Love Your Neighbor

This is an essay corresponding to the current sermon series called “Love Your Neighbor“. Let’s (just for fun) ask two fundamental questions. “What is love” (“Baby don’t hurt me”. Sorry. If I didn’t say it, you would’ve.) and “Who is my neighbor?” But let us start with the latter. One, because it has a simpler answer, and two because it is a question directly in the mouth of a speaker in the Bible. The greatest commandment is: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This requires our high attention given the virtual agreement that these are the greatest commandments. And they are two separate commandments. Furthermore Jesus affirms with the prophets that “all the law and the prophets hang on these.” If you were looking for a purpose in life, you just found it. Love God. Love your neighbor.
Seeing that this is the love your neighbor series, we shall not delve into what exactly it means to “love God”, but when we get to the section, “What is Love” there will be some apparent overlap. Notice that Jesus says that this second command is like the first. What relationship must there be between love of God and love of neighbor. John helps us see this in an interesting light when he says in his 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. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” It seems they are necessarily related. In fact, part of loving God is loving your neighbor. This is why the second is like the first.
This brings us to the question that we’re supposed to be dealing with: Who is my neighbor? It should be noted that the text in Luke tells us that the lawyer asked Jesus this question with the purpose of “seeking to justify himself”. He must not have been loving very many people. He was maybe hoping that Jesus might give a narrower definition of “neighbor“, a definition that would allow his current state of care for others to be acceptable. Of course Jesus, ever not the legalist, and always up for a story, tells one as a response to this self-justifying question. This is the famous story of the Great Samaritan.
And as the story goes, a Jewish man on a dangerous road to Jericho, was beaten, robbed, and left for dead. He was passed by two of the lawyer’s buddies, who made up excuses for refusing to love their neighbor, and then the man who finally stopped and helped was a Samaritan. It’s really a big deal, and rather clever of Jesus to slip this part into the story. The Samaritans were “half-breeds” if you will allow the vulgarity. They were leftovers of the exile; part Jewish, part Gentiles, and were purposely excluded from participation in Judaism, and so formed their own cultic version, which of course only further divided the Jews and the Samaritans. They were natural enemies.
So when Jesus concludes the story with this question: “Which one of these was a neighbor?”, he brings to light how faulty the lawyer’s original question was, how tainted it was by selfish, and defensive motives. In the lawyer’s question, the “neighbor” designated the passive member of the care, but in Jesus’ question, the implied notion is that the neighbor is active, exposing the futility of the lawyer’s question twofold. One, that a neighbor is active not passive necessarily, and two, by the neighbor being the Samaritan, the lawyer has no right to assume that there is anything that qualifies being a neighbor besides being a human. Thus the question ought not to be, “who is my neighbor?” but, “to whom have I been a neighbor?”, and if one feels he or she needs to ask who might be exempt from neighborly care, they need look no further than the Samaritan who cared for his natural enemy. If our enemies are not exempt, who is? And so the second part of the greatest commandment is fulfilled by us caring for anyone, no matter who they are, and if you read the story again that includes praying, and going to church. This is, as we have pointed out, a part of loving God.
Our second question: What is love? It’s quite foundational really. But really what is love? It’s important to not read our modern notion of love into the Biblical text. They are really not the same thing. This is not Greek’s fault, it is that the English word “love” is so vague, general, subjective, and emotional. It can mean anything from a state of being, to a declaration of approval. (e.g. “I am in love”. “I love country music”) I can rightly love an object, an idea, or a person. Here is one of my favorite, humorous definitions of love.
“Love is a happy time. It is that time when the male part of the species says to the female part of the species, “Hey! You wanna go on a date?” And she says yes, if he’s lucky. And he takes her to a place called a restaurant. And she orders for herself a salad. And he orders a big piece of beef. And that ladies and gentlemen is love”
But love in the Bible is not so vague, or humorous, and carries not the same heavy romantic overtones. Nonetheless they are variations of meaning. There are three main words in the New Testament that are translated “love”. First, there is “eros” from which we get the word erotic. This is sexual love. Second, there is “phileo”, which can be translated, as brotherly love. Hence we get Philadelphia, “the city of brotherly love”. But the words brotherly carry more than just a familial or neighborly love but also refer to a sweet and compassionate love. Then lastly, there is “agape“, which is somewhat commonly used in the Bible as well as other Koine Greek texts. Most of the time it seems to con notate an unconditional love, but is also used in places in Scripture where that would not make much grammatical sense. The safest understanding of “agape” is an intense, unwavering, intentional love.
Despite “love” being still vague in the Greek, though to a much lesser extent. It is not near as subjective as it is in English, and when we look at it closely we shall see that, whether it be “eros”, “phileo” or “agape” that it is always active and volitional. Therefore when Paul says in the famous love chapter 1 Corinthians 13 that love is (all these things, let’s for the sake of example say “kind”), he is not saying that the definition of love is kindness, he is saying that love is the act of kindness, and that it also the act of all these things. In the Greek the word love cannot ever escape its active nature, and the idea of appreciating something, or approving of something, or admiring something is never attached to the concept of love. Love is active. As DC Talk once said, “Love is a verb”.
With that said we understand that in the greatest commandment that God is not calling us to a subjective feeling towards him, but to an action towards him (which might lead to a feeling, but that’s another essay) And he’s not calling us to merely like our neighbors, but to actively care for them, to actively be neighbors to all people.
One question remains which I didn’t mention before. What does it mean to love your neighbor, “as yourself”? Much has been made of that little phrase, particularly in the last couple of individualistic, post-modern, psychological/introverted centuries. Perhaps too much has been made of it. Some have said something similar to, “You can’t love others unless you love yourself”, to which others have replied, “The Bible assumes that we all love ourselves” To me the conflict is clarified when we think of love as being active, and not necessarily a state of being or statement of admiration. I’m not sure what exactly is meant by the retort, “we all love ourselves” for if we’re using the vague modern concept of love here, there certainly are people who do not love themselves, which really means that they have too much pride to see their worth as a person. But if we take the active biblical understanding of love, we find that indeed everyone does (naturally) actively care for themselves, at least physically if not hygienically. If taken that way then the Bible does assume that human beings generally do care for themselves. So the commandment to love your neighbor (everybody) is the commandment to be equally concerned with everybody’s well-being, including yourself, as you would be useless to help if you were not taken care of.
But the greatest love Jesus says is that a man lay down his life for his friends. To consider your life worth sacrificing for the sake of another’s, this is the apex of agape. John says in his epistle: “In this is love. Not that we loved Him, but that He loved us, and became the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Christ sacrificed His life so that we might live. He is the greatest lover of all time.
So. The greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. It is as important as the first commandment to love God, and is a major part of loving God. Everyone is our neighbor. We are to be a neighbor to everyone, including our enemies. Love is volitional and active. To love our neighbor as ourselves is not to concentrate on good self-esteem, but to concentrate on others, knowing they need the same things that we do, to take care of ourselves with the motivation of allowing ourselves to take care of others, and to be willing to put our own life on the line for others, as Christ has done for us. In the next month, and beyond, this is what we shall do.