Magic Trick
The second is like it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:39 NASB
Is like it – Why does Yeshua say that the commandment to love your neighbor is hómoios aute (like it)? How can any other commandment be like the first one: to love God will all your heart, mind, and strength? If you’re fulfilling that commandment, there’s nothing left over, right? And if there’s nothing left over, then why is there a second like it?
The answer is a slight-of-hand. The reason that the second great commandment is like the first is because “True love of man is clandestine love of God.”[1] The magic of loving God completely is realized in our love for others. The reason love for your neighbor fulfills God’s request to love Him is because real love for your neighbor is God’s love. You are doing what God would do. That’s what the first commandment expects and implies.
Heschel’s insight helps us correct a theological mistake. The great commandment is often interpreted through a verse like this: “Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me’” (Matthew 16:24 NASB). Read as sacrifice, this verse implies that concern for ourselves is wrong. In fact, it is a roadblock to true discipleship. Accordingly, if we really want to follow the Messiah and love God properly, we must give up all concern for ourselves. We must sacrifice!
Heschel comments:
“Our first impulse is self-preservation. It is the essence of organic living, and only her who has contempt for life would condemn it as a vice. If life is holy, as we believe it is, then self-regard is that which maintains the holy. Regard for the self becomes only a vice by association: when associates with complete or partial disregard for other selves. Thus the normal task is not how to disregard one’s own self but how to discover and be attentive to another self. The self is not evil. The precept: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” includes care for one’s own self as a duty. It is as mistaken to consider the duty to oneself and the will of God as opposites as it is to identify them. To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.”[2]
Rather than the aesthetic denial popularized into doctrine by the cloistered spirituality of the Roman Catholic Church, Jewish faith views care of the self as a necessary component of the sacred. To disregard myself is to ignore how God made me—in His image. This is why the rabbis can say that a man sins when he does not take pleasure in those good things allowed by God. Self-loathing is a form of idolatry. Moreover, self-loathing is a sure way to prevent the fulfillment of loving God in disguise, namely, loving others. Sacrifice is not a higher spiritual plane. It is the admission that God’s instructions for the sacredness of life have failed.
Topical Index: neighbor, love, self, sacrifice, Matthew 22:39
[1] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 139.
[2] Ibid., p. 141.
