself, but I
say that because I love myself and I am deeply disappointed in how I hosed
things. If I really hated myself I would
rejoice in my own failures – and I have had plenty of opportunities. That’s not the same as wallowing in
self-pity, which some of us are prone to do.
That’s what Jesus means.
You love your neighbors in spite of their imperfections, in spite of the
fact that they sometimes hurt you or offend you or mistreat you. You love your neighbors when they persecute
you and reject you, when they strip you naked, beat you, and hang you on a
cross to die, suffocated by your paralyzed chest muscles. You love your neighbor whether his boots are
plastic or full-quill ostrich. You love
your neighbor when his clothes are second-hand and his hygiene is bad and when
his wife carries a Coach bag that cost more than your car.
One of the great lessons I learned was from my friend,
Eddie. Eddie had money, and he loved
good cars. He drove the most expensive
Cadillac available, paid cash for it. Nothing
wrong with foreign cars if you’re a foreigner, that was his view. But somebody could drive up in a new car of
any kind, and he was just as happy and excited for that person as he would have
been for himself. “I love to see my brothers
and sisters driving nice cars,” he would say.
He loved his neighbor as he loved himself.
Jesus wants us to use His Golden Rule as the starting
point. Treat others the way you want
them to treat you. That is a good
beginning in the natural realm. When we
step into the spiritual realm, when we begin to “rejoice with those who rejoice”
even as we “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:5), we begin to see that there is no distance or
distinction in Christ because the very same Holy Spirit, the very same Person,
the very same God dwells in and gives life to each and every one of us.
Thus we come to understand what John says in his first epistle: If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
