Matthew 22:34-40
“Self Love”
July 19, 2020 – Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
This past week, the neighbor across from us cut down a beautiful, healthy, perfectly straight 40 or 50 foot tall Douglas fir tree in his yard. I watched as he and his son climbed the tree, hacked off the green branches and lowered them to the ground. As I write and record this sermon, the ugly, bare trunk of the butchered tree stands there waiting to be brought down in the final act of destruction.
As you might guess from my description of the event, I am struggling to find some love for my neighbor at the moment. I totally understand the removal of leaning, dead, problem trees in our neighborhood, but taking out healthy specimens just to get rid of the nuisance of falling needles and occasional falling branches just seems wrong. As Beth said, “Why live in this neighborhood if you don’t like trees?” I’d even say it’s stupid.
But now I turn to our text for today in which Jesus tells us that God’s command to love our neighbor is second only to the command to love God. In response to what was evidently a frequently asked theological question, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus quoted two passages from the Old Testament. In verse 37, He cites but paraphrases Deuteronomy 6:5, the command to love God with every part of our being. Verse 39 is a quotation from Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And verse 34 of Leviticus 19 is much like it but extends the command to love beyond “neighbors,” beyond one’s own people, to include aliens, foreigners.
As we consider the theological virtue of love this month, we could probably spend the whole time talking about what it means for us to love neighbors and foreigners, especially in regard to all our present concern about race. But as many have observed, just the first part, which Jesus explicitly repeated, is difficult enough. G. K. Chesterton famously said, 110 years ago almost to the day, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”[1]
So I could spend more time on my feelings toward our annoying, tree-killing neighbor and what it might mean to love him, but I’d like to take this text in a different direction for now and talk about the assumption that is at the heart of the second of the greatest commandments. Loving your neighbor as yourself implies and assumes that you love yourself. Since loving or at least liking oneself is the subject of much popular psychological “wisdom” in our time, I suggest we spend some thought on what self-love is. I’ll come back to my hard-to-love neighbor later.
In that popular psychology I mentioned, we find two interesting and seemingly opposite opinions about what might be called “self-love.” First, there is a positive appraisal of self-love. Jesus’ direction to love our neighbors as ourselves is often understood this way. We are told that we simply cannot learn to love others until we first learn to love ourselves. So there is a whole psychological and educational movement and industry aimed at fostering “self-love,” sometimes going under the designation “self-esteem.” Concerns about sexism, racial stereotypes, and body image all get caught up in the worry that some of us do not think well of ourselves. I have had several pastoral conversations with people who describe their experience that way: self-hatred, lack of self-esteem, etc. Learning to love oneself, then, is said to be the pathway to a better life, to flourishing as a human being.
On the other hand, self-love in the pathological form we call “narcissism” has been mentioned often recently in conversations and opinion pieces about certain people in positions of power and leadership. The term derives from the Roman author Ovid’s story about Narcissus, a young man of such exceptional appearance that he fell in love with his own reflection as he stared into a pond. According to Ovid he wasted away there by the pond, unable to leave his “beloved.” When he died, wood nymphs covered him with their own hair and arranged a funeral. But when they returned for his body, all they found was the white and yellow flower we call a narcissus.
In psychology, narcissism is a combination of intense self-focus and desire to be admired with a nearly complete lack of empathy or understanding for others. Narcissistic people can be initially charming in order to cause other people to give them the admiration they crave, but their lack of empathy generally makes long-term relationships almost impossible for the truly narcissistic. That’s the extreme, but psychologists realize that narcissism is a spectrum. Many of us exhibit it to some degree. “Loving oneself,” like so many other facets of our psychology, is a mixed bag. We need it to some extent to be healthy, but when it goes too far the result is less than a fully human life should be.
My own understanding of self-love, for most of my life, has been a deep distrust and suspicion, at least in part because I generally find myself over-supplied with a positive self-image. In my honest moments I recognize that I often have way too high an opinion of myself and what I deserve in life. I feel the discord between that way of seeing myself and Jesus’ call to focus on others and even to “deny yourself,” as He said frequently about what it means to follow Him.
