The Gospels record that Jesus affirmed that the second great commandment is to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is easier said than done. It raises all sorts of questions in our minds. One of them, asked by a lawyer in order to narrow its application was, “Who is my neighbor?” But before I get to that let me ask this question: “How does God expect us to love our neighbor?” The answer is inherent in the commandment: apparently by our understanding of how we love ourselves. We are expected to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

One of the biggest barriers to loving our neighbor as ourselves is the inability to love ourselves as God loves us. Many hate themselves, or what they have become, and have no love to give to others. Many love themselves in the wrong way, and seek to bolster their love of themselves in self-destructive ways. So they drug and drink themselves to death, or cause the violent deaths of others.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote that there is a proper and an improper form of self-love. There is selfish love of self, and there is a spiritual love of self. The person who does not know how to love himself properly is not capable of loving others. He is so obsessed with his own need for love that he cannot relate positively to others. The ‘selfish,’ exclusive love of self, does not care for anyone beyond himself. The ‘proper,’ inclusive love of self, seeks the good of others, because it recognizes what it needs for oneself.

When a person degrades herself by allowing herself to be used by others and exploited, she has not learned to love herself. When a person allows himself to be bought, bribed, or otherwise corrupted, he has not rightly learned to love himself. When a person seeks power and fame, and abuses it for his own satisfaction, he has not learned to love himself rightly. When a woman becomes a doormat for her husband and enables him in his tyranny, she has not learned to rightly love herself. When a man wastes his time and energy in the service of empty accomplishments in order to boost his ego, he has not rightly learned to love himself. When the frivolous woman throws herself into social engagements in order to escape her loneliness, she does not understand how to love herself rightly. The woman who is depressed or otherwise self-destructive, who surrenders to despair because she has been betrayed or rejected, does not know how to love herself rightly. When a man who is self-tormented tries to martyr himself, or take his own life, he does not have a genuine understanding of how a man ought to love himself. When a person measures his worth by the standards of success in the culture, and feels himself a failure, he does not possess proper self love.

What is legitimate self-love? If we are called to love everyone, that includes ourselves. No one is to be excluded from our love, not even ourselves. If we value God’s creation, God’s gifts, we must value ourselves as one of those gifts. If God values us then we cannot but do otherwise. If God, by his grace, finds us worthy of love, then we should also. “We love because he first loved us.” We learn what love is from seeing how God loves us. We appreciate God’s love by recognizing how high a price he has set on us in the Cross.

Proper self-love is the standard by which we shall love our neighbor. We ought to love our neighbor as we ought to love ourselves. We ought to love our neighbors as we are loved by God. We love ourselves by seeking God’s kingdom, seeking his truth, seeking his blessing, seeking his fulfillment and satisfaction, seeking his goals for our lives. We love ourselves by seeking God’s best for us. We love ourselves by taking care of ourselves. It is our responsibility to take care of ourselves so that we have the ability to love others, to have something to give them. What we want for ourselves we will want for others We have a need for forgiveness, for respect, for love, for health and wholeness..

In the parable of the Good Samaritan we can identify with, either the victim, who has been left half dead by the side of the road, or the other travelers. The priest and the Levite, who hurry on past, lest they too are assaulted, are insecure. They see anyone who needs help to be beneath them. They are too wrapped up in themselves, and their self-sufficiency, to consider the needs of someone else. Theirs is a selfish self-love, turned in on themselves, because of their insecurity.

If we identify with the victim we can imagine how we would like to be treated by others. We know how we would like to be loved by realizing how we ourselves would like to be treated under the same circumstances. The kind of care the Samaritan provided is an illustration of the kind of care we believe is implied by the qualification “as yourself.” This is the teaching of the Golden Rule: “do to others what you would have them do to you.” He does what we would like others to do for us: dressing our wounds, taking us to a hotel, and taking care of us until we recover, to continue our journey unaided.

