Love Your Neighbor

Friday October 28th, Matthew 22: 36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37Jesus replied: " …. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' First we need to learn to love ourselves. You are a child of God, created in the image of God and loved by God. Think on that the next time you are feeling a bit down on yourself. Loving your neighbor is what we are called to do because we are loved by God. It is not all fun and games. Sometimes it is work. The love here is not meant as a feeling, it is a verb, it is what you do. The following is from Fredrick Buechner, Wishful Thinking) To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth. In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonable honest friends.