So pretty nearly exactly thirty years ago, I preached a message on this text as part of a series entitled, “Things Jesus Didn’t Say, But People Think He Did.” The title of the sermon was “Love Yourself.” In other words, my message then was that Jesus did not mean at all here to command us to love ourselves, but only to love God and others. I thought the common suggestion that a command to love yourself is implied by the command to love your neighbor as yourself was completely misguided. I said the idea that we have to love ourselves before we can love anyone else, even God, would in fact make self-love the first commandment, which is not what Jesus meant here at all. So I set out to show that God is not interested at all in whether we love ourselves, but only in whether we love Him and those around us. But that was not quite right.
God does care whether we love ourselves. It is, in fact, the way He made us. Self-love is natural. It’s human nature. That’s exactly what Jesus is assuming when He tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. He starts from the fact that everyone, unless she has some psychological disorder, loves herself. It’s the same point Paul makes about the marriage relationship, speaking to men in Ephesians 5 verses 28 and 29, “husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies… for no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it…” Don’t get bogged down in the fact that some people do seem to hate themselves or hate their own bodies. Jesus and Paul were talking about what is normal for human beings, that almost everybody loves himself and wants what is best for himself. And that brings us to what I didn’t quite get thirty years ago.
To understand what self-love is, we need to get clear on what love is. There are lots of definitions. Love is so big that no definition quite captures it. But at least one solid suggestion, from Thomas Aquinas, is that, at its best, love is wanting what is good for someone. And what is good for human beings is to be happy, truly happy. Not just happy in the sense of getting something you want in the short run, but being happy in the sense of being fulfilled, content, fully satisfied and at peace. To want that kind of happiness for someone is to love that person. And, says Thomas, and as Jesus and Paul assume, almost everyone wants that kind of happiness for himself or herself.
The upshot is that when Jesus (or Moses long before in Leviticus) tells me to love my neighbor as myself, He is not telling me that I first need therapy to deal with lack of self-esteem in order to love another person. He is telling me to turn the same kind of perfectly natural concern, love, which I have for my own happiness and well-being toward others. If I am hurting because of poor self-esteem, then let my desire to be free of that pain extend to others who are in pain. Let me want them to be happy as much as I want myself to be happy.
In talking about one aspect of loving others, the act of forgiveness and love toward those who have done something wrong, C. S. Lewis brings up the old Christian saying that one ought to “hate the sin but not the sinner.” In asking us to love our neighbor, that seems to be what is asked. To return to my tree-cutting neighbor, I want to hate what he did to that tree, but not hate him. But sometimes that feels like a tall order. Lewis says that for a long time he used to think it was silly and impossible: “how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?” We might think of all the terrible things the news tells us about what people have done and ask the same sort of question. How am I not to hate him, or her, given the deeds they have done?
Lewis’s answer goes back to our business today of self-love. He writes,
But years later it occurred to me that was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason I hated the things [I did] was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.[2]
Loving our neighbors, then, means constantly remembering and applying to those others what Lewis realized about his own self-love. Another great saying of Jesus points us in a similar direction, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” This great commandment to love others as yourself is basically saying, “Do to others as you would do to your own self.”
So popular psychology is actually right about how important self-love is for being able to love others, even to love God. I was wrong to downplay self-love so much when I preached on this passage 30 years ago. But what pop psychology may overlook is that I cannot pursue self-love all by itself. I cannot focus solely on my own happiness and expect to find it. Without loving others, especially without loving God, I cannot really love myself and find happiness.
Both self-love and the desire for happiness, and if Aquinas is right they are pretty much the same thing, are like those “floaters” some of us get in our eyes when we are older. They are little imperfections in our retinas which appear as black spots in our field of vision when we look at a light-colored surface. The thing is, those “floaters” are typically not front and center in our vision. They’re off to one side or another. Because they are actually part of our eye, when we try look directly at them, focus on them, they move as we move our eyes, slipping away from us. That’s exactly what happens with self-love and our own happiness when we try to focus directly on them.
