“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:39
Few commands in the Bible combine with such magnificence a fairly ambiguous concept with such a pragmatic object. Fewer still identify the precise mode in which that command must be carried out.
“Love your neighbor as yourself!” What’s more intangible, ambiguous, and so defies definition as love? What can be more flesh and blood, tangible and identifiable as your neighbor? The command does not stop at “love your neighbor”, but paves a pathway for this love – “as yourself”. It sets a standard for this love. We are not simply to love our neighbor, but to love them as ourselves. It is this precise mode, this standard, that has so captured the attention of theologians and psychologists alike, and spawned many a good pages on the subject of learning to love yourself. While there is much truth in all of our excursions in the subject of loving ourselves so we can love our neighbor, I suspect that there is a simpler, more subtle truth intended in this command, and it has less to do with how much in the abstract we love ourselves, and more to do with how much in the concrete we see our neighbor as ourselves.
It is a universal experience that we are intimately and distinctly aware of ourselves in the concrete, but we often think of our neighbor in the abstract. For example, I am rarely aware of myself (and hardly think it as my major identity) as an “Asian Indian” with a distinct accent who loves curry and rice, owns a good Japanese car, and sports a bad haircut. But I am perpetually and intimately aware of my feelings, my pain, my joy, my dreams and my struggles – in essence my humanity. In contrast, when I meet my neighbor, I often see him in abstract – for instance as a tall, thin, southerner with annoying habits, or worse, as a proud, pompous northerner whom I differ sharply in my worldview. It is only by a conscious effort that I see him in the concrete – as another human being with frailties, with feelings, with desires, with sorrows and fears not much different than mine.
I suggest that when Jesus emphasized loving the neighbor as yourself, that at least one of the things he was commanding was a radical change of perspective that would make that love possible. He was advocating viewing our neighbor not in the abstract categories that we so automatically place them in, but as the tangible concrete fellow human beings, made in the image of God whose essence is the same as myself.
In fact that is the only possible basis of genuine love to our neighbor. You cannot love the neighbor as yourself until you see them as yourself – frail humanity with a stamp of divinity. As long as you see them as abstract categories, you may tolerate them, you may even help them occasionally, but you can never truly love them. Love is not only difficult, but hate finds its roots when we do not see the neighbor as ourselves. History itself testifies to this. One of the reason the holocaust happened was the fact that a fellow human being became a category – a people group to be annihilated. The essence of humanness was blurred, and the abstract became the focus.
The Gospel narratives brim with examples of this very thing. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the glory of the Samaritan’s action is that he did not see the robbed and battered man in the abstract as a “Jew”, but in the concrete as a fellow human being in pain, dying and in desperate need for help. The rest of the actions simply were a natural response to his seeing the man as himself.
It is perhaps this lack of the vision of the tangible humanity was the failing of those who were shocked and asked Jesus, “ Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?” (Matthew 25:44). Perhaps all they saw was the problem of poverty, the oddity of the stranger, the crisis of health care, and the scandal of the prisoner.
It is expressed in the astonishment of Simon the Pharisee on seeing the sinner woman washing the Lord’s feet, and annointing His head with fragrant oil. The thought in his mind exposes how he sees her – not as a imminent, corporeal, weeping and broken woman but rather as a representative of that flaunting city sinner, a blot to civilized society.
It is expressed in the public prayer of the Pharisee who sees his neighbor prayiong, not as a fellow worshipper, but rather in that abstract category of a “publican”.
How do we then as Christians, mandated by our Lord, love our neighbor as ourselves? May I point you to the One who is our inspiration, our strength, and our enabler! The One who saw us, not in the abstract of a fallen and rebellious humanity, but as individuals worthy of the price of His very own blood for our redemption! May the same Lord give us the grace to see our neighbor as ourselves, so we may love them as ourselves!
Danesh Manik
