Love My Neighbor as Myself?
Humans have proven to be survivors. Through war, famine, disease, and natural disaster, people pick up and carry on. We don’t typically lie down and die when push comes to shove. We usually fight for a means to provide for our own necessities, safety and freedom.
Recently I finished reading a book filled with narratives by holocaust survivors who were friends of the renowned Frank family. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank- Willy Lindwer
Their stories relayed accounts of individuals and families who had comfortable life styles and education that were stripped of their homes, safety, professions, dignity, and right to defend themselves.
However, the human spirit is known for its strong inclination to live and their stories revealed the desperate measures that were often taken to survive. Those measures boiled down to lying, stealing, and begging while experiencing hopelessness and dehumanization.
Groups of prisoners would often gang up together. A tiny piece of bread might be split eight ways. It would not have nourished them but it gave them a sense of belonging and inclusion.
Is that not every person’s desire, a sense of belonging and inclusion?
This struck me because I realized that the ghettos of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen have striking similarities to the ghettos across the tracks, the ones we may find ourselves locking our doors to drive through, the ones sickened with poverty and distress, broken families, crime, prisons of exclusion based on judgment passed without a trial.
Stealing from one another, ganging up, fighting to find a spot at the top of the pit, it’s called survival of the fittest.
I’ve said this to make the point that every person has the ability to act desperately in desperate circumstances as seen in the Ghettos of war or the Ghettos of your home town, but in any ghettos, there are the greatest needs: hope, love, safety, inclusion, not to mention the necessities for survival like enough to eat and shelter.
Do they deserve to have these needs met? Do gangsters, drug addicts, unwed mothers, thieves, and liars deserve hope, love, and inclusion?
Is this my problem?
If we claim to be Christians, this is our mission field.
In Dr. David Anderson’s “Gracism,” he explains, “Paul was saying there should not be a “them versus us” mentality in the body of Christ.” (Anderson 125)
He explains “equal concern” using 1 Corinthians 12: 24-25: “while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greatest honor to the parts that lacked it so there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”
There is no Black versus White, no Christian versus non Christian, no Catholic versus Protestant, no upper class versus lower class, to name a few divisions among us.
Christians are commanded to love their neighbor as themselves. There is no man that I may pre-judge as superior to or worse than myself based on clothing, vehicle, home, ethnicity, criminal record, # of children out of wedlock, bad hygiene, bad attitude, religion or social group, etc. Prejudice is not the character of Christ that I am called to imitate. It is the characteristic of the world.
Jesus, the only one who IS better than any of us, looked at us with favor and rather than giving us what WE deserve, he sacrificed himself and died for us.
Incredibly, he still wholeheartedly loves each and every one of us equally. We are all sinners, yet to him we are all worth dying for, but not any one race, class, age group, or social grouping over another.
My own human inclination would be to fight for my own comforts and my own needs.
Jesus says to fight for our neighbors! Love them like we love ourselves!
Romans 12:10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves.
Fight for their needs, fight for their inclusion, fight for their hope.
This is not the norm for a common sinner like me. This is the characteristic of Jesus, the character I am commanded to imitate and honor.
It is a daily struggle. It requires a daily renewal of relationship between Jesus and us: who is He and who are we?
It is a daily battle to deny ourselves, to serve, sacrifice and ultimately glorify God.
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