Jesus in the New Testament, referenced in Matthew 22:35–40, Mark 12:28–34, and Luke 10:27a that the two greatest commandments are to love God with all your heart and soul and strength and then to Love your neighbour as yourself.
There are certainly different ways of interpreting the phrase, and I am not going to go into them all. I am just giving my thoughts on what could be the interpretation of the commandment.
The part I suppose we would have trouble with is the “as yourself” part in the law rather than loving your neighbour part.The self is something that many philosophers throughout the centuries and its not what some people in modern culture would call ‘self-love’ or ‘self-worship’. Jesus is certainly not asking us to love our neighbours in that narcissistic or hedonistic way. It is the realisation of what makes up an individual person. Aristotle defined the soul as the core of a living being, and not separate from the body and this is what makes up the individual person. Aristotle went further and said there are different parts of the soul—the rational, thinking side, the irrational side that is responsible for identifying our needs eg food.
Then other philosophers came along such as Descartes who came up with ‘I think therefore I am’ in his discourse on the method. Descartes said that even in times of extreme doubt whether that is imagination, deception and so on, that as proof of at least reality in one’s own mind, there has to be a thinking entity; which is the self.
From a Christian perspective the soul, spirit and body are what makes up a living being.
“Then the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Genesis 2:7
"And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."1 Thessalonians 5:23
All of these things are true, we have a spirit, a soul and a body, and it is the ‘self’ that is the soul. We should not worship ourselves nor that we go other way and hate ourselves because all these things are gifts from God.
Loving your neighbour is exactly what it says, meeting other people’s needs on an individual basis. I recently called Giving the Devil His Due by a scientific humanist called Michael Shermer and he makes a really important point. In the modern world, particularly in politics that many of the modern-day progressives and the modern-day conservatives have veered away from classical liberalism or individualism, putting an emphasis of the group over the individual. The progressives put people in different categories whether that be oppressor, oppressed, and then into defined by race, gender, class and so on. For conservatives it is under ‘faith and flag’ and then proceed to label by nation, tribe, family, religion, political party and so on.Yet this is far from what it is in the bible, apart from the pharisees, it is very rare for Jesus to label or describe individuals in such groups in the way we do today.
Examples being the Samaritan women, or the crippled beggar. To the crippled beggar, the first thing Jesus says to him, is “Do you want to become well?”Jesus is identifying the person’s needs straight away, nothing more, nothing less. Then there is the haemorrhaging woman who had been bleeding all her life, in this case she goes to Jesus, but her need is still met. These two instances illustrate different ways of meeting people’s needs—either going to them or them coming to you as individuals.
Now this can become easier in the world of social media and connected 24/7, and being aware of the needs in the community, which are all good works and you can be aware of Facebook groups where people are seeking help. But at the same time social media can make us become hyperaware of things going on all over the world, and showing this love to people all across the world becomes more abstract, and more vague and then we will have the tendency to fall back into labelling people or putting people into groups and assuming they all have the same needs, wants and desires, which is not the case. At a base level, everyone needs food, water and shelter but it can become very difficult, very fast. For instance how can you show the same kind of commitment of love or friendship or support to someone that is a neighbour, a work colleague, someone in the church compared to someone that lives five hundred miles away?
You can of course send money, which helps or prayer which certainly helps but it is not the same commitment to being in those people’s lives. We need to get back to loving our neighbours as ourselves, as individual and meeting their needs without labelling them and adding to the already divided society. Instead we need to be pointing indviduals to Christ who will meet their needs, their spiritual needs which outweighs their physical needs though that is important as well.