Then one of them, a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question, testing Him, and saying,
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
Jesus said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
“This is the first and great commandment.
“And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
“On these two commandments hang all the laws and the prophets.”
— Matthew 22:35-40
A few days of blissful disconnection from the internet (and cell phone service, for that matter) at a friend’s cottage in central Ontario has given a lot of time to reflect on various things. I haven’t had the usual distractions of checking things like Apple News, Facebook or my email account “just in case”.
Frankly, had I been born two generations later than I was, I would probably have had a whole dispensary of drugs shoved into me to control what I imagine would have been diagnosed as ADH – hey! How many loons are on that lake over there?!
Right.
So, gliding around Oak Lake on a kayak early yesterday morning, my mind flashed onto those two great commandments. From time to time, I’ve wondered about the concept of loving oneself, and projecting that onto one’s neighbours. After all, are we supposed to love ourselves? What if I don’t particularly like myself on a given day? Do I get to treat my neighbour like crap on those days, too?
One way to look at it, is that the job of loving me belongs to God and to our neighbours. My job is to love God and my neighbours. So some years ago, I came up with another interpretation: love your neighbour as you, yourself, are loved by God – unconditionally, slow to anger and quick to forgive, putting his or her own interests ahead of your own.
But there’s something airy-fairy about that interpretation and it’s not exactly in line with Scripture. Instead, isn’t Jesus calling us to take our natural narcissistic tendencies and turn them inside out, projecting them on everyone else around us?
But here’s another way of looking at that. God knows – Jesus knows – that we do love ourselves, in that we look out for our own interests first. We defend ourselves, we lie to protect ourselves, when we do something wrong, we come up with a million and one reasons to rationalize the action or mitigate the damage; we sacrifice someone else’s convenience for the sake of a “better offer” or “what works for us”.
Jesus’ Second Great Commandment calls on us to take that “me first” concept and apply it to the people around us. Love your neighbour as yourself.
We’ve always been self-centered, but it seems like our generation, with its fixation on “identity” and a worldly concept of “freedom”, has pushed the boundaries further than ever before.
The two Greatest Commandments. Something we need to embrace, and cling to.
Two Minutes for Cross-Checking! 