Friday, November 26, 2010

Spinach and Chocolate Cake

When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus’ answer was twofold:  love God (with everything you’ve got) and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  So, how many love commandments are there in this response?  Just two.

 

Some well-meaning interpreters of Scripture would tell us that there are in fact three love commandments here:  love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself.  They might insist, “Jesus tells us that we need to love ourselves in order to truly be able to love our neighbors.”

 

But I’m afraid that this interpretation, while probably well-intentioned, is mistaken – both grammatically and theologically.

 

For example, consider the instruction, Eat spinach as you eat chocolate cake.  How many commands have I issued?  Just one:  eat spinach.  I’m not commanding you to each chocolate cake!  In fact, there’s a good chance that I would prefer for you to STOP eating chocolate cake altogether.  But the command to eat spinach is based on a very good assumption:  the listener really likes to eat chocolate cake, and does so with eagerness!  In fact, the force of the command – as stated – depends on that assumption being true.  If I’m not sure whether the listener really likes chocolate cake or not, then phrasing the question in this way actually serves to undermine the impact of the command to eat spinach.  And to suggest that, when I say, Eat spinach as you eat chocolate cake, I really mean, If you don’t currently like chocolate cake, please learn how to eat it ravenously so that you can then fulfill my command to eat spinach with the same gusto – well, that’s just ridiculous, isn’t it?

 

By the same token, the very syntax of the phrase, Love your neighbor as yourself, must NOT be taken as a command to love oneself, implicitly or otherwise.  Jesus is making the very legitimate assumption that all of us really do in fact love ourselves.  NOT that we necessarily have the highest opinion of ourselves, since that is often not true. But we are passionately devoted to what we perceive to be our own best interests.  I’m no psychologist, but I would suggest that this understanding of self-love could hold true even to people who quite vehemently “hate themselves.”

 

So – we are already pretty well preoccupied with ourselves.  We don’t need another command to reinforce that.  We need to hear Jesus’ commands to love God first and love others with the same passionate commitment we give to our own interests.

 

And, yeah, eating more spinach might not be a bad idea, either.