"Love your neighbour AS YOURSELF" says the Scripture.
Well, bad luck Neighbour, because I'm fighting scratching raging to get my own needs met!!!
The social justice call for love, care and concern for the other - and to stop "othering" them is right!!! Great ambition and right thinking here.
Yet, where is a person to start, for if most people treated their neighbours as they treated/Love themselves, there would be LESS quoting of this verse.
See, this verse doesn't just 'appear' in a vacuum, on a list of good suggestions from a cool dude named Jesus...
It's from a context of community, and from a place of possibility in and only through surrender to the Lordship of Jesus, Son of God and Saviour.
When you and I have to keep ensuring that certain parts of our lives - emotional, sexual, relational, identity - are "looked after" by ourselves, then that is self-focussed.
How then can we be loving to the others - just scraping off a bit of our spare energy and emotion after we are sorted?
Isn't this what social justice concern has been RIGHTLY critiquing in a church where Jesus is not Lord, and not allowed to be everything, resulting in scratchy grabby Christians who have ignored the poor and allowed systemic injustice to go on?
The big picture is that my self and my personal issues are connected to the wider whole...
An example: I feel threatened by being fat/divorced/single/whatever so I take care of myself and buy myself a holiday, a massage, new clothes and shoes. These things are not wrong - but what is my inner motivation?
I want to FEEL good - something, anything - for a moment, a minute, an hour, and this is fine --- if one believes that "the moment is all we've got".
Yet, if we are made for something more, and if true love of self is not just a minute of pleasure, status, or happiness, but a progression to BEING known and loved and accepted, then surely True Love of the other - neighbour/refugee/spouse - will not come from grabbing moments for myself.
It is being known, embraced, and secure as a child of God - through Jesus - that "enough" is present for me and OVERFLOWS for my neighbour.
Then, I can live out The Golden Rule.
