Love Thy Neighbor...

I gave a talk in church a few months ago and I'm finally getting around to posting it to the blog. Enjoy!

Judging by what we see, hear, and read in popular culture, I think that “love” the most frequently used and most misunderstood word in the English language. We find it everywhere from books, to movies, to TV shows, to songs, to speeches, to anything else you can think of. People have been talking, writing, acting, singing, dancing, signing, nodding, smiling, and winking about love for millenia. And what it has produced is a confusing, confounding, and conflicting cacophony.

Love is a many splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love. Love is blind, love is a battlefield, love is like the dew on a summer’s morn. Love conquers all, love will set you free, all’s fair in love and war. Can’t buy me love. Love means never having to say your sorry. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. 

There’s true love, unrequited love, empty love, companionate love, consummate love, self-love, courtly love, and love at first sight. The most common word that people use with love is the word “falling” as if love is something that happens to us against our will, unless, of course, other people do a lot of falling on purpose and I’m just not in on what the cool kids are doing these days.

The first definition of the word “love” in every dictionary that I found was something like “an intense feeling of deep affection,” and common synonyms for “love” include “fondness, tenderness, warmth, endearment,” and other similar words. Going by only those things that we hear in the world, it seems like love is an intensely strong emotion that we can’t really control, predict, or resist. 

So what are we supposed to think when we are commanded to “love our neighbor”? Do I have to feel some strong emotion toward by neighbor? Or maybe it means that I never have to say I’m sorry for tossing my lawn clippings into his backyard? 

Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the clearest illustrations of the kind of love that we are supposed to have for our neighbor and how it differs from the kind of love we hear about in popular culture.

But before we get into the parable itself it is helpful to have a little context. Growing up in the church and hearing this story from the time I was in primary, I thought that the word “Samaritan” meant someone who goes around doing nice things for other people. Of course, it has taken on that meaning now, but I just assumed that that is what it always meant. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We read in James E. Talmage’s masterpiece Jesus the Christ, that the term Samaritan meant something much different in Jesus’ day. The Samaritans were, of course, a group of people, much like the Jews. They believed in the God of Israel, kept the Law of Moses, and even had a temple like the one in Jerusalem. But they still hated the Jews and the Jews hated them.

The animosity between these groups of people traced its lineage back seven hundred years to the time when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians. Over time, Israelites and Assyrians, along with other various and sundry peoples intermarried, and repopulated the region. The religious practices of all of these people mixed along with their genes and produced a people who worshipped the God of Israel alongside the gods of other nations. Over time, however, the Samaritans became even more rigidly attached to the law of Moses than the Jews themselves. They wanted to be recognized as Israelites, but the High Priests in Jerusalem, refusing to forget the Samaritans’ idolatrous past, would have none of it.

Rebuffed, the Samaritans decided to build their own temple to rival the temple in Jerusalem. They declared that the location of their temple was holier than the location of the Jerusalem temple, and accused the Jews of adding to the word of God by recognizing as inspired the writings of the prophets in addition to the Pentateuch. They even went so far as to defile the Jerusalem temple itself by strewing human bones in it during the Passover. The Jews responded to all of these insults by destroying the Samaritans’ temple, and leveling the city of Samaria. By Jesus’ day, the vitriol was so intense that the Samaritans praised Herod for being a good king just to needle the Jews, who hated him. (pp. 172-73)

If they could be compared to modern neighbors, I think it is accurate to say that in Jesus’ time, the Jews hated the Samaritans only a little less than they hated the Romans, only because the Samaritans were on the other side of the fence and the Romans were stomping around their living room.

So it is with that context that we are prepared to comprehend the drastic, revolutionary teaching that Jesus conveyed with this timeless parable.

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted [Jesus], saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? [Jesus] said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. (Luke 10:25-37)

The Samaritan is such an example of love, not because of the emotions that he felt, but because of what he did. He saw a need and he did everything in his power to satisfy it. We don’t know what the priest or the Levite felt for the bruised and bloodied man that they came across on the road to Jericho, but we know what they did: absolutely nothing. 

If we want to love others, we shouldn’t focus so much on feeling a certain way for them, we should focus on doing things for them. As President Thomas S. Monson once taught, “It is in doing — not just dreaming — that lives are blessed, others are guided, and souls are saved.” 

I envy the Greeks who had not just one word for what we call love, but four. Storge is familial love, or the love between parents and children and the love between siblings. Philia, or platonic love, is the love between friends. Eros is romantic love, the kind of love between a husband and a wife. All of these kinds of love come naturally to us because they involve our emotions. It is natural for us to love our parents, our siblings, our friends, or spouse. We feel strong emotions for these people and those emotions motivate us to help them and serve them. 

But the fourth kind of love in Greek is different. It is called agape and it is generally what we are talking about when we talk about love in church. It is the word that is ususally translated as “charity” in the King James Version of the Bible, but many modern translations just use the word “love.” This kind of love is the love that Christ has for us, and I think that that should help us comprehend what it entails because Christ loves us when we are righteous, obedient, and devout, but he also loves us when we are sinful, disobedient, and wayward, when we are selfish, stubborn, and sleazy, when we are hard-headed, hard-hearted, and stiff-necked, when we are mean, cruel, unkind, or just cranky. It doesn’t matter what we say, what we do, or what we think. Christ continues to love us even when we are not lovable. That is agape and that is the kind of love that we are commanded to have toward everyone.

The writer Paul Johnson once explained the importance of Jesus’ admonition to go and do like the Samaritan. He said,

When Jesus was asked “[W]ho is my neighbor?” (Lk 10:29), his answer was: everyone. He turned compassion, which all us feel from time to time for a particular person, into a huge, overarching gospel of love. He taught the love of mankind as a whole. The Greek word for this is philanthropia, “philanthropy,” which has since become threadbare with use and stained by misuse. It did not exist in Jesus’s day as a concept. The idea of loving all humanity did not occur to anyone, Greek or barbarian, Jew or Gentile. Everyone’s compassion--love--was selective. The Greeks were taught to hate the barbarians, just as Jews were taught to hate Gentiles and Samaritans. The Romans despised the peoples they conquered. All free men and women hated and feared slaves. Aristotle, perhaps the most sophisticated and enlightened man of his age, dismissed slaves as mere “animated machines.” The intellectual, social, and racial climate of Jesus’s day was implacably hostile to his message in this respect. The society he entered was one in which pious Jews taught and were taught that Gentiles without the law were accursed. What he tried to show was that compassion had, quite literally, no limits. Otherwise it was false. Benevolence was meaningless if it failed to be universal. Here was a new commandment as important as any in the Decalogue, or all of them put together. God was the model. He loved all human beings. And anyone who drew distinctions and made exceptions on grounds of nationality or race or religious beliefs or opinions or age or sex or profession or past record of sinfulness was not heading for the Kingdom of God. On the contrary, he would find its gates shut. (Jesus: A Biography from a Believer, pp. 91-92)

But how can we do that? How can we love people who say things we don’t agree with, or do things we know are wrong, or, heaven forbid, vote for someone we didn’t vote for. How can we feel affection for people like that? Well, we’re not expected to feel affection for them, we’re expected to love them. To quote the great C. S. Lewis, “love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.” (Mere Christianity, p. 129)

And what is the state of the will which we naturally have about ourselves? It is that we “wish our own good.” 

Lewis goes on: 

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. (pp. 130-131)

Love, the kind of love we are commanded to have because we wouldn’t have it any other way, is not an emotion, but an action. It is service for our fellow beings. This service brings us closer to those we serve. And as King Benjamin taught us, when we are in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God, so it also brings us closer to God.