“An Interpretation of ‘Love Your Neighbors,’” by Andrew. J. Schatkin

“An Interpretation of ‘Love Your Neighbors,’” by Andrew. J. Schatkin

The saying of Christ to not merely love your neighbors and pray for those who persecute you I now propose to explain, seek to understand, interpret and analyze…

My dear readers, thinkers, politically incorrect, discerners and intellectually honest and those of you who are willing not to remain on the intellectual surface and are willing to go beneath the surface to the truth, to those who are unwilling to have your lives governed by political hype and political code words:

I now want to perhaps attempt to grasp and understand one of the most familiar of the sayings of the son of god to not merely love your neighbor, which is difficult and challenging enough, but to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  I note as a Christian that every word that comes from the mouth and mind of Jesus is from the eternal god in heaven and we can only try as the limited human beings that we are to plumb the depth and meaning of what Jesus means to tell us in these sayings.

The particular saying I will be talking about today is found in Matt 5:43 where Jesus says: “You have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven, for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and unjust. For if you love those who love you what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”

So what does Jesus mean for us to know here? First of all, he is raising the moral bar and extending the commandment to love from the easy task of loving those easy to love, whether the physically beautiful or the powerful and wealthy, and most important those who love us, and tells us that the true understanding of the command to love our neighbor, which one could say is somewhat easy or easily doable and possible, to love our enemies and prayer for those who persecute us. He means, I think, that the love of neighbor truly understood includes the greater and demand love for our enemies and those who persecute us. He is extending our understanding of the law perhaps to the true depth of the command and its true and profound meaning. Jesus extends the law and tells us the true meaning of love of neighbor and challenges us to follow this most difficult of his commandments which brings us to a high moral bar almost impossible for us to reach without the aid of Christ and the holy spirit. Perhaps the love of your enemy and prayer for the persecutor is a strategy of overcoming the persecutor through the wise agency of love. One could say that Jesus means here that to love those who love you is to gain their love, possibly, but if you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, you become transformed into the image and likeness of god, as St. Paul often said, in using the image of adoption. Jesus says here that when we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, we attain a closer likeness to the image of god and perhaps become more like his love for humanity: unconditional and not based on our works of love but on his loving us first and foremost.

This ends my interpretation and attempt to understand this passage in the gospel of Matthew and my interpretation and I do hope it has been helpful to you my fellow thinkers and discerners and intellectually probing and you who reject slogans and media propaganda for truth. I urge you to go back to the gospel reading in Matthew and read it many times to come to some grasp of what the son of god means here.