Love Thy Neighbor
Mark’s gospel relates this incident from Jesus’ life:
“One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, ‘The first is “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord, is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’” (Mark 12:28-31)
Mark tells us that the scribe was delighted, that he felt Jesus had captured the whole Jewish law in a nutshell.
That was quite an accomplishment, since by some counts there are more than 600 laws mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures!
Christians typically refer to these as the two Great Commandments. One without the other is incomplete, so far as Jesus is concerned. The first Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy (Deut. 6: 4-9) where it is known as the “shema,” from its first word in Hebrew, which means “hear.” These are the words observant Jews were required to recite day and night as the touchstone of their monotheistic faith, so Jesus’ choice is no surprise. The second, plucked from a laundry list of seemingly unrelated laws in Leviticus (Lev. 19:18b), is the surprise. There it appears as the end of a verse in our Bibles, but we should remember that there was no versification in the Hebrew text. Chapters and verses were added centuries later, well after Jesus’ time.
In another telling of the interchange, Jesus himself asks the question of a lawyer with whom he is in conversation. When the lawyer identifies these two as the heart of the Jewish law, Jesus heartily commends him. But the lawyer has another question, more specific: “And who,” he asks, “is my neighbor?” Which prompts Jesus to tell one of his most famous parables, the one we have come to know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37).
Scholars have pointed out that this parallel love of God and love of neighbor is very well captured in the two “tables” of the Ten Commandments. In one table, the first four commandments spell out our duties toward God: having no other gods before God, making no graven images, refusing to profane or abuse God’s name, and keeping the Sabbath holy. The last six commandments, the second table, all have to do with how we treat others: honoring our parents, not murdering others, not committing adultery, not stealing, not bearing false witness against a neighbor (likely related to giving false testimony in a court of law), and not even coveting what our neighbors have.
A topic of controversy among scholars is just how broadly this concept of neighbor was to be interpreted. Did it refer, as some have argued, only to fellow Israelites? Or is “neighbor” here a broader term, referring to the whole human race? Professor Richard Elliott Friedman points out in his book The Exodus (p. 199-216), the Hebrew term “re’a,” translated as “neighbor,” doesn’t just refer to fellow Jews. It is used of Babylonians in the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:13), to Judah’s neighbor, Hiram the Canaanite (Gen. 38:12, 20), and to Egyptians (Exod. 2:13). In short, “re’a” is used to describe other human beings, not only fellow Israelites.
After telling his parable about the man robbed on the road going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, Jesus relates how temple functionaries, a priest and a Levite, both managed to avoid contact with a man presumed to be lying dead there beside the road. Such contact would’ve rendered them ritually unclean. Jesus’ use of a Samaritan as the “hero” of his story would’ve startled his listeners, who were accustomed to looking down on the Samaritans as suspect keepers of the Jewish law. In his usual disconcerting way, Jesus then pointedly asked the lawyer, “And which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”(Luke 10:36)
The lawyer answered, reluctantly, “The one who showed him mercy.”
To which Jesus responded, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:37)
Jesus here uses “neighbor” in a surprisingly expansive way. A neighbor is more than someone who lives close to us. A neighbor is more than one of our own kind. A neighbor is a fellow human being in need. And one becomes a neighbor by an act of will–proving it by having compassion on a fellow human being. Not just noticing the one in need as a fellow human being. Not just pitying the person in distress. But also by rendering practical aid, binding up open wounds and paying for medical care.
To love your neighbor as yourself is to treat someone else as we’d like to be treated in similar circumstances of distress. It involves the hard work of imagining ourselves in the place of the other person, and then having the courage to share our resources with someone else in need.
Too often we have overlooked the kind of elegant reciprocity in the Biblical command to love our neighbor as we do ourselves. Both Leviticus and Jesus assume that it’s natural for us to love ourselves. We can’t truly function with compassion toward others if we do not have some positive self-regard. Acting in our own self-interest is not necessarily a sin. A love for our own self is not only healthy; it’s a recognition that we are made in the very image of God. We are worthy by virtue of the truth God made us and loves us. The secret is, all other selves are also worthy, not only of God’s compassion, but also our own.
When the famous rabbi Hillel was challenged to recite the whole Jewish law while standing on one leg he reputedly said, “I would not do to my neighbor what I would not have done to myself.”
Rabbi Jesus, in this same spirit, formulated what has become known as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Again, this elegant symmetry: we are called to do toward others what a healthy regard for ourselves would dictate.
The New Testament letter of James echoes Jesus and refers to the royal law. “You do well if you fulfill the royal law according to scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (James 2:8)
Rabbi Paul, writing to the church at Rome, also echoes Jesus beautifully: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for one who loves has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not murder, you shall not steal; you shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)
In our culture, we often equate love with a feeling, the warm, fuzzy sensation we get when we gaze into the eyes of our beloved, or the swelling of motherly and fatherly emotion for our children. And, of course, these are aspects of love. But, in its flinty way, the Bible wants us to understand that love has extraordinarily practical consequences. Like forgiving our loved ones when we disappoint each other, as we so often do. Like making ourselves really listen to each other, when it’s easier to make snap judgments and talk right past each other. Like considering what really might be best for our loved ones, and daring to act accordingly.
The flinty sort of love the Bible requires of us is to do no harm to our neighbors: not breaking the bonds of the marriage covenant, not taking from them what is rightfully theirs, not even desiring what they seem to have on Facebook.
This flinty sort of love is even to be extended toward those we scarcely consider our neighbors at all: those with whom we disagree on the subjects of politics and religion, whose opinions we would rather dismiss out of hand, instead of hearing out. Those whose interests seem alien to our interests, and the interests of our social strata.
This flinty sort of love is even to be extended to those of other nations whose perspectives we are loathe to entertain: Russians invading the Ukraine, Hamas taking hostages in Israel, Israelis dominating Palestinians in Gaza. The list can, and does, go on and on.
To love our neighbors as ourselves was, and is, a radical ethic. It doesn’t mean agreeing with everything our loved ones do that frustrates us.
It doesn’t mean whitewashing or ignoring the injustices of the past visited upon one race by another or one nation upon another.
But it does mean trying to find common ground, trying to find common humanity in the hopes and needs and desires of our fellow human beings. It might even come to mean recognizing our kinship with all living things, and seeing the care of creation as part of our common and healthy self-interest.
To love our neighbors as ourselves is an ideal we challenge ourselves to realize in a thousand different ways. It is as fresh as tomorrow’s headlines and as current as today’s crises. For people of faith the work is hardly done. It beckons anew today and every day.
