The Pharisees in Jesus’ time were considered law abiding citizens. In today’s Gospel they come to Jesus after He had silenced the Sadducees in the previous verses of Matthew. They intend to silence Jesus with a rather loaded question: “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” This was a usual topic of arguing among themselves. Jesus, in reply, gave the standard line from Deuteronomy chapter six, verse five. Jesus then adds His usual stinger, something new, but old as well.

The Law defined the Jewish people as the Holy People of God, by their observing, performing and living with God as their center. The prescriptions were exact and generally related to activities between, among and within the boundaries of the Jewish tribes.

Jesus advances the “greatest” law to include, and here’s the kicker, “your neighbor”. For Jesus this meant more than the neighbors who kept the law. This seems to have silenced His lawyer-friends, at least for a while.

I choose not to ask who your “neighbor” might be within the teaching of Jesus. She, he, or they, just might be the ones for whom affection is not quite yet experienced. The loving of God with the totality of all that we are, now that is a question my pharisaical-self asks Jesus. “All” is kind-of a word-trap. We cannot do anything with such “allness”, because we cannot give what we do not have. Our selfishness, so natural to us, prevents our even giving all that we do possess. This, for me, is the cause of Christian “Spiritual inferiority.”

We cannot love God, neighbor, spouses, puppies or anyone or anything totally, whole-heartedly. Thus we miss the mark; we, it seems, are not “totally” His followers.  
We are invited to love ourselves as God loves us in Jesus. We are invited to allow the Christ-loved self to go and extend that love to our “neighbor” as well as we can. The Pharisees didn’t appreciate that second part of Jesus’ response and we can pray gracefully with our response as well. I cannot love whom I do not know. Loving begins with the risks of climbing over self-established fences made precisely to separate us from “those who are different from us and so frightening to us.”

Today I reflect that Jesus would say, “Love God Who loves the different, including me.”  We are all more than His neighbor!