“Love your neighbor as yourself”
As I watch sandbags and floodwalls put up by countless volunteers and workers this week, I’ve returned to a line attributed to Martin Luther: “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.” Whether he actually said that or not is debatable, but that doesn’t make the point any less true.
Our neighbors should be the recipients of our good work. When it comes to flood times, it seems like this community understands that on a special level. Rising waters don’t discriminate and so we are all in this together – we are all neighbors. And as scripture tells us that when one suffers, all suffer, and when one rejoices, all rejoice together.
This idea of serving neighbors goes even beyond the command to “Love your neighbor as yourself”. It’s this simple notion that is the cornerstone of the Christian tradition just as it is for faiths around this country and the world. Almost every major world religion including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism have some form or another of this ‘greatest commandment’ and golden rule.
You would think that something as straight forward as the golden rule would leave little room for interpretation, but things can be more complicated than they seem. In the gospel of Luke, after asking how to inherit eternal life, Jesus asks a religious teacher, “what is the Law?” The teacher responds with the greatest commandment, as we know it, saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus replies to him, “Do this and you will live.” But the teacher quickly quips back, “And who is my neighbor?”
That is the question for our time, is it not? Who is my neighbor? 2000 plus years later it is still this question that shapes our faith at work in the world. Our context and world view, perhaps just as it was for this religious teacher, leads us to think firstly of ourselves, believing that ‘love’ should start by turning inward and only after that, should we begin to turn outward. And likewise, it seems that we characterize neighbors only as close friendships, or community connections like the folks next door, rather than humankind and the global community more generally.
It seems to me that when many of us ask the question, “who is my neighbor”, knowingly or unknowingly, we are sharing some of our deepest fears about the ‘other’. Whether it be a lack of understanding or empathy, taught behaviors, or fear and worry, you and I and people in general just seem to have a hard time understanding and loving the ‘other’. This can be especially true when navigating religious, cultural, political, racial, and ethnic differences. And so, our narrow sense of ‘neighbor’ and own sense of self-preservation causes us to pull back, to stick with our own, to remain focused inward instead of outward. From this naval gazing and isolation is born hate, distrust, and fear.
In the face of this, it is our calling as people of faith to rise up and realize that when God commands us to “love our neighbor”, it does not come with terms and conditions or specific limitations. We are all neighbors – the folks next door and the ones across town and the globe, the people from the other church and even different faiths, rich and poor, refugees and migrants, all races, sexualities, gender expressions, and ethnicities alike. This understanding must be at the core of our being if we are to take our lives as faithful people seriously. We are people who are called not inward, but outward, and who have been charged to love and serve the neighbor and the stranger and the ‘other’ and everybody in this whole wide world the same way God loves you - unconditionally.