As Yourself

This Sunday’s Gospel is a very familiar one, Matthew 22:34-40. Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart. And He tells us that the second commandment is “like it”, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Like a lot of concepts in the Bible, this is simple to say but difficult to accomplish. I think that the key is to start by loving God, but there seems to be more to it.

Let’s take a look at the tail end here, the “love your neighbor as you love yourself” part. It assumes that we love ourselves. Because it’s only if we love ourselves that we can love others. That’s not always the case; not everybody loves themselves. So how do we come to love ourselves? In two ways, I guess. First, we can learn to love God and rely directly on His love for us. We can pray and receive Communion and try to commune with God the best we can. And if through doing this we wind up realizing that God loves us, we can love ourselves.

Great.

But humans being humans, sometimes the way we learn to love ourselves, or not to love ourselves unfortunately, is from those around us. If we receive love from those around us, it’s easier to love ourselves. If we don’t receive love from those around us, it’s really difficult to love ourselves.

So, what’s our job, then? Our job is to express love to everyone we can. Perhaps that will make it easier for those people to learn to love themselves. It’s not always easy for people to connect to God directly, so we need to be that light of love for other people. We need to reflect, or “refract” is probably a better word, God’s love.

That’s not to say that our earthly love will ever be a substitute for God’s love. Our love will never be a substitute for someone else’s understanding that God loves them. But we still need to shower love on those around us. Like hitting the primer button on the lawn mower, maybe we can prime the pump for other people, so they can turn to God and experience His love for them directly.

Just a thought.

                        ~ The Older Brother