Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Matthew 22:37–39)[1]
Loving your neighbor is a key part of being a good Christian. But what does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself?
For many years, I’d vaguely understood it as “be nice, bring brownies at the holidays, deliver casserole when they’re sick.” Basically, eliding it with a generic vision of good neighborliness, in an aggressively suburban America kind of way. Sitting in church last week, I realized that this reading is rather missing the point. We are not asked to “love your neighbor as you love other people in your lives, like your family or your loved ones.” We are instructed instead to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
How do we love ourselves?
We prioritize our own needs above those of all others. We place our own wants ahead of the needs of all others, except perhaps family members or other loved ones. Whether it’s the hours of our day or the dollars in our paycheck, most of us dedicate both to supporting and then pleasing ourselves and our families.
To love our neighbor as ourselves, then, would be to accord their needs the same priority that we give our own. To give our time, our energy, and our money to supporting their needs and satisfying their wants in the same way that we do our own.
…this is sounding pretty difficult. Perhaps, at the very least, Jesus conceives of “neighbors” in a relatively narrow way?
Nope. Lucky for us, a listener in Luke asks Jesus to clarify who, precisely, constitutes a neighbor (Luke 10:29). Jesus responds with the parable of the good Samaritan.
Quick recap: a traveler is injured by brigands and left for dead on the side of the road. Several people, including a priest and a guy from a famously moral group, ignore him; only a Samaritan—whose tribe was a longstanding enemy with the Judeans—aids the injured traveler: giving him first aid, taking him away on his own horse, and sheltering him at an inn and promising to reimburse the innkeeper for any costs. Jesus ends by asking:
Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?
And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. (Luke 10:36-37)
Okay, so loving your neighbor is not just about helping the people who live right next to you, or those in your ethnic group alone, but rather about helping complete strangers, and helping them generously.
How, exactly, are we supposed to action something this extreme? In a world of 8.1 billion people, all of whom could use a little mercy at times – some of whom could use quite a bit, in fact – how can we live up to this ideal?
Throughout the Bible, Jesus sets a moral standard that is not merely difficult, but actively impossible, to meet. In light of that, one can give up entirely or try to live up to it nevertheless, anywhere from halfheartedly to full throttle. Emotionally, everything from apathy to guilt to energized motivation makes sense in response to a demand of this magnitude.
In my mind, we are morally obligated to do everything we can given our own circumstances and limitations, while recognizing and accepting that we are going to fail to live up to this call. While I don’t believe in a Hobbesian “State of Nature” where humans are solely selfish, I do believe that we are biologically and culturally predisposed to give substantial priority to our own needs. That’s okay. It’s close to impossible to consistently care for others as much as we do ourselves.
But we can still try. We can occasionally give up something we’d like to buy and donate the money instead. We can give up some animal products even if we’d enjoy them. We can go out of our way to accommodate the needs of others, even when it inconveniences ourselves. We are called to make sacrifices in our lives; each of us has to determine what kinds of sacrifices we’re willing and able to make.
Saying “Jesus says: be nice” is the world’s blandest take. I don’t think Jesus says “be nice.” I think he says: one of your core responsibilities as a human being is to help others. I think he says: you should aspire to prioritize the needs of strangers as highly as your own, even though you will inevitably fail. Back in 30s CE Judea, you couldn’t donate your salary to buy bednets for children you’d never meet. But by defining our responsibilities to our neighbors in terms of a strong responsibility to care for even strangers from very different backgrounds, chance met on the road, Jesus is asking for something similar.
Jesus doesn’t tell us that our moral responsibilities are small. He tells us that they’re both substantial and central to a good life. Loving our neighbor as ourselves is not easy: in fact, it’s so difficult as to be impossible for almost all of us. But it’s worth our best effort – worth everything we are.
[1] In three of the four gospels, we get some version of the above.