“Hear O Israel! The Lord Our God is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

In Luke 10 Jesus has a conversation with an “expert in the Law.” The lawyer rightly identifies the most important points in the Law of Moses: To love God with all your being, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus congratulates the man and says, “Right. Do that and you will have eternal life.”

The law expert is still uneasy however. He asks a follow up question. “Who is my neighbor?”

For him it seems the sticky part about these two eternal commands is not the One God, but the countless people he encounters every day.

On the one hand I understand. God is just One God, and He is invisible. He doesn’t make verbal and physical expressions of His expectations of us on a regular basis. So maybe it’s kind of easy to assume that unless hail and brimstone are chasing you that things with Him are good.

While people on the other hand are very present and communicative of their wants and needs, and so often we feel pulled in different directions trying to meet the expectations of many different people simultaneously: spouse, child, parent, boss, friend. And these are just the people we like and want in our lives. Do I have to count the people who cross my path seemingly just to test my patience?

So, I get it. Loving people can be complex, but on the other hand the Rule says Love God with everything you’ve got, but it only says of my neighbor that I must love him as I love myself. I do love myself to be sure. In fact if I look at this rule through the lens of the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Then I fail at loving my neighbor often. I catch myself not only doing the very distracted driving behaviors that make me crazy in my neighbor, but also justifying them in myself. I wasn’t watching the road because I needed to check Google to see where I’m going, or because I have kids in the car, or I spilled my coffee. I have a reason for grace and forgiveness, but my neighbor is “just in my way.” 

So yes, Rule two is a tall order, and I break it often, but I still think it is interesting that an “expert at the Law” glibly skips over Rule 1 despite its emphatic language and goes straight to Rule 2. Jesus, Rule 1 incarnate, both sides of the equation: God and man, lover and Beloved, ignores this omission and gives the man what he asked for. He gives him the story of the Good Samaritan. God is beautiful in the way that He treats us! Patient, humble and unassuming.

Still, what if the first rule establishes a base for the second. In our US constitution we have a series of amendments. The first 10 we call the bill of rights. They outline specific freedoms that can not be taken away from the citizens of the United States without due process of Law. They are all important and certain groups fight diligently to protect their favorite, but the first one is the big one. When you boil it down, It’s the right to be a person- To own your own mind, heart and body and to give it to Whomever or Whatever you choose. It makes it a law that we all respect one another and acknowledge their personhood. It gives each of us an identity as someone given a mind, a conscience, and a will who is free to grow them, express them, follow them or defame them if we so choose.

Later amendments extend the definition of personhood to women and people of color. That was needed culturally, because we all want, like the “expert in the Law” from Luke 10 to narrow our definition of neighbor. That is, we all want to limit our obligations to love and respect others to a more manageable number. But these amendments still depend on the first one. What good is it to say, “You are a person too.” if you don’t know what a person is?

I make this digression because what if to love your neighbor, you must first learn to love God. What if at a fundamental level, you don’t really know how to be a Good Neighbor, until you’ve met One?

More thoughts on Rule 1 to come in my next blog post. Peace!