Loving our neighbor as another self?

Jesus wants us to become imitators of himself so that others may come to Christ.

WORD OF FAITH: A breakdown of each week's upcoming Sunday readings to better understand the Word of God at Mass.

“A scholar of the law, tested him by asking, Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Matthew 22:35) This question, which is posed to Jesus by the Pharisees in Matthew 22:34-40, is a last-ditch effort by the religious authorities to try to entrap Jesus in his own words. Jesus responded to their question by paraphrasing scripture, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.” Jesus challenges their love of God and they know that he is challenging them. But they cannot challenge his words because they would be rejecting the law. Jesus does not stop there, he then goes on to challenge how they love one another, “The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” These religious authorities learned nothing from the experience of the Sadducees who had their tongues silenced by Jesus previously. They just do not know when to stop!

Without saying anything, Jesus tells them in his response what he will do for love. Jesus says as his final response to their questioning, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” Jesus is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. What does it mean to fulfill the law and prophets? We need to look at the First Reading from Exodus 22:20-26, “You shall not oppress an alien, you shall not wrong a widow or orphan, if you lend money to one of your poor neighbors, you shall not act like an extortioner.” Now replace the word “not” with the word “love.” You shall love the oppressed and alien, you shall love the widow and orphan, you shall love your poor neighbor. The double commandment to love is powerful because it reveals what Jesus has done by his love, which is expressed on the cross and shows us how we are to love. Jesus’ double commandment to us is to become another Christ to others and to love our neighbor as another self.

The words from the Book of Exodus that Jesus quotes remind the religious authorities how they themselves were aliens, how they were oppressed, how they were widows and orphans. And if they were all these things themselves, how can they afflict on others what was afflicted on their ancestors, and how it was being afflicted on them by the Romans? They are to love their neighbors as themselves, as another self. The alien, the oppressed, the widow and the orphan should be loved as another self. Powerful words for us to remember today in this environment we live in. We were once aliens and we were once oppressed, but today we are suspicious of immigrants and migrants even though we were all immigrants at one time. We were once oppressed, and in many cases still oppressed, for our beliefs and values today, so how can we oppress others for their viewpoints because they do not agree with our own? We are called to value life, where the widow and the orphan, the elderly and the sick have dignity, so how can we not care for the most vulnerable among us? So then if we are defined as a nation by how we protect the most vulnerable, how then can we see no value in the lives of the unborn, the orphan, the poor and powerless, the immigrant and the migrant, the discriminated, the widows and widowers and all the elderly among us? Is not all life sacred? Has not God endowed us all with human dignity?

So how can we do to others what we do not want done to ourselves? Seeing others as another self means we cannot hate and curse others, speak badly of them on social media or simply be rude when people are rude to us. Remember the person we are treating badly is ultimately ourselves! Maybe if we all remember, we would not live in such a toxic environment of anger and hate.

Jesus wants us to become imitators of himself so that others may come to Christ. We are called to become another Christ to others, for that is what St. Paul and his disciples did as imitators of Christ. Because they became another Christ to others, they were able to love others as another self: “I love you, Lord, my strength.” (Psalm 18)

When we love the Lord, we can imitate the Lord by being another Christ for others and when we are another Christ to others, we love others and another self.