I can get on board with what Jesus is saying when he tells us to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I think most everyone can. I hear it and read it all the time – a lot of people are on some kind of quest for justice and fairness, and this, of course, goes straight to how we get there.
But we fall short, and so the blame and finger-pointing is relentless. Our problem is that we often miss the first part of what Jesus says and skip straight to the second. Of course, we humans are going to be big-time in favor of loving our neighbors as ourselves (generally speaking). This means there’s something in it for us too. If others love their neighbors, that includes me too, doesn’t it? But how?
If we love each other by our own standards, we end up all over the place. Each culture and society has its own perception on how it should go, and each person within those cultures and societies believes in even more nuanced ways. Because of this, the phrase “Love your neighbor as yourself” can mean wildly different things across the planet. To some, it may mean license to do whatever one wishes, as long as it doesn’t hurt one’s neighbors. To others, it might mean to encourage a sense of discipline so our neighbor may contribute to society (and what’s good for society is something they themselves have figured out). Or maybe something in between, like do what you want in your own home, but toe the line in public.
But the point of failure in all of this is the missing out on the first part of Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees – what he calls the first great commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Without this, the second (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”) is merely preference. Important, yes; but meaningless in God’s grand scheme. The loving of one’s neighbors rests upon how you love God, because how you love God establishes the standard by which you exercise your love of others.
If you are exercising a love colored by your own preferences, you’re bound to miss the point. You can give to the poor and feed the hungry and support all kinds of causes, but to do it with selfish motive is only a temporary fix to everyone’s biggest problem. You’ve gotten someone off the street, filled their bellies, and assuaged your own guilty conscience along the way. Great. But now, in the face of eternity, you simply have more people strolling comfortably on the broad path that Jesus himself (your “love everyone” guy) says leads to destruction.
The prophet Elijah says a line I’ve always liked when addressing the people and the prophets of Baal in the Old Testament book of First Kings (chapter 18). He says, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” I like his straightforwardness in this – it’s either/or, not “a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” If you want to pull from the words of Jesus to justify your actions as a “Christian,” then you have to be prepared to pull from all of them. You can’t say “Jesus was a great teacher here” while ignoring what he says “there.”
You can’t short-circuit the ways of God and continue calling yourself any semblance of “Christian.” Sure, you can borrow from the principles of Christianity – a great deal of your morality rests upon them already. But you’ve got to go either one way or the other if you want to be called “Christian” (or not). This is of great importance because Christianity has taken such a bad rap over the centuries from having far too many claim it on the basis of only a portion of what it takes. Far too many actions have been influenced by personal preference rather than a serious look at what God is really asking of his followers. It’s too obvious when you see slavery, extortion, murder, sexual molestation – all conducted and condoned by “Christians” — when God’s word clearly condemns those things.
Along the lines of Elijah’s word, I’ve always enjoyed this bottom-line perspective from C. S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity (page 52 in my version):
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
I challenge you to quit limping between two opinions. Quit short-circuiting the words of Christ by choosing only those that appeal to you at the expense of those that challenge you. Continue to love your neighbor as yourself, but don’t forget the first commandment that gives the second its true power – to love God with all of your heart and soul and mind. In eternity, you can’t have one without the other.
