One cannot honor another person without blessing God who created the person. One cannot adore God without loving all God’s creatures.
Catechism of the Catholic Church #2069
We all keep lots of rules every day. Call friends. Finish homework. Eat healthy. Be on time. Don’t try drugs. Go to church with the family. Help out at home. Go to sports events at school. Practice piano, swimming, speech, running, yoga — whatever. Don’t turn left in front of traffic.
The teachers who studied the Law of Moses in the Old Testament identified 613 different laws. Some of these laws, such as the ten commandments and love your neighbor as yourself, are basic. Jesus also teaches them. But some laws said no to specific actions for reasons lost in history; for example, “You shall not round off your hair at your temples…or tattoo any marks upon you” (Leviticus 19.27-28).
Jesus sums up the whole Law of Moses in two commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. The command to love God with all one’s heart, mind, and spirit comes from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy 6.5. The command to love our neighbor comes from a collection of laws called the Holiness Code in the Old Testament book of Leviticus (19.18).
To love God above all is the call in the first three of the ten commandments. First, worship only God, not idols. Second, keep God’s name holy and keep the promises we swear in God’s name. Third, keep Sabbath holy as one day a week to appreciate God’s gifts in creation.
To honor and respect one another is the call in the other seven commandments — to love our neighbors as ourselves. The word as makes our neighbors our equals.
Israel’s history reminds the people of God that they once knew the suffering and degradation of slavery in Egypt and therefore should never enslave or degrade others. “The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19.33-34).
Loving our neighbors as ourselves is another way of expressing the golden rule — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The golden rule challenges us to develop empathy — the ability to feel with others. To empathize is to walk in our neighbor’s shoes, to put ourselves in another’s place, to imagine what it is like be least.
A clumsy classmate doesn’t want to be teased any more than I do. I need to learn why a young Muslim woman wears a headscarf just as I want my peers to know why I value doing service work or sing in the youth choir at church.
Today in our society, advertising teaches us to put ourselves first, to give ourselves all we deserve. Violence in our headlines makes us fear our neighbors. In cities we may not know our neighbors’ names.
In his counter-cultural teaching Jesus insists loving God and loving our neighbor are inseparable. We cannot love God without loving our neighbor. In our diverse society we cannot love our neighbors without listening and learning their culture.
Catholic social teaching rests on the principle that every human person is sacred, made in God’s image and likeness, possessing inalienable rights to life and its basics. The human person is also social. None of us thrives without interacting with family, friends, and neighbors. Loving our neighbors is vital to becoming our whole selves.