The victim stands for anyone who is mugged on the road that is life. The wounds received may be emotional rather than physical. The roadside may be a family in which there is much emotional pain that is covered over and denied. The family or the relationship may be controlling and manipulative. The robbers may be those who hold emotional power over the victim, who strip him or her of his sense of self love, beat him down over the years, and leave him to live a diminished life – half alive, and half dead. The antagonists may be priests and Levites, religious people, church people, upstanding in the community; but nonetheless robbers of the lives of those they abuse. There is no freedom to become your own person, to form your own God-given identity, in that relationship. So many people are robbed of a healthy self love by those who beat them down and expect them to conform to what they expect them to be, instead of what God has created them to be. So much domestic violence takes place because of lack of proper self love.

A person with proper self love has such a healthy regard for himself, and a sense of the worth of his own identity in Christ, that he does not have to cling onto another in a co-dependent way. He is willing to give up the other person, to allow him to distance himself, to let go in the relationship, for the sake of the good of the other person. So many friendships, and family relationships are unhealthy because one person sees the other person as a way of fulfilling themselves in a co-dependent way. That person can be like a parasite, sucking the life out of the other. If we love the other person, such as our child, we are willing to let her go her own way for the sake of her future growth. To love our neighbor as ourselves means not to cling on to them (for we do not want others to cling on to us), or stifle them with our expectations and claims on them. We value our independence. Therefore, we would not demand that our neighbor, or family member, become like us, or model themselves on us, or agree with us, in order to be accepted. To love our neighbor as ourselves is to respect the separate identity of the other person, and to rejoice in their independent development apart from us.

Loving our neighbor as ourselves is a safeguard against loving our neighbor less than ourselves, as well as loving others more than ourselves. To love others more than ourselves is to beggar oneself, to not take care of ourselves so that we cannot continue to love others. How can we love our neighbor if we do not love ourselves? Part of the problem of the human condition is that we are conflicted about ourselves. On the one hand we can love ourselves too much and become egotistical. On the other hand we can love ourselves too little and become envious of others. If the former we then see others as serving our needs by using them to fulfill our egotistical desires. If the latter we see ourselves as victims and others as being privileged. In both cases we believe that our relationships with others can become means to ends in fulfilling our needs. In other words our self-centeredness causes us to find ways to use others for our fulfillment. That is why some people use politics to manipulate others to do their will.

Envy of others causes us to want to find ways to become like them either by motivating us to achieve what we perceive them to have or by seeking ways to take from them what we desire to have for ourselves. The first way leads us to excel in whatever way we can in education, sports, marriage, the arts, business or public affairs. The second way leads us to crime, intrigue, socialism, acquisitions, military aggression, manipulation, blackmail and fraud.

Egotism causes us to want to use others for our fulfillment by domination, bullying, sexual promiscuity, and subjugation. The egotist wants to recreate others into his image, to remodel others, to push his agenda, to exalt his ideas, to silence his opponents, to crush the other person’s individuality or make life miserable for him.

The problem for our society is when these attitudes become enshrined in our politics. The only antidote to save us from these attitudes is to discover who we really are and what our needs are in relation to God. Jesus prefaced this command by saying that the first commandment is to love God with all your heart, mind and strength. By repenting of our self-centeredness and turning to God for our forgiveness and redemption we put God, our Creator and Savior, first in our lives and ask for the empowering of the Holy Spirit to love ourselves properly. If this is done we can find ways to deal with our envy and our egotism and discover our true spiritual nature in Christ by becoming a new creation.

Jesus said that we should love ourselves as we would love our neighbor, for to love oneself in the right way, and to love our neighbor is the same thing. When you love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor, you love your neighbor as yourself. The teaching of Christ is that a person should love his neighbor as himself, that is, as he ought to love himself. Is this something you do? Is this something you need to work on for yourself, and for those you love? What do you need to do in order to love your neighbor as yourself?

GUIDE FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. How do you balance the need to acknowledge your sins and need for forgiveness with proper self-love?

2. How does the awareness of our own need for forgiveness affect our attitude to others?

3. What is the difference between a proper and an improper form of self-love?

4. Give an example from your experience of lack of proper self-love.

5. How do we love ourselves properly?

6. Who do you identify with in the Parable of the Good Samaritan? Why?

7. How can we avoid confusing loving our neighbor with co-dependency?

8. What is the antidote to envy and egotism?