A Reflection for Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
What is there left to say about today’s Gospel? A frequently quoted passage in Scripture, it features Christ’s command to love God with your whole heart and to treat your neighbor as you’d treat yourself. Called “the Greatest Commandment,” reflections on this teaching—a ubiquitous mantra in Catholic kindergartens everywhere—range from the pedestrian (“Just be kind to everybody”) to the academic.
The charge first appears in Leviticus: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18). The same sentiment is repeated in Mark 12, when Jesus is asked by a scribe to detail the first commandment. Jesus provides his answer in two parts, first naming the prohibition against worshiping false gods, which was especially important in the first century A.D. as monotheistic Judaism grew out of the polytheistic traditions of the ancient Caananites.
At initial glance, “love thy neighbor” reads as a clear, straightforward command—a relative rarity for a Galilean preacher who more often spoke in parables. It is obviously true that we must treat those whom we encounter with dignity and respect, as did Jesus during his public ministry. But a critical look at this command sparks two short yet deceptively challenging questions: Who is my neighbor? And what does it mean to love them?
In Luke 10, when a lawyer asks Christ “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The lawyer correctly identifies the neighbor as the Good Samaritan, who shows mercy to the injured man on the street. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus directs him (Lk 10:37). Here, the parable defines a neighbor as someone who takes action and does good unto others. In his landmark, multi-volume work Church Dogmatics, the 20th century Swiss theologian Karl Barth writes that a neighbor is your “fellow-man acting towards [you] as a benefactor.” His use of the term “benefactor” appears to support this reading, as “benevolence” derives from the Old French meaning a “disposition to do good.”
We then encounter the second question: What does love mean in this context? Thomas Barrosse, C.S.C., in an essay for The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, notes that love is the ultimate foundation of Christianity, and yet its definition is subject to a broad variety of interpretations. He identifies the love of God for humankind, and the love that disciples of Christ ought to show towards their neighbors, as agapē (in Greek, ἀγάπη). In 1 John 4, the phrase “God is love” (ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν)—arguably the most mysterious pronouncement in Christianity as it seeks to define the very nature of the Father—also uses the word agapē (1 John 4:8, 16).
Father Barrosse characterizes this kind of love as “always and everywhere a disinterested and efficacious benevolence,” an interesting (if not intentional) parallel to Barth’s idea of neighbor as benefactor. Admittedly, this description does not make the matter at hand any clearer, but biblical exegesis tends to prompt more questions than it answers.
Referencing Father Barrosse’s understanding of agapē, to love thy neighbor strives for more than simple kindness or a surface-level interaction. Rather, we can hear Jesus direct us to do good to others—that is, to deliver them to God. As noted by Stephen Post in The Journal of Religious Ethics: “No vision of Christian love that forgets to bring the neighbor towards the divine is finally adequate.” This should not be misunderstood as instructions to proselytize strangers on the street, but it is a recognition that Christian love flows from and is returned to God.
