The Question: What Does 'Love Your Neighbor' Really Mean?

It's one of Christianity's most commonly-referenced adages. But how much do we really understand it, let alone practice it?

One of the most frequent issues that arises during pastoral counseling¹ is trying to find that thin place between supporting a loved one and enabling a loved one. This is especially common when a loved one is contemplating making a major life change. I think about it like this:

Supportive Behaviors

• Empowering someone to develop new skills or achieve new goals

• Encourage, listen, offer to assist

• Provide strategies and resources

• Aimed at flourishing, growth, and greater health and wholeness

Enabling Behaviors

• Shielding someone from the natural consequences of their actions, often to avoid discomfort or conflict

• Taking on someone else’s responsibilities, offering excuses or “covers” for behavior

• Providing financial or other in-kind assistance without accountability

• Ultimate aim is self-preservation, equilibrium, “don’t rock the boat.”

There are lots of nuances to this, of course, but generally speaking, this is how I differentiate between the two.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on the question of human dignity and promised a related post about loving one’s neighbor. At this point, you’re probably wondering, “Okay Marshall, all of that is fine and good, but what does any of it have to do with loving one’s neighbor?” The short answer is everything. “Love your neighbor” is right up there with “do not judge” in the realm of popular Christian jargon. When understood only at a surface level, it can be employed poorly or even dangerously.

In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus gives a summary of the Old Testament law, saying this in the 37th verse of the 22nd chapter of Matthew’s Gospel: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” He is, of course, quoting here from Deuteronomy 6:5. Then he goes on to say this in verse 39: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is also a quotation from the Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 19:18. (Extra credit if you knew Jesus was quoting the Hebrew Bible in not one but both instances!) Mark and Luke also include this saying of Jesus, as does John—though in a modified way. Paul picks up on the command and expands upon it in both Romans and Galatians.

In The Book of Common Prayer 1979, the question of loving one’s neighbor appears in the Baptismal Covenant, as part of a two-part question that is avowed by candidates for baptism (or their sponsors if they’re not quite old enough to speak for themselves.)

Question: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

Answer: I will, with God’s help.²

So what does it mean to love one’s neighbor? During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the endless wars over masking, vaccinating, etc., I said with some frequency, “We’re called to love our neighbor, and we can’t very well do that if we’re infecting and killing them!” Let me begin to respond to what love of neighbor means first by being clear about what it does not mean. Loving one’s neighbor does not mean that “anything goes.” A community without any boundaries whatsoever is a community without integrity. I can, should, and must love my neighbor, even if and when we disagree, and even if and when my neighbor wishes or does me harm. But that does not mean that I do not get to defend myself, work for appropriate remedy, relief, and restitution, and protect myself and my community from further injury. Saint Augustine famously opined that the only time lethal force is justified by Christians is when it is employed when all other intervening methods are exhausted, and solely to stop perpetrators from killing the innocent.

Due in large part to the harmful ways I have seen Jesus’ command to love one’s neighbor employed both within and outside of Christian communities, it bears stating plainly: a wife is commanded to love her husband, and the husband his wife. This is true. But it is also true that neither wife nor husband should or must stay in a relationship that has become abusive—up to and including the nuclear option: dissolution of the relationship itself through divorce. The same is true for parents and children. They are called to love one another, but when the relationship becomes abusive, the injured party is entitled to relief—even if that means the relationship must be severed temporarily or permanently.

Now that I’ve given some clarity about what love of neighbor does not look like, let me attempt to sketch out a bit of what it does look like. Let us return to where we began: the discussion differentiating between supporting and enabling. Loving one’s neighbor means that we should want them to thrive and flourish; we should want them to be healthy, happy, and whole; and we should want them to live into who God has called them to be—and, insofar as we are able, we should not stand in the way of these aims for our neighbors. I think this is the absolute bare minimum required of us toward every human being, period. Full stop.

Barbara Brown Taylor says that a helpful way to imagine the scandal behind the parable of the Good Samaritan is to imagine the person on earth from whom you would least like to receive CPR. I think that might be a helpful guide for ensuring that we’re loving even our most cringe-worthy, obnoxious, annoying, never recycles, cusses the cat, blocks the driveway with their car, never pulls in their trashcan kind of neighbors, then work from there accordingly. This gets at my earlier post about human dignity. Dignity says, “I recognize that you are a human being worthy of certain rights and privileges,” and loving the neighbor says, “I want the very best for you, and I want to do everything I can not to stand in your way.”

I want to mention something important that often gets overlooked here. Nothing about what I have described so far is unique to Christianity. In fact, Jesus himself was Jewish, and quoted the Jewish Scriptures when making these pronouncements! This is a place where every one of the world’s great religions can agree—and a place where even those of no faith whatsoever can agree. As Eugene Petersen once quipped, “Most atheists I know are perfectly nice people!”

