Love Your Neighbor, As Yourself

"And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:31). The common understanding of the second great commandment is that we must love our neighbor with the same care and devotion and passion as we love ourselves. Essentially, this boils down to the golden rule: treat others the way you would like to be treated. But what if we were to throw a comma into that commandment? Love your neighbor, as yourself. In other words, love your neighbor in the unique way that only you can, as yourself. If we were to approach honoring and fulfilling this commandment, we would be less likely to get bogged down with concerns that we were loving our neighbor wrong or inadequately or insufficiently or hopelessly. If we see our neighbor collapse on the sidewalk, we might wish we were a trained doctor to be able to treat them on the spot, but maybe the very best we can do is to call for help and make them as comfortable as possible while we wait for the trained professionals. If we love our neighbor and feel like we should mow their front lawn, we might wish we were professional landscapers and could cut the grass in precise, crisp rows, but maybe we cut it the best we know how and miss a patch here and there. Maybe our neighbor will tell us thanks but no thanks. Maybe they'll be so grateful they will overlook or won't even notice the uncut patches. We so often commit the sin of omission and refrain from loving our neighbors, as ourselves, because we worry that our best is not good enough. How many hatchets could have been buried, how many fences mended, how many bonds forged and friendships nourished and relationships cultivated, if only we had the humility and the courage and the faith to love our neighbors, as ourselves? The more we embrace the reality that our only real option to love our neighbors is as ourselves, the more often and fully and joyfully we will be able to love our neighbors. And the more we embrace the reality that everyone else can only ever love us as themselves, the less likely we will be to judge and misconstrue and take offense at all of our neighbor's faltering, misguided, courageous attempts to love us in the way that only they can. The Commandment for all of us to love our neighbors as ourselves is not designed to force us all into becoming absorbed into the same personality - all of us loving and acting in the same exact way. It's just the opposite. It's all about empowering us to fully become our real, true, authentic selves and to be comfortable, even eager, to love each other in our own unique ways. It is a wicked and jealous love that demands that our own self gets absorbed or subsumed by the object of our love. The pure love of Christ helps us to become more of our self than we ever thought could be possible. I know that we are all capable of loving our neighbors, as ourselves.