When asked what was the greatest Commandment, Jesus replied: “ 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matt 22:37-40).
Jesus' answer to the question meant as a test from a religious scholar schooled the one posing it. His answer was not only correct, it was corrective. To love God with your whole being is our highest calling and the greatest Commandment but in order to do that one must first love others around him: "Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen" (1 Jn 4:20).
And, before we can love others, we must first love ourselves. While sounding counterintuitive, self-love is the foundation of godly love. It also seems odd to suggest that one has to be instructed to love him/herself. But it is indeed needed for people are often found to be loathing rather than loving self - the real self.
The self we want to be, try to be, hold out as being; that self is fairly easy to love. But our real self, the self we keep hidden, the self we deny, the selfish self we wish didn't exist - that self we find hard to love and so often do not. That self we want and want other to believe isn't really us.
Like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11-12 who "stood by himself and prayed: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people---robbers, evildoers, adulterers---or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get,'" we too may try to deny that self even before God. But like tht Pharisee, we do not fool God even if indeed we might be fooling ourselves.
The fact is that we all "sin and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23), we all struggle with selfishness in our true self, our unwelcome and unloved self, that self we wish didn't exist and we have so much trouble loving. You know the one I'm talking about, don't you? Yes, of course you do.
Yet, it is exactly that self that God loves - loves enough to have sent His only Son to die for us (cf. Jn 3:16) that we might forever live with Him. God knows our true self and loves him/her to the nth degree. We don't have to hide our true self from God, we don't have to despise our true self. Quite the contrary, we need to love him/her enough to free share that self and accept the love God has for our true self so that we can truly feel His love.
In fact, in order to truly receive anyone's love, we must learn to love ourselves, thinking ourselves worthy of love. Not that we should excuse the selfishness but that we should admit it's reality so that we can allow true self to be transformed by God's love and the love of others, even our own love. Jus' Say'n.
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