In Mark 12:31, Jesus summarizes God’s wishes for humanity with the second great commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other greater commandment than these.” His unequivocal language makes it clear that the obligation to love your neighbor as yourself is non-negotiable and timeless.

But certain times can tempt us to negotiate. We are living in such a time. When hatred feels so intense that it causes bullets to fly at political rallies, the insistence to “Love, love, love” can feel like a relic from another era. When we view our political opponent as an existential threat to our identity and core values, the call to “Fight, fight, fight” begins to sound like a good idea. In times like these, we Christians across the ideological spectrum will be tempted to look for some way to exempt ourselves from having to obey Jesus’ second greatest commandment.

This temptation is found in two rhetorical tricks aimed at distorting the clear simplicity of this commandment. One such trick seeks to misconstrue “love” and another tries to misconceive “our neighbor.” Those of us seeking to fully submit our behavior to Jesus in this political moment would be well served to recognize these moves for what they are: dangerous deceptions that contradict the explicit teachings of Jesus.

What is love?

The attempt to misconstrue love sounds something like this: if your neighbor holds the “wrong” belief (by which we mean “different from my own”) on some high stakes moral issue and you show love (by which we mean serve, offer forgiveness, show mercy, etc.) to that neighbor, then you are diluting your own moral purity or even the integrity of your faith. To associate in any way with this politically “wrong” neighbor is to agree with wrong beliefs and become tainted. Therefore, the argument goes, in especially high stakes conflicts, we are exempt from the requirement to “love.”

This line of reasoning rests on smuggling in the false equation “Love = Agreement.” Both the Left and Right tragically can fall prey to this equation, especially when the political conflict involves highly personal realms of life like gender, sexuality, and family. The two sides tend towards slightly different applications: as a generalization, for the Left, it comes across more often as, “If you disagree with me, you don’t love me;” while for the Right, it gets expressed a bit more like, “If you disagree with me, you should be kicked out of the tribe.” For both sides, the “Love = Agreement” equation is wielded to grant an exemption to the command to “love.”

This equation grossly distorts God’s definition of love. Romans 5:8 makes this clear: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The “while we were sinners” clause is crucial. God loved us precisely while we were living in hostile disagreement with Him. Christ demonstrates that love — first, His own, and therefore ours of others — does not rest on agreement. Rather, love is most necessary precisely in relationships that are characterized by profound disagreement, like the kind we as sinners had with God.

This kind of divine love upends our human notions of moral purity and helps to explain why Jesus was spectacularly unconcerned with conventional notions of purity and cleanliness. He was willing to touch lepers and party with “sinners.” Association with such folks — with whom Jesus no doubt had many disagreements — did not make Jesus impure.

This same power to associate with “sinners” (defined as “those we think hold morally wrong views”) lives in us precisely because Christ lives in us. Just like Christ remained in relationship with us “while we were still sinners,” we, too, can relate to others who might be judged as morally “impure” by certain Biblical standards. We can connect with and care for our politically “wrong” neighbor without fearing that we are somehow tainted. In Christ, the false equation “Love = Agreement” gives way to “Love > Agreement.”

Because we share in this greater love, we as Christians can seek partnerships across the political spectrum. As I have previously illustrated via the partnerships behind The After Party project, we can partner with those who differ with us politically so long as we can find a common ground from which to work. That kind of “starting common ground” is who Jesus was in his Incarnation. Indeed, the Incarnate Jesus is how God created an initial common ground with an otherwise disagreeable humanity — which includes you, me, and all who might read this newsletter. Consider how this worked out in your own spiritual life as a follower of Jesus. When you became a Christian, the entirety of your life was not in perfect agreement with Jesus. But Jesus created an initial common ground, and the ongoing transformation of the rest of your life flowed from that starting point.

Our politics ought to mirror the pattern of the incarnational love of Jesus. In Christ, we, too, seek to create places of common ground — and yes, it helps to start with particular issues where there is some agreement — in hopes of this flowing out into a more comprehensive transformation. We embody how God’s Love > Agreement precisely when we love — and even work with — that neighbor who holds politically disagreeable views.

Who is my “neighbor?”

It takes a great deal of effort and sacrifice to practice the love of God across political differences. This is hard, hard work and it often won’t feel comfortable. This is why we are tempted to redraw the boundaries of “neighbor” such that we can exempt ourselves from the hard work of obeying Jesus’ second greatest commandment when it comes to our political opponents. The growing support of a nation geographically divided along partisan lines is a prime example of this line of thinking and comes up against a related fallacy which goes something like “My life will be much easier/better if I’m surrounded only by people who vote like I do.”

