Love Your Neighbour As Yourself

It helps me to remember where Jesus is standing when he says this. By Matthew 22 he is in Jerusalem during the final week of his life, teaching in the Temple, and a string of groups are taking it in turns to try and catch him out. The Pharisees and Herodians come with the question about taxes to Caesar. The Sadducees come with a riddle about a woman and seven husbands. Then a lawyer, an expert in the law of Moses, asks which commandment is the greatest (Matthew 22:34 to 36). It is not an innocent question. Rabbis genuinely debated how to summarise a law with hundreds of commands, and any answer Jesus gave could be picked apart.

What strikes me is that Jesus does not dodge or stall. He answers with love for God first (Matthew 22:37 to 38), and then, unasked, he adds this second one. Nobody pressed him for two. He volunteers it. In a setting designed to trip him, he calmly hands them the whole heart of the law and goes further than the question required.

The phrase that stops me is ‘A second likewise is this’. The word likewise is doing real work. Jesus is not ranking love for neighbour as a lesser, optional add-on. He is saying it is of the same kind, the same cloth, as love for God. A few verses on he says the whole law and the prophets hang on these two (Matthew 22:40). Two commandments, one hinge.

The other thing easy to miss is that none of this is new. Jesus is quoting, almost word for word, from Leviticus 19:18, a line set down long before in Israel’s law. He did not invent the sentence. He lifted something already written and held it up as central. That matters to me, because it means love of neighbour was never a soft New Testament afterthought layered on top of a harsh old law. It was there in the Torah all along, waiting to be seen for what it was. Jesus simply refused to let it stay buried under the smaller rules.

I have sat with that little measuring rod, ‘as yourself’, for a long time, and I am still not sure I have got to the bottom of it. The plainest reading is also the most uncomfortable. The verse is not measuring my love by a feeling, or by a good day, or by how deserving the other person seems. It measures it against the steady, instinctive concern I already pour into myself.

What unsettles me is how exposing that is. I can tell myself I love people while quietly running two different standards: endless patience for my own failures, brisk judgement for theirs. The verse closes that gap. It asks whether the person near me gets the same benefit of the doubt, the same practical concern, that I reflexively grant myself without a second thought. Measured like that, most of my so-called loving falls some way short, and that honest sting is, I think, exactly where the verse means to land.

There is a thread here that runs the length of the Bible. The command sits in Leviticus, Jesus names it as second only to loving God, and Paul later writes that love is the fulfilling of the law (Romans 13:8 to 10), gathering the commandments up into this one line. James calls it the royal law (James 2:8). The whole story keeps circling back to neighbour-love as the test of whether our love for God is real.

And then there is Christ himself. It is one thing to teach the second commandment in the Temple. It is another to be days from carrying it out at full cost. The man saying ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ was about to love his neighbours, including the ones jeering, by laying down his life (John 15:13). He does not command from a safe distance. He goes first. So the command never works as a ladder I climb to earn God’s favour. It is the shape of a love already shown to me, and what I give my neighbour is that same love passed along, not a debt I am scrambling to pay.

In practice I find the hardest neighbour is rarely the stranger in need. It is the colleague who got the credit, the relative who keeps reopening the old wound, the person whose politics make my jaw tighten. The Samaritan story (Luke 10:29 to 37) deliberately picks someone the original hearers would have despised, and I think that is on purpose. It refuses to let me draw a tidy circle and love only the people inside it.

So what helps me is to make it small and specific. Not a grand campaign of compassion, just the next person. Who is the one I am most tempted to write off this week? What would the care I instinctively give myself actually look like, aimed at them? Sometimes it is a message I do not feel like sending, or holding my tongue when I have a sharp reply ready, or noticing the person serving me and treating them like a person. The commandment rarely asks for something heroic. It asks for honesty about the gap, and one real step to close it today.

Something in the pairing keeps working on me. Because Jesus calls the second command like the first, the two are not really rivals; they are one love with two directions. And here is the part I find quietly bracing: love for God is invisible. Nobody can watch me adore him. But they can watch how I treat the person at the next desk. So the second command is where the first one grows a face. John puts it bluntly: anyone who claims to love the God he has not seen, while ignoring the brother he has, is fooling himself (1 John 4:20). Loving my neighbour is not a separate hobby alongside loving God; it is the same devotion turned outward, made touchable. And the measure stays practical. The steady care I give myself by instinct is simply redirected to whoever is actually in front of me.

