The Bible tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves.
That's a pretty good sound bite. Jesus himself said that if you do that and
love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind, that sums up the entire law
in a nutshell.
But there is nothing simple about loving our neighbor
as ourselves. There is not even anything simple in understanding what it means to
love our neighbor as ourselves.
I've heard this biblical command used over and over to
teach that we need to learn to love ourselves more. How can we love our
neighbor as ourselves if we don't love ourselves? Because, you know, we are SO
filled with self-hate. We don't like who we are; we just don't accept ourselves
for how we are made.
Good heavens. Satan must be particularly proud of himself for that one: turning the
second greatest command of God into an invitation to indulge the most basic and
greatest of all sins -- pride. Yep, that was pretty brilliant. And what suckers
we are to fall for it.
I can't think of a single place in the Word where we
are instructed to grow in love for ourselves, to try to love ourselves, or to
love ourselves at all. Rather, we are constantly being told to die to
ourselves, to put God and others above ourselves. In Jesus' command here, he assumes
that we love ourselves from the start – which seems like a reasonable assumption
to me, having observed myself and a good number of human beings for several
years now. Our problem is never that we think of ourselves more lowly
than we ought. Quite the contrary.
I've been reading and re-reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity during my nighttime devotions these days. (There's another
brilliant one, C.S. Lewis. Not to compare him to Satan -- but yeah, brilliant.) He talks about this self-love idea:
Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap?
Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments)
but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my
self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I
love myself. . . . In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think
myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of
the things I have done with horror and loathing.
So, the Self-Love contingency would say, "See? He
can't like himself when he thinks he does horrible loathsome things. How could
he?" But Lewis continues:
I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that
I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would
say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a
silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not
hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom
I had been doing this all my life--namely myself. However much I might dislike
my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never
been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason I loved myself,
I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.
Part of this has to do with our definition of love. If
you think love has to do with fondness or affection, you might have trouble
loving loathsome people. But love is not a feeling; it is an action. Love is
acting in another's best interests. (Which, Lewis notes, is easier to do when
we are fond of the person, so it still behooves us to try to develop some
fondness for folks . . . but it's not a requirement to obey the command.) Even
when I hate the things I do, I still act in my own best interests.
And even when I hate the actions and behaviors of my
neighbor, I can still act in their best interests. I can love them. I can even
have some affection for most of them, if I give it some effort.
This love command of Jesus' -- it really requires more attention than we give it.
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