The Sunday Sermon Archive

Dear Friend,

Who is this neighbor that we must love as we love ourselves?

Loving God with our whole: heart, mind, soul, and strength apparently poses much less of a problem for us than loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. We cannot see God so it becomes easy to say we love Him because He does not present a materialistic obstacle to our self-love.

This neighbor on the other hand whom we can see is constantly posing an obstacle to our self-love, pride and vanity. A neighbor tends to become an imposition after a short time. His requests, needs or demands place a burden upon us. Our fallen nature then leads us to avoid him and therefore any burden that he may cause us.

Even if our neighbor happens to be our friend, a close examination will show that he is only our friend as long as he is beneficial to us in one way or another. I have often mentioned that most people confuse love with lust. While they are polar opposites more and more people seem to confuse them. Lust is essentially self-love; it is when we view another only for the pleasure or good that they will bring to us. While love is just the opposite, it is when we view another with the desire to offer him our assistance towards some good for him without any consideration for ourselves.

Thus we have many who claim to "love" their neighbor, but this "love" lasts only as long as there is something in it for them. When our neighbor ceases to give us something that we want or need, then we are very quick to dismiss him and look for another friend or neighbor to feed off of.

If love is self-sacrificing and forgets oneself for the good of another, then we see that there is little true love in the world; for even the good that many people do for others contains something in it for themselves. All too many will give to a "charity" to give the appearance of doing good while they try to remain as distant as they can from those whom they are "helping". They then become filled with pride and vanity as the world praises them and congratulates them for their "love" and generosity. Would they do the same good works if there were no praise or congratulations; if they were forced to never let anyone know about their assistance; if they were not allowed to use it for a tax write off? If all this were forced upon them we would soon see that there would be very little in the way of good works for our fellow men.

Our politicians need the poor so they can get elected with all their promises to help them. But, if they were not running for an office or looking for self-glorification it is most doubtful that they would have any interest at all in the poor.

Husbands and wives likewise often profess their love for one another, but upon closer examination we see that they do not have any idea of what love truly is. Their "love" lasts as long as they can mutually use one another to satisfy their own selfish wants and needs. And therefore we see their "love" (lust) fades away with time and they must seek a divorce to free them to find someone else who will offer to satisfy their wants.

So many of those that we consider our neighbors are generally not very neighborly to us nor are we to them because we have not yet taken to heart the lesson in today's Gospel. Christ's lesson carries us beyond those who do good to us or prove useful to us. He would have us love those who have nothing to offer us in return. We must do good to those who have no way of ever repaying us.

It does not end here with loving and assisting others who have no way of repaying our kindness, but Christ would have us extend this love even to our enemies and those who would do us harm. He would have us return good for evil, and truly love our enemies.

This in no way implies that we should offer assistance in doing evil. Or that we help an evil person so that he can continue on his evil path. When we truly love another we wish him only good and above all we wish him the greatest good _ eternal life in Heaven. So sometimes it turns out that our love impels us refuse someone in their evil ways, much as a loving parent must refuse the unreasonable or harmful desires of an unruly child.

All mankind then are our neighbors and we must love them because Christ has loved them and offered His life for them, and He has commanded us to do likewise. Christ never hesitated to pray for and even offer His very life for those who hated Him and were His enemies, but at the same time He never failed to rebuke them and remind them of the terrible consequences their evil was bringing upon them. This is the true love of our neighbor that we must strive to imitate.

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