Thoughts for the Day

Love your neighbour as yourself.                               Matthew 22:39

Jesus’ sacrifice for us demonstrates God’s love towards us.  How then should we respond?  We will spend a few days looking at what Jesus said, starting with the easy one (!) and getting harder.

When challenged to say which was the greatest commandment, Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and added, without being asked, “And the second is like it, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ ”.   The latter comes from Leviticus 19, which includes commands not to rob, defraud, slander, endanger life, hate, seek revenge or bear a grudge against your neighbour alongside commands to judge fairly and, perhaps surprisingly, to ‘rebuke your neighbour frankly so that you will not share their guilt’, before summing up with the words ‘but love your neighbour as yourself’.  It perhaps isn’t too tough a list of commands to manage, at least if we limit our definition of ‘neighbour’ to people rather like us.  And the ‘neighbour’ in Leviticus 19 is clearly limited to ‘your people’.

Luke records an expert in the law testing Jesus with the same coupling – Love God, Love your neighbour as yourself.  Does this suggest it was already a recognised summary of the law or was he merely quoting Jesus back to him? Who knows!  But, trying to put Jesus on the spot, the expert asked, “Who is my neighbour?”, and Jesus turned the world on its head.  In Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, it turned out that my neighbour is anyone to whom I can be neighbourly.  And very intentionally and pointedly, the hero of Jesus’ story, the Samaritan, was someone the person being helped would have looked down on.  Being neighbourly to those who despise us! Now that’s a challenge!