I have heard this verse open a talk about learning to love yourself, as though the real task were building up enough self-esteem to qualify you to love anyone else. It is a tidy therapeutic reading, and it gets the sentence backwards. Jesus is not setting self-love as the goal. He assumes it and points the same energy somewhere else. Preach it as a course in self-worth and you spend the whole talk on the word that was only ever meant to be the ruler.

The second misuse is quieter and more respectable. Lift the line away from ‘A second likewise is this’ and it reads as a stand-alone slogan anyone could sign, whatever they believe. That is not wrong so much as truncated. It detaches the command from the reason Jesus gives for it, and preached alone often enough it trains a congregation to hear neighbour love as general niceness.

The third is the one I find hardest to watch, because it usually lands on good people. It gets aimed at the exhausted volunteer, at the carer running on empty, at the person who has said no for the first time in years. That reading takes ‘as yourself’ as though it meant instead of yourself. The measure is equivalence, not erasure. A verse given to expose our double standards should never be turned into a stick for someone who has run out of standard altogether.

For teaching, I would push past verse forty, because the scene does not stop there. Once Jesus has named the two commandments, he puts a question of his own to the Pharisees, about whose son the Christ is, and Matthew records that from that day nobody dared ask him anything more (Matthew 22:41 to 46). The chapter opens with a trap and ends in silence, which is worth a beat in any talk on this verse.

Then comes Matthew 23, and this is what I think gets missed when the verse is taught on its own. Jesus turns to the crowds and to his disciples and describes scribes and Pharisees who tie up heavy loads and lay them on other people’s shoulders, while refusing to lift a finger to shift them (Matthew 23:4). Set that beside ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ and the link is not subtle. Here is a leadership fluent in the law that will not carry for anyone else what it would never ask of its own back. Matthew does not spell that out, so I hold it as my own reading, but the order is striking: the standard is set at the close of one chapter and people are found short of it at the opening of the next. A talk that only works backwards into the trap questions misses the half that runs forwards into the indictment.

This is a strong text for commissioning: sending out small group leaders, welcoming new members into a covenant, charging someone at baptism with the shape their new life will take. It earns its place at a harvest or mission Sunday, where the point is genuinely to widen who counts as near enough to help. It works as a call to worship too, because it names what the gathering is actually for.

I would not reach for it in a safeguarding conversation, or in a hard church meeting where someone has raised a real grievance and been told, in effect, to love their neighbour and let it go. That turns a command about care into an instrument of silence. I would be wary of it at a fresh graveside too. It is an instruction, not a promise, and grief needs something to hold onto rather than one more job to do. And I would not let it close a service with nothing attached. This command comes with an address on it, so give it one: a name, a rota, a visit before Friday. Left as a fine sentiment on the way to the car park, it has evaporated before the traffic clears.

This command does not arrive in Leviticus alone. It arrives in the middle of a very ordinary list of instructions about fields, wages and courtrooms, and that neighbourhood is worth reading for itself. A few verses earlier, the same chapter tells landowners not to harvest right to the edges of the field or strip the vineyard of every last grape, but to leave something standing for the poor and for the foreigner passing through (Leviticus 19:9 to 10). A few verses later it insists a hired man is paid the same day, before the sun goes down on his wages (Leviticus 19:13), that you do not curse a deaf man who will never hear the insult or put something in the path of a blind man who will never see it coming (Leviticus 19:14), and that a judge shows no favour to the poor and no deference to the great (Leviticus 19:15). Then, sixteen verses after the one Jesus quotes, the same chapter says it again, this time about the foreigner living among you, told to love him as yourself, because you were foreigners once in Egypt (Leviticus 19:34).

That is the neighbourhood this command was born into, long before Jesus needed a Samaritan to make the point stick. Leviticus already had the edge case built in. It was never really a village-sized commandment about people who look like you and worship the same way you do. It arrived from day one with a corner of the field left unharvested for someone who had no legal claim to your crop at all, and knowing that changes how I hear ‘as yourself’. It was never meant to describe an easy circle. It came with an outsider already standing inside the fence.

This is not the exhausted carer problem, where a real reservoir has simply been drained. It is stranger than that, and I only saw it slowly. The verse assumes something that is not true of everybody: that the reader has a working, functioning fondness for themselves sitting there to be redirected. For some people it was never installed. If you have spent years being told, by a silence, a mirror or an illness, that you are not worth much care, then ‘as yourself’ is not a high bar being lowered kindly onto other people. It is already a low bar. Jesus does not stop to say so, because he is speaking into a room where self-preservation was taken for granted, not a room where it had been worn away, and the lawyer who asked the question was in no danger of undervaluing himself.

