Love Your Neighbor as Yourself?

It says in Luke 10:27, “You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (NRSV). These words found in Luke’s Gospel, specifically the part pertaining to loving your neighbor as yourself, comprise what many refer to as “the golden rule.” We often take the spirit of the golden rule to mean that we should treat others as we would want to be treated. Though this way of interpreting this passage certainly makes sense, is this particular understanding truly what Luke’s author meant to convey? Does “love your neighbor as yourself” actually equate to “treat others as you would want to be treated?” 

Luke’s Gospel is not the only place in the Bible where we see the golden rule mentioned. Take Matthew 7:12 for example, where we read “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (ESV). It should be plain to see that this passage from Matthew is hardly any different from the traditional rendering of the golden rule, and therefore, I think, this passage from Matthew gives us clear cause to uphold the reliability of the “do unto others as you would have them do to you” version of the golden rule. 

However, what Matthew’s Gospel says is not what Luke’s Gospel says. In Luke we read that we should love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Like in Matthew, the golden rule in Luke relates how our actions toward others reflect some aspect about how we treat ourselves, but Matthew’s Gospel leaves us with a more straightforward message. Most people desire to be treated well by others.  As the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle would state, everyone wants for themselves that which is good. The person who might read Matthew 7:12, therefore, would have little to contemplate, save that she should treat others well, because she also wants to be treated well. 

However, Luke’s golden rule leaves its reader with a certain degree of ambiguity. The person who reads Luke 10:27, which states that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, may have occasion to ask, “How can a person love his neighbor if he does not love himself?” “How does our self-perception affect our attitude toward our neighbor?” “If a person hates himself, does he inadvertently transpose this hate toward others?” “If a person is depressed and thus sees her existence as having little value, does she view others in a similar fashion?” “If I obsess about looking for faults in myself, do I then spend my time with family and friends looking for faults in them?” When we simply take “love your neighbor as yourself” to mean “treat others as you would want to be treated,” we often miss the opportunity to confront ourselves with some of these powerful and important questions.

If we are to take seriously the command found in Luke to love our neighbor as ourselves, then in our attempts to love others we need to seriously evaluate how we love, or perhaps fail to love ourselves. I can say from personal experience that the way I have treated myself often has impacted directly the way that I have treated the people around me. I constantly strive for perfection in myself, but when I fall short of my standards, which I often do, I can get angry with myself, I can get cynical. In like manner, I often demand perfection from others, and when others come up short, I feel compelled to respond with anger, and I start to view humanity in the most cynical and depressing of ways. The unfortunate problem, often times, is not that I fail to love others as I do myself, but that I love others as I love myself all too frequently.  

Is there a remedy? What if for some reason you cannot find a way to love yourself, would you then always be unable to truly love others? I have no prescriptions or proscriptions here. I only ask that you take a moment to think about the ways you love, and sometimes fail to love both yourself and others. I would argue that a strong correlation exists between the way we view and treat ourselves and the way we view and treat others. Luke’s rendering of the golden rule should give us cause to consider this correlation and the implications that it has for our lives shared together in Christian community.