Thursday, September 22, 2005
Love yourself as your neighbour (or another new direction)
I think Jesus had incredible insight into our inability to spin many different plates at the same time in his famous statement "Love yourself as your neighbour." I admire his perception that we find it hard to multitask - hey maybe that's why he came as a man?. So rather than giving us two tasks he reduced it to one. Rather than a task of hate and love he kindly reduced it to just to love. So he set us free from the religious requirement to hate ourselves and love our neighbour by giving us permission to merely love all. I like him. He's my kind of task master.
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5 comments:
"My yoke is easy, and my burden is light"
Does "love yourself as your neighbor" have different meaning that the scripture references to "Love your neighbor as yourself?"
for me it's exactly the same thing.. but I imagine mildly offensive for most Christians.. what is your reaction?
I don't think I'm offended. I began to reply a couple times, but realized that my comments were born out of my evangelical upbringing (you know, the one where they convince you that you're a piece of sh*t because you can't live up to their standard of perfection. Of course, neither can they). The problem with that mindset, and the reason "churchy people" are so often perceived as unloving and judgemental, is that when we try to look at ourselves through God's eyes, we've been conditioned to believe he's focused on our fallenness and imperfection. So when we try to look at others through His eyes, the obvious result is condemnation. Under those conditions, I cannot love my neighbor nor myself.
Perceptual precision notwithstanding, I think the scripture's rendering of the phrase (it appears that way nine times) implies an "others-first" disposition that's truer to the spirit of Christ's precedent of service
I forgot to add:
...according to me :-)
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