I do not have a tidy way to close that gap, and I am wary of anyone who claims they do. Telling someone who cannot stand their own reflection to love their neighbour ‘as themselves’ can, if we are not careful, teach them nothing except a lower standard than the one they are already failing to reach. I think the honest thing to say is that this verse was not written with that reader especially in mind, and pretending otherwise does them no kindness. What I can say, without smoothing it over, is that the low regard a person has for themselves is not the truth about them, whatever it feels like at two in the morning. But knowing that and feeling it are different animals, and this verse, on its own, will not walk anyone from one to the other. Some griefs need more than a commandment. They need a person willing to sit there until the low bar stops looking true.

There is a hymn British congregations, and British school assemblies especially, have been singing for decades that will not let this verse stay comfortable: Sydney Carter’s ‘When I Needed a Neighbour, Were You There’. It works through a string of ordinary crises, hungry, thirsty, sick, in prison, a stranger with nowhere to go, each one lifted from Jesus’ later picture of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, and after every one of them the same question swings back round, aimed not at a priest or a Levite in somebody else’s story but at whoever happens to be holding the book.

What Carter does that a sermon mostly cannot is refuse you the third person. You are not permitted to sing it about anyone. And the refrain closes the other escape route as well, insisting that creed and colour and name are not going to count for anything, which is Leviticus 19:34 and the Samaritan and this verse all folded into something a child can sing before morning break without noticing what they have just agreed to. I have watched a hall full of them promise more than most adults manage, in unison, and then go out and fight over a football.

There is something odd about being cross-examined in a hymn. Most of what we sing tells God what he is like, or tells us what he has done, and we sing it standing up because it is good news. This one turns round and puts a question to the singer, and does not wait politely for an answer. I sang it as a boy and meant nothing at all by it. I have sung it since, standing a few feet from somebody I had quietly given up on, and could not get to the end of the line. The hymn had not changed.

When I have tried to teach this to children, the temptation is to soften it into ‘be kind’, which is true but not what the verse says. Children already understand ‘as yourself’ better than most adults, because they have not yet trained themselves out of noticing unfairness. Ask any eight-year-old whether it is fair that they get the last biscuit and their brother gets nothing, and the answer comes back before you have finished the question. So start there: you already know exactly how much you want for yourself, do not pretend otherwise, now give that same amount of wanting to the child nobody sits with at lunch.

The trap is that the very instinct which makes them understand the verse is also the thing that fights it. A child’s fairness is a scoreboard. He got one, so I get one, and if he had two yesterday then I am owed. ‘As yourself’ is not a scoreboard. It never asks what he deserves. It asks what you want, and then tells you to want it for him, whether he earned it or not, whether he ever pays you back or not, whether he says thank you or not. That is the part that actually costs an eight-year-old something, so I would stay there rather than hurry on. Ask them about the boy who broke their thing and never said sorry, and then ask what they would want somebody to do if they were him. Nobody in the room enjoys that question. It is not comfortable at eight and it is not comfortable at forty, which is roughly the point, and it is why I have never seen the need to simplify a single word of this verse for children. They get it. They just do not want it, and neither do I.

Put this verse beside Philippians 2:3 to 4 and something shifts. Jesus sets the bar at equality: love your neighbour the same amount you love yourself, no more demanded, no less accepted. Paul, writing to a fractious little church in Philippi, pushes straight past that equality and asks for something steeper: reckon the other person as being ahead of you, and keep your eye on their concerns and not only your own. Read alone, Matthew 22:39 sounds almost fair, a level playing field where I give you exactly what I already give myself. Read alongside Philippians, it looks like the entry level rather than the target.

I do not think the two verses argue. I think Paul is giving an honest account of what happens once the first is actually kept. Nobody who steadily gives their neighbour the same regard they give themselves stays at parity for long. Love that is only ever exactly equal, checking that nobody has given more than anybody else, has not settled in yet, it is still watching the ledger. Paul was writing to people squabbling over status and precedence, and he did not tell them to aim for fairness. He pointed them to Christ, who had everything and emptied himself of it for people with nothing to offer back (Philippians 2:5 to 8), and let that shape how they looked at each other. ‘As yourself’ is where the command starts. It was never where love, once it gets going, actually stops.

• Where am I running two standards: generous with my own faults, hard on someone else’s?
• Who is the neighbour I would rather leave outside my circle, and what is the smallest real kindness I could show them this week?
• Do I treat love of neighbour as the proof of my love for God, or as an optional extra once the religious bits are done?
• When did I last let myself receive God’s love before trying to hand it on, and does that order ever get reversed in me?

If you would like to keep going, you could sit with more of Matthew or find a verse for wherever your heart is today at verses for how you feel.