Bulletin Articles
“Loving Your Neighbor”
Categories: Iron sharpens iron“You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19.17-18)
The latter part of that passage is quoted 9 times in the New Testament and upheld as the basic rule for how to manage all our relationships. When we view it along with just a little more context, it seems more narrow than that. God’s law uses three terms interchangeably here: brother, neighbor, and son of your own people. That shouldn’t be too surprising—after all, he gave this law to a relatively young and small nation who all descended from the same father, Israel. God appeals to their sense of familial devotion, since nearly everyone forms strong bonds with the members of their immediate family. God wanted the Israelites to extend that kind of love to the rest of the nation, so he reminded them constantly that they were brothers. Paul says
the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Romans 13.9)
Nevertheless God thought it necessary to add an enormous amount of commentary to further explain how this principle is properly applied in this or that situation. This fills most of the law presented in Exodus 20-23, Leviticus 18-20 and 25, Numbers 27 and 35-36, Deuteronomy 17-25, and assorted tidbits in between. To be clear, this amounts to only a fraction of the text devoted to laws that fall under the umbrella of the greatest of all the commandment in the Law of Moses: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (De 6.5). There’s a lesson to be learned there, but also much to gain from examining the conflicts God anticipated among his people, and his prescriptions for solving them in a manner that was just, loving, and gave him honor.
Jump forward into the modern day, and while we may still at least try to subscribe to the notion we are all one big family and brothers with the whole human race, we certainly have not maintained that as the working definition for our term, “neighbor.” We usually reserve that word for the people who happen to live immediately adjacent to ourselves. We’re occasionally willing to extend the label to cover others who live nearby, but we’d never say the our neighborhood covers the entire earth, and even when using the slightly expanded definition of “neighbor,” we feel obligated to add a qualifier to set apart those who live closest to us. They become next-door neighbors to us, in contrast to the perhaps dozens of other neighbors who don’t deserve that same, highest degree of neighborliness from us.
Even under this restricted sense of the word, the Law of Moses has plenty to teach us. God told Israel, “You shall not move your neighbor's landmark, which the men of old have set” (De 19.14). He told them, “You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another” (Le 19.11), and “You shall not see your bother’s ox or his sheep going astray and ignore them. You shall take them back to your brother” (De 22.1). He told them,
If a man borrows anything of his neighbor, and it is injured or dies, the owner not being with it, he shall make full restitution. If the owner was with it, he shall not make restitution; if it was hired, it came for its hiring fee. (Exodus 22.14).
How many disputes between next-door neighbors today fall into one of these categories? There are more of these specific scenarios in the Law, and they help to remind us that even over thousands of years and thousands of miles, people are people. We continue to create the same basic conflicts over property lines, broken promises, ignoring each other’s setbacks, and failing to return borrowed items. If only our neighborly gripes were limited to these! Yet the principle God taught to Israel so long ago would address every one of our conflicts.
He didn’t go silent on the topic after the Law of Moses. Jesus mentions an apparently common saying among the Jews during his ministry: “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy” (Mt 5.43). Sometimes we complicate this even farther, and our next-door neighbors actually become our enemies. Yet, Jesus’ instructions still cover our situation here: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5.44). It’s not easy to love an enemy—to desire and pursue what is good for someone who harms or seeks to harm us. It’s difficult to pray on their behalf, too. But Jesus tells us that loving our friends is nothing to be proud of—that’s easy, and many awful people still love their friends. This is also the point Jesus makes in his parable of the Good Samaritan. A lawyer, “desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (Lk 10.25) and Jesus’ response in the next several verses demonstrates that God doesn’t care what your enemy says to you, does to you, or thinks about you. Your enemy may very well hate you, and take every opportunity to inconvenience or harm you. You still have an obligation to “do good to everyone” (Ga 6.10). Take your cue from Jesus himself:
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. (Ro 5.10)
Jeremy Nettles
