Textual Harassment: Vol I

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. - Matthew 22:39 

One time, the man leading worship at the church we were attending said, in an aside comment: "The Bible says that I should love my neighbour as myself. So if I don't love myself, I can't really love my neighbour!"

In a culture where self-esteem is the highest virtue, perhaps its no shock that people would try to use even the words of the Lord Jesus to convince people that what they need more than anything is to feel good about themselves. While this is on some level to be expected from the secular culture, it is sad when Christian leaders buy into it.

Notice, when Jesus commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves, he is not saying that we need to love ourselves; He is assuming we already do. The question He addresses is not, "how much should I love myself?", but "how much should I love others?" And the answer He gives is "as yourself" - that is, we should love others to the same degree that we already love ourselves.

It is not necessary to insist that we love ourselves before we love our neighbour, for we are by nature self-interested. We want our own way; we demand our rights; we fight for what will bring us the most benefit. And it is to that degree that Jesus calls us to love others. We should demand their rights with the same intensity as our own; we should fight for their benefit with the same violence that we fight for our own.

The most radical part of this statement of Christ is that, most of the time, when we fight and make demands on behalf of others, we will be fighting and making demands of ourselves. Like the Apostle Paul says in Philippians 2:3, "Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves."; and in 1 Corinthians 10:24, "Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbour." Rather than having an intense focus on seeking our own good, we should take that same intensity but re-focus it, toward seeking the good of our neighbour.

You might be asking, "So, does Jesus want me to love myself?" The answer is no. He wants us to deny ourselves (Luke 9:23). Even as Peter denied Christ, refusing to admit that he had even been introduced to Him, so we should act as if we had never been introduced to our own self-interest; even as Peter refused to associate himself with Christ, we must refuse to associate we our own interests. We must refuse to love ourselves, choosing instead to love God and to love others.

I think Jesus Himself wants us to understand these as being mutually exclusive: we cannot love God or others if we still love ourselves: 

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. - Matthew 6:24

And why is the love of money so seductive? Is it not because it helps us get what we want? The love of money is the ultimate self-interest, the ultimate loving of ourselves. Perhaps that is why Jesus says it is hard for those who love riches to enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:23-24): if you love yourself that much, it is that much harder to deny yourself and love others.

In order to love others, we don't need to love ourselves - we need to hate ourselves. We cannot love two masters.