As Josef Pieper explains it, quoting Bernard of Clairvaux, there is a great paradoxical relationship between self-love and love for others, between desire for our own happiness and our desire for the happiness of someone else. If we offer love toward someone else in a kind of self-loving calculation for what we will get in return, then both our love for ourselves, our own happiness, and our supposed love for that other person will slip away from us. But, says Bernard, “All true love is without calculation and nevertheless is instantly given its reward, in fact it can receive its reward only when it is without calculation…”[3]
Thomas Aquinas explains it this way. When you truly love another person as yourself, then your conception of your own happiness expands to include the happiness of that other person. What makes that person happy makes you happy. What grieves or hurts that person grieves or hurts you. Thomas follows Aristotle in the idea that a beloved friend is like “another self.” Love for a friend makes us perceive his or her happiness as if it were our own happiness.[4] To expand what Scripture says a little, we love a neighbor as if that person really were our own self.
I’m still wrestling to grasp this idea of self-love including what is good for someone else. But here’s a few thoughts on what I think Moses and Jesus and Paul taught us. Loving someone like myself is what I felt toward my daughters when I took them fishing. I love to fish. I especially love to actually catch a fish. But when two little girls came into my life that self-love of the joy of catching a fish expanded in such a way that it was even greater joy to take them fishing and watch one of them catch a fish. All that I love about fishing myself gets reflected back to me in her excitement to feel a tug on the line, her breathless struggle to reel it in, her wide smile of pride when it’s hoisted in the net and we measure it. The glorious paradox is that I’ve made myself the happiness at just the point I’ve totally forgotten about my happiness and focused all on hers.
That paradox of self-love and love for others is played out over and over in our lives. It’s maybe easiest to see in family relationships. Their good and happiness feels like our own. My wife has a happy, peaceful day drawing in her book and my own soul feels refreshed. If she receives bad news or has lots of pain in her knee, it’s as if my own heart or body aches. My own self-love, what I think is good for me, has come to include what is good for her. That’s what really loving someone else like your own self means.
This is why the narcissist is so damaged, so hurtful to himself and others. That “lack of empathy” means he cannot feel someone else’s good as if it were his own. And because of that he never gets the paradoxical reward of finding that he is actually doing good for himself, loving himself, by caring about what is good for others. The narcissistic paradox is that the narcissist cannot even truly love himself.
All that Jesus is asking us here is to learn to love not just family or close friends in that deep, “my other self” sort of way. In the video on racism some of us watched and talked about this past week, Phil Vischer ended a concise, dense recitation of the injustices done to black people in America with the simple suggestion, “Care.” I think Jesus is telling us here how to do that. When I see or hear of another person unjustly arrested or even killed, try to feel it as if it were my own self being put in handcuffs or lying on the street with a knee on my neck. Let that person, in my heart and in my mind, at least for a few moments of caring, be “another self,” another me, regardless of the color of his skin.
Maybe most of Christian life is learning how to practice this kind of paradoxical self-love toward others. It’s a little easier to see how the greatest commandment, to love God, brings a reward with it, because God saves us, God does so much for us. But that second great commandment, to love others as ourselves, is a long slow process of discovering that I haven’t really even begun to love myself until that love for myself expands to include care and love for those around me. And that kind of expanded self-love does not come by “calculating” what is good for me and what I will receive when I show love to others. It only arrives as I forget myself and my own happiness and treat the happiness and good of others as if it were my own.
Jesus did not leave us without resources for learning and growing in paradoxical self-giving self-love. He told us to love each other as we love ourselves, but He also told us to “Love each other as I have loved you.” Jesus Himself is the greatest example of what I am talking about. Jesus along with His Father and the Holy Spirit expanded the love they share so much that they treated our eternal good and happiness as if it were their own. Jesus came, forgetting about what was good for Him, to suffer and die so that we could be set free from sin and live. He showed us exactly what it means to love others as we love our own selves, because that is what He did for us.
This week I encourage you to think about Jesus’ example and all the times when someone else being happy has made you happy, when your love for yourself expanded to include loving another person. Then try stretching that a little further. Try to imagine the happiness and well-being or the distress and worry of that rude driver behind you, that annoying neighbor next door, or even that narcissistic co-worker, as if their own joy or pain were your own. Remembering Jesus, forget about the effect they have on you and consider your effect on them. Then see if anything changes, if anything grows in you, if perhaps you even feel a little better about yourself. Me? I’ll think some more about my neighbor and his tree.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Illustrated London News July 16, 1910.
[2] In Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1960), p. 105f.
[3] Quoted in Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 244.
[4] See David M. Gallagher, “Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love as the Basis for Love of Others,” Acta Philosophica, vol. 8 (1999), 23-44.