“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Huh?

Thinking more about the notion of “loving your neighbor as yourself” and the passage in Matthew 22:34-40.

It is understandable how this can be interpreted as “love your neighbor the same way you love and treat yourself.” Certainly, you don’t steal from yourself, lie to hurt yourself, and shouldn’t be killing yourself. But we think it’s much more than that. Remember, this one of the two principles is summing up the second half of the Ten Commandments; the ones concerning murder, adultery, false witness, stealing and coveting. Interpreting the summarizing statement of Jesus in the sense only of being as nice to others as we are to ourselves we can start to justify our conduct based on how far we have not gone to violate a command. But, as Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount, the Commandments go to something deeper in our hearts and spiritual. As we—if we are being truthful—see that we do not keep those Commandments because we sin in our hearts, we can see that the love he is talking about must be something deeper too. He was preaching life, not law, and grace, not works.

The Greek word used is αγαπησεις. It is not a self-love, but a selfless emptying love. It is the kind of love that Jesus displayed on the cross—“Father forgive them for they know not what they’re doing.” It is a love we cannot do in our self-serving, self-preserving flesh. We cannot simply gin up by our own will the measure or quality of love to which Jesus refers in this passage. He was not using the word for erotic or brotherly love, or even the love of a parent for a child, but rather unselfish love.

So the idea is that when first we love God with our entire being then, as the result and only because He called us and redeemed us to love by means of Him loving us first, we ought to (in fact, by operation of the Holy Spirit of Christ at fruitful work in believers, we are compelled to) turn that around to our neighbors to love them as we have been loved; with agape love—which is only God’s love. We love them—with God’s love—as though they were us being loved by God. And, we know how loved we are if we know Christ. Loving not in a utilitarian sense of hope for a return on our investment but as God’s hand extended—as He extended His to us—even before being loved in return and regardless of any return at all.

Finally, it is not yet another unfulfillable command to show us our failure or to give us a false sense of accomplishment when we think we’ve succeeded. Like all of the law, it is only fulfilled in Christ. As we are one with Christ and with His Church, we love God as He loves and love our neighbors as He loves with all the Glory and Praise to Him alone. In our failure to do so as we are prone from time-to-time to fail or be selfish or self-seeking or conceited we see our continual need for Christ.

Love your neighbor as yourself is to see your every neighbor as the imago Dei: the image of God, just as precious to Him as we are to Him. We need to know so, even when we feel low. It is only partly about the way we treat ourselves. It is more about the way God has treated and transformed us.