With that in mind, let us return to the Baptismal Covenant, and more specifically, to the first part of the question of loving one’s neighbor: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons…” Unlike the part of the question inquiring about loving one’s neighbor, this part of the question does make a specific faith claim. What does it mean to “seek and serve Christ?” Well, remember earlier when I said that all four Gospels record Jesus summarizing the Law, but that John’s Gospel gives it an additional spin? Let’s review.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke each record Jesus quoting the Hebrew Bible, commanding that we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, (and strength),³ then they go on to quote Jesus’ further command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” John, however, doesn’t quite say that. Whereas Matthew, Mark, and Luke explicitly record Jesus quoting the Old Testament, John doesn’t do that. Instead, John records Jesus giving the Disciples a new commandment: “…love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34) It’s not love your neighbor as yourself; no, the new commandment goes further than the old—it’s now “love your neighbor as I have loved you.”

Here we find something unique to Christianity and unique to baptism. Unlike the other great religions of the world, Christianity is unique in claiming that God took on human flesh and walked among us in the person of Jesus. There is a certain quintessential Divine transcendence claimed by Christianity that doesn’t exist elsewhere. Saint Augustine famously put it this way: “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” Not only did God take on human flesh in Jesus, John’s Gospel argues from the very start that Jesus (the Word) is the pathway through which everything in the cosmos was created. Moreover, John’s Gospel in particular and the New Testament in general argues that love was the reason for God’s creating the cosmos through the person of Jesus. It wasn’t for God’s own glory; it wasn’t so God could be praised; rather, it was because God is love, and love possesses within itself a kind of desperation to be shared. God creates humankind because God is desperate to love us.

God’s love, made known to us in Jesus, and received by grace through faith, implants within us that self-same desperation for sharing. A Christian who comes to know the love of God and does not in some way, shape, or form, seek to share that love with others is a contradiction in terms. Whether through thought, word, or deed, the love of God pours forth from us, and we are at once hungry for more (that’s why we need Scripture and the Eucharist), and desperate to share what we have received.

So—part of what we vow to do as Baptized Christians is to seek others in Christ’s name, and serve others as Christ first served us. But the careful reader will note that I’ve left out a word. It’s not enough to seek some others, or most others, or all but a few others. The vow is to seek and serve Christ in all persons. This, too, is a faith claim. If we believe that God created as an act of love through Jesus Christ (we do believe that, in case you were wondering), then we also believe that a seed of that self-same desperate Divine love dwells within each and every human being. That seed bears the potential that all seeds have: to grow and flourish, or to wither and die. Love, the Sacraments, Scripture, discipleship, evangelism, missiology—all of these things make that seed grow within us. Likewise, when those things are absent or diminished, sin is allowed to grow like a weed, and can cut off any chance that seed has of growing—and can even strangle a growing faith whose nourishment is cut off.

Credit: ChatGPT

My friend Rebecca studied with Patrick Malloy at General Theological Seminary. Dr. Malloy is known across the Church as a sharp, thoughtful priest, and he is also a respected liturgical scholar. Rebecca relayed to me a story about a discussion on baptism in one of her classes. A student raised his hand and asked, as only a seminarian could, “Dr. Malloy, exactly how much water is required for a baptism to be valid?” Without missing a beat, Dr. Malloy replied, “Enough to drown in.” The moral of the story, both theologically and practically, is that baptism is a dangerous entry into a dangerous life—which shouldn’t be as surprising as it often is to those of us who follow a crucified Messiah!

I say this to my parish a lot: There is no such thing as a retired or part-time disciple of Jesus Christ; there is no emeritus status when you get to stop making good on your vows because you’ve worked at it long enough. The call to love one’s neighbor; to seek and serve Christ; to respect human dignity is a call that will, so far as I can tell, be hard and necessary work right up until the moment Christ comes again to finish the New Creation. Not only that, in the same way that we come again and again, week after week to the Supper of our Lord, we also need to renew our baptismal vows again and again because we’re forgetful people.

There’s a story told about the Roman Emperor Constantine that is probably apocryphal, but it’s a good story, so I’m going to re-tell it. After Constantine had warmed to the concept of Christianity, he decided to have his armies baptized en masse. But when they went down into the waters, he commanded that they hold their dominant hand out of the water so that their sword-fighting hand would remain unbaptized and therefore unbeholden to the vows taken therein. I’m not sure that quite checks out theologically, but I have to give Constantine high marks for creativity!

Baptism is dangerous, and if you’re unwilling to be changed and challenged and refined and reformed, I don’t recommend it. But baptism also opens to a whole new dimension of the cosmos, where we can begin to see—even in a small and imperfect way—the world, our neighbors, the stranger, and even the enemy as God sees them: worthy of respect, dignity, love, and above all, bearers of the image of Christ Himself.

1. I am not a mental health professional. The word “counseling” refers to the normal private interactions I have with parishioners who are undergoing some sort of stress or trauma in their personal lives. I offer advice and counsel, and very often make a referral to a professional if additional work may be warranted or required.

2. The Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 305.

3. Matthew leaves out the “and strength” bit.