Loving Your Neighbor: What Christianity Teaches About Others

Love your neighbor as yourself is probably the most widely recognized ethical instruction in the Bible, quoted comfortably by people who have never opened Scripture. Its familiarity hides how demanding it is, and how carefully Jesus refused to let his listeners narrow it.

The Command in Context

The phrase is not original to Jesus. It comes from Leviticus 19:18, tucked into a chapter of laws about honest weights, paying wages promptly, and not exploiting the deaf or the blind. When Jesus was asked which commandment was greatest, he paired Leviticus 19:18 with Deuteronomy 6:5, the command to love God with heart, soul, and strength, and said all the law and the prophets hang on the two together.

A Working Preacher commentary on Matthew 22 from Luther Seminary emphasizes that the love in view is not a modern emotional state. It is active mercy, a conscious choice expressed in generous action toward others, including strangers and enemies, whether or not affection is present. To love God, on this reading, means also to love God’s people, and the two commands cannot be separated.

This matters because emotions are not subject to command. Actions are. A person can act mercifully toward someone they find exhausting, and Scripture treats that as love rather than hypocrisy.

The Question About Limits

In Luke’s version, a lawyer answers correctly and then asks the follow up question everyone secretly wants answered: who is my neighbor? The question is not stupid. Every ethical system needs boundaries, and ancient interpreters genuinely debated whether the Levitical command applied to fellow Israelites, to resident foreigners, or more widely.

Jesus responds with a story rather than a definition.

The Good Samaritan

A man is robbed and left half dead on the Jerusalem to Jericho road. A priest passes. A Levite passes. A Samaritan stops, treats the wounds, transports the man, and pays for his continuing care.

The shock of the story depends on knowing who Samaritans were. A Working Preacher commentary on Luke 10:25-37 notes the documented tensions between Jewish and Samaritan groups in the ancient world, which made the Samaritan an unlikely hero to Jesus’ audience. They expected the religious professionals to act.

The same commentary observes that the lawyer’s question hinges on whether neighbors are those in physical proximity or those in social proximity. Jesus’ parable dismantles both framings. He ends by inverting the question entirely: not who qualifies as my neighbor, but which of these three proved to be a neighbor to the man in need. The category stops being a list of people who deserve your love and becomes a description of how you behave.

Who Is My Neighbor Now

Christian traditions have applied this with striking consistency, even where they disagree about much else. Catholic social teaching frames it through the dignity of the human person and a preferential concern for the poor. Orthodox spirituality speaks of seeing Christ in the stranger. Protestant traditions have historically driven it into hospital founding, abolition movements, and relief work. The commonality is the refusal to let neighbor mean people like me.

The Working Preacher commentary makes an uncomfortable point about modern readers: we frequently pass by the man ourselves, knowing perfectly well what the text asks, just as the priest and Levite knew the Torah’s call to care.

Practical Love Today

The parable resists abstraction, so the applications should stay concrete:

• Proximity counts. The Samaritan helped the person actually in front of him, not a cause. Start with the neighbor you can see.
• Cost counts. He gave time, supplies, money, and follow up. Love that costs nothing is usually sentiment.
• Category boundaries are the test. The people it is socially easy for you to ignore are the ones the parable is about.
• Sustained care beats one gesture. He arranged for ongoing treatment rather than dropping the man at an inn.
• Do not wait for feelings. Mercy is a decision that emotion sometimes follows.

Jesus closed the conversation with two words that were not a suggestion: go and do. The lawyer wanted a definition and received an assignment instead.