By Ryan Diaz
Why “love your neighbor?” Out of all the things God could have asked of us, why this seemingly simple and ordinary command? Shouldn’t Christians aspire to something greater than the simple task of loving one’s neighbor? This is what I used to think of Jesus’s words when I was young. When my young zeal outpaced my wisdom, neighbor-love sounded all too easy. I got along quite fine with the people who lived next door. To love them came at no cost to me. I smiled and waved and shoveled when it snowed. If this was all Jesus had to ask of me, then I was doing pretty okay.
Years later, I look at the words of Jesus’s command, and the word neighbor has a different meaning. It’s easy to love the world as a distant, nameless other. To love generally, to pronounce that we love that intangible thing called humanity is easy. But your neighbor? That seems now like an altogether impossible task. My neighbor is not a shadowed face but those living, breathing people I find myself in proximity with—all their flaws, insecurities, and brokenness laid bare for me to touch and name and know. These are the people Christ calls us to love. It’s these flesh and blood people Christ asks us to make room for—to open our hearts and homes and say “come feast and eat; this is your home too.” All of a sudden neighbor-love feels impossible. How can we love people whose brokenness is intimate and familiar to us? How can we sit and eat across from those whose wounds are exposed and untreated?
It’s here Jesus invites us to do the inherently radical—to love our neighbors as ourselves. Our neighbors show us our shared humanity, the image of God chiseled in human flesh. It’s in the face of others we recognize our own humanity. We see, though dimly, the glory of God behind the eyes of those we call neighbor, and in turn, bear witness to the same glory imbued in us. Once we recognize that our neighbors also bear the image of God, then we have no choice but to love them as ourselves. They are us, and we are them—glorious images of the One who loved us and gave himself for us. In our neighbors, we glimpse the face of God present in our own. This is why love for God and neighbor are eternally bound together. You cannot do one without doing the other. Making room for our neighbor means making room for God, and it is here, at this crossroads, that God dwells in our midst and the Great Commandment is fulfilled.
Post Comments (0)