2024 is not the first time humanity has been tempted to play this rhetorical game of redefining our neighbors.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record Jesus giving the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Interestingly, political division hovers as the context in all three cases. In Matthew 22 and Mark 12, what immediately precedes Jesus’s statement of the second greatest commandment are the attempts of the Pharisees and the Sadducees/Herodians to trap Jesus. Note that these two parties were bitterly opposed on the central political question of the day: whether to oppose the Roman Empire (Pharisees) or cooperate (Sadducees/Herodians). Both parties want to force Jesus to pick a side. They first attempt to corner him on the hot button topic of imperial taxation (Mark 12:13-17; Matt. 22:15-22). Then they switch to the legitimacy of marrying your brother’s widow, another politically loaded issue because this is what King Herod (the puppet king installed by Rome) had done to bolster his standing (Mark 12:18-27; Matt. 22:23-32).

With these rhetorical traps, both sides are demanding that Jesus define “neighbor” on political grounds. You’re either (political) neighbors with “us” and you hate “them” or you’re (political) neighbors with “them” and we therefore hate you as an enemy.

In the Mark and Matthew passages, Jesus frustrates these specific traps, showing how his inquisitors’ insistence on the “us or them” options are all wrong. His insistence on the second greatest command presents a radical alternative with its clear “Love your neighbor as yourself,” which is far from a namby-pamby platitude. It is a radical statement of a politics fully centered on Jesus. Jesus is saying, in effect, “Don’t figure out a way to redefine “neighbor” to only those who agree with you. Instead, figure out how to love any neighbor on the grounds of how you would like to be treated.”

It’s an important question: How would you like to be treated by neighbors who hold political views different from your own? I think most of us would agree on some basic relational standards like “treat me with respect”, “don’t mock me”, “try to understand me”, “don’t reduce everything in our relationship to politics”, and so on. In other words, you likely want — and I do, too — to be treated with civility. “You are correct,” Jesus would say to us. “Go and do likewise.”

Civility would certainly fall into any bare bones definition of “love.” But it turns out that Jesus’ definition of “love your neighbor” invites his followers to much more than just civility. What Jesus means by “love your neighbor as yourself” is something far more transformative.

This transformative vision is illustrated most vividly in Luke 10:25-37. The passage begins with an expert in the law seeking to “test” Jesus. He is trying to pin Jesus down in a manner akin to what the Pharisees and Sadducees were doing in the Matthew and Mark parallels. Jesus gets this expert to restate the second greatest commandment, and then tells him, “You are correct; go and do likewise and you will live” (v. 28).

But the expert wants to defend his original agenda. Like the Pharisees and the Sadducees in Mark 12 and Matt. 22, he tries to get Jesus to narrow the obligation to love your neighbor: “But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘But who is my neighbor?” (v. 29). “Surely, there are exceptions!” the expert is implying.

Jesus responds by telling the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The first half of the story illustrates that common impulse outlined above: the desire to exempt ourselves from the second greatest commandment by claiming that moral impurity would result. The priest and the Levite studiously avoid coming into contact with the victim because they fear the consequences of associating with someone their tribe would view as “unclean.”

Jesus’ deliberate identification of the hero in the story as a “Samaritan” is important. For Jewish nationalists, the Samaritan people were an unclean “them” due to a complicated racial and political animosity. The Samaritans returned that hostile fire to the Jews. This political context is seen in the passages preceding the Good Samaritan parable. In Luke 9:51-56, Jesus and his followers are marching towards Jerusalem in a way that would be mis-perceived as an act of Jewish nationalism. They pass through a Samaritan village and the villagers give them a chilly rejection. In angry response, James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (v. 54)

In the Samaritan village, Jesus strongly rebukes his disciples for their proposal (v. 54). One can hear Jesus’ frustration that the disciples cannot recognize that following him minimally means refraining from causing harm to others.

He’s frustrated because his love is so much more than even that minimum definition. In the parable that he tells shortly after passing through the village, Jesus deliberately makes a Samaritan the hero of the story. Jesus is expanding on that earlier rebuke. Jesus is saying,“The ones you sought to eradicate via violence are, in fact, your neighbors. In fact, they are the people who will show you what neighbor love truly means.”

What the narrated actions of the Good Samaritan show is Neighbor Love > Civility. Civility is the avoidance of inflicting further harm. Civility is refraining from calling down fire from heaven to consume our neighbor. That’s necessary and good and our national discourse today would benefit from more of it. But the fuller meaning of “loving your neighbor as yourself” is to repair the harm that has already happened. To that end, the Good Samaritan displays proactive care, attentiveness, generosity, and self-sacrifice to heal the damage already present. He binds up the wounds with care. He treats the injured person in the way that any of us who are already injured would want to be treated. He loves his neighbor as himself.

In our political moment, we do need civility. But don’t we also need more than that? Across the political spectrum, we are all hurting. We all feel injured. What would it be like to cross the road and proactively attend to the hurt of our neighbor, including our friends and family members whose political allegiance is different from our own?

It is time to do so. It is time to bind up each others’ wounds. It is time to be neighbors. It is time to love.

Warmly,

Curtis