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39 And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' (Matthew 22:39 NRSV)
To be a disciple of Jesus, Jesus taught them that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. For some it might have been a reaffirmation, but Jesus wanted them ot know the seriousness of this commandment. If you ever see infants interacting with other infants, you see that they are still at a point where they have not made any judgments about differences and thus no negative thoughts have entered into their mind; how long do you suppose that lasts? Sadly, we all know the answer. It just takes one parent to say something negative about someone else. and the baby has learned something new albeit something awful. And if it isn't the parent, then someone else will step in and begin to teach the infant what the infant would be so much better off not knowing. Interesting that the moment Jesus says this to His disciples is during the last week of His life on earth. Imagine the weight of this moment.
Jesus has entered Jerusalem to crowd-shouts of Hosanna, has cleared the Temple, and is now engaged in a series of increasingly hostile exchanges with the religious establishment. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes come at Him in waves — each group testing Him with questions designed to trap, discredit, or expose Him. The question about the greatest commandment, posed by a lawyer in Matthew 22:36, is one of these tests. It was not an innocent theological inquiry. It was a snare.
And yet Jesus answers it not defensively but with stunning clarity and generosity — first citing the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:5, the heart of Jewish daily prayer, and then immediately adding: "And a second is like it."
That phrase — like it — is everything. The Greek word is homoia, meaning similar in kind, comparable in nature, belonging to the same order. Jesus does not say the second commandment is a footnote to the first, or a lesser obligation to be attended to after the primary one is satisfied. He says it is like the first — cut from the same cloth, inseparable from it in practice. You cannot, He implies, genuinely fulfill one while ignoring the other.
The commandment Jesus quotes is not new. It comes from Leviticus 19:18 — "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord."
In its original setting, the command appeared within a dense cluster of ethical instructions governing communal life in Israel. The surrounding verses address fair wages for laborers, honest treatment of the deaf and blind, impartial justice in court, and the prohibition of slander. The love commanded here was not a vague sentiment — it was expressed through specific, concrete practices that protected the vulnerable and held the community together.
Crucially, in Leviticus 19, the word neighbor initially referred to fellow Israelites — "your people." But within the same chapter, just a few verses later, the command is extended: "The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself" (v. 34). Even in its original context, the boundary of neighbor was already being pushed outward.
By the time of Jesus, the question "Who is my neighbor?" was one of active and serious rabbinical debate. Different schools drew the circle differently. Some interpreted neighbor narrowly — fellow Jews, fellow members of the covenant community. Others were more expansive.
Jesus addresses this question directly in Luke 10, where the same exchange about the great commandment is followed immediately by the Parable of the Good Samaritan. When the lawyer presses — "And who is my neighbor?" — Jesus responds not with a definition but with a story in which the hero is a Samaritan, a person the Jewish audience would have considered a religious and ethnic outsider. The neighbor, Jesus concludes, is whoever acts with mercy — and the real question is not who qualifies as my neighbor but whether I am willing to be a neighbor to whoever stands before me in need.
In Matthew 22, Jesus does something equally significant. He links the two commandments so tightly that He can say in verse 40: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The entire moral and spiritual architecture of Israel's covenant life — every command, every prophetic call to justice, every instruction about worship and ethics — is suspended from these two points. Pull them out, and everything else collapses. Honor them, and everything else falls into its proper place.
The standard reading of "love your neighbor as yourself" treats the as yourself as a measure of degree — love them this much, as much as you love yourself. And that is certainly part of it. But there is more here worth examining.
The command assumes a basic, healthy self-regard — not vanity or self-absorption, but the ordinary human instinct to care for oneself, to seek one's own wellbeing, to take one's own needs and dignity seriously. This is the baseline. Now extend that same instinct outward. What you naturally do for yourself — attend to, protect, provide for, take seriously — do for the person in front of you.
This has a disorienting implication: those who genuinely cannot love themselves — who live in deep self-contempt, shame, or self-destruction — will find this command extraordinarily difficult, not because they are morally deficient but because the instrument of measure is itself broken. The pastoral wisdom here is that learning to receive God's love for oneself is not a selfish detour from the command — it is necessary equipment for obeying it.
The apostle John will make this explicit decades later: "Those who say 'I love God' and hate their brothers or sisters are liars" (1 John 4:20). The vertical and horizontal cannot be separated without both being distorted. A religion that is all transcendence and no mercy becomes cold and self-righteous. A social ethic that is all horizontal service with no grounding in God eventually loses its footing — its sense of why human beings are worth loving at all.
The reason the neighbor is worth loving, at full depth, is that the neighbor bears the image of God. Every human being — the agreeable and the difficult, the familiar and the strange, the deserving and the seemingly undeserving — carries within them the imago Dei, the divine image that makes them irreducibly valuable. To love the neighbor is, in some genuine sense, to honor the God whose image they bear. The two commandments are not just companions. They are reflections of one another.
The church in every generation is tempted to redraw the circle of neighbor in ways that conveniently exclude whoever is most threatening, most foreign, most ideologically opposed, or most costly to love. We do this not with malice but with the quiet management of categories — deciding, below the level of conscious thought, who counts and who doesn't, who is close enough to deserve our full moral attention.
Jesus will not allow it. The parable of the Samaritan was told precisely because the original question — Who is my neighbor? — was a boundary-drawing question, an attempt to identify the edge of obligation. Jesus dissolves the question. He refuses to hand over a list. He tells a story instead, and in that story, the neighbor turns out to be the one you least expected, loving the one you would least have chosen. The command is not love the neighbors you have selected. It is be a neighbor to whoever you encounter.
In our fractured cultural moment — sorted by politics, class, race, geography, and ideology into increasingly sealed communities — this commandment lands with particular force. The person across the aisle, across the border, across the theological divide is not exempted from the second great commandment. They are, in fact, precisely the test of whether we are keeping it.
PRAYER: Lord, forgive me for the neighbors I have quietly decided not to see. Expand my circle. Soften my categories. Make Your love for every image-bearer You have made the love that moves through me. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Think of one person you find it genuinely difficult to love. Pray for them by name today — not that they would change, but simply that God would bless them. Let that be your first act of obedience to the second commandment.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me.
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr. TOMORROW: Repent and Believe the Good News
