Hillside Swedenborgian Community Church

The Short Version

September 6, 2009

Hillside Community Church

Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence

 Mark 12:28-34

 “One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him: ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’” –Mark 12:28 

 The ability to summarize judiciously and to extract the essence is perhaps the highest form of wisdom. Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith, for example, come to mind as significant wisdom figures in the modern era due to their ability to look deeply into the spiritual philosophies across the world and across the centuries and to draw out skillfully the nectar from the core.

            It was just such a wisdom art that Jesus was being asked to render that day that has been recorded for the ages in the gospel of Mark. For in the highly evolved Hebrew wisdom tradition of that day there were 613 commandments: 365 negative ones and 248 positive ones. And to these were appended a staggeringly complex network of sub-law and nuanced commentary. What was the essence? Can you, rabbi, bring to bear on our understanding the gist of divine law for human living? Of these myriad commands, which is most vital?

            Huston Smith himself puts forward an attempt to fathom the essence of spiritual life in the Jewish way of living out a complicated matrix of laws and commandments. In his great classic, The Religions of Man, which is undoubtedly the most widely read work covering the great faith traditions sympathetically and under one cover (and which in recent editions is titled, The World’s Religions), Professor Smith opens his masterful chapter on Judaism by trying to get the reader to imagine what it might be like to live out a faith commitment in which every gesture of the day has been contemplated as a consecration to the holy. How you dress, what and how you prepare your morning meal, how utensils are kept, cleaned and used—how, in fact, you can move through the entirety of the day and of the life in which the wisdom of the ages have honed through an enormously broad and comprehensive matrix of laws of do’s and don’ts the best way to meet the sacred here and now.

            In fact, one of the most famous rabbis who also tried to summarize the law in a particularly spiritual way lived in the generation before Jesus: Hillel. He might have been a forerunner to Jesus in some ways with his attempts to draw nectar from the core. Behold one of his famous sayings: “If I am not for myself, then who can be for me? And if I am only for myself, then who am I? And if not now, when?”

            That day when Jesus was asked which of all the laws was the most important, he answered in the plural, and his words in this passage comprise one of the central intersections of holy writ today. If all you had to take with you from the whole Bible was one saying, Jesus’ answer is perhaps the best: “Love God with all your heart and soul and mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is closely related: love your neighbor as you do yourself.”

            When we hear this now familiar challenge to love our neighbor as ourselves, the question needs to be raised whether this has been properly understood over the centuries. In many eras, if not all and also true for our own day, so many think that the emphasis is on loving the neighbor because loving oneself is a given. In fact, we think it is so obvious that we already love ourselves that many of us deep down experience little daggers of guilt because we believe we love ourselves too much—that we’re too selfish.

            And so often when we think that, we are wrong! I think the truth of the matter is that most of us are unable to love our neighbor as much as is our potential, not because we love ourselves too much, but because we do not love ourselves enough. The deeper issue and reality for so many of us is that we lack the right kind of self-appreciation and self-regard. Let’s take an example of a young man who is overly concerned with how he looks an dhow he dresses and what car he drives. He tends to brag in subtle ways constantly about whom he knows, what he has done, and where he thinks he is headed. In other words, he exhibits traits we think of as “vanity,” and some might say, “he’s too full of himself.” But he’s not. The problem is just the opposite. He is not full enough! If he were, he would not have to be so preoccupied with himself. If he were like a glass filled to the brim, he would be able to let himself spill over and out to other people, but because he is like a glass that is only half-full, he is continually trying to fill himself up.

            There are a lot of reasons why we might have challenges in loving ourselves properly. Right here in the Bay Area was born one of the significant contemporary schools of psychoanalysis in the work of Joseph Weiss and Harold Sampson, who developed the theory after watching hundreds of patient sessions in the Fifties and Sixties that the most deeply seated and challenging danger to healthy psychological growth is what they called a version of survivor guilt—which manifests in an extremely powerful but wholly unconscious way. A great many of us have a difficult time surpassing our families of origin. There arises, even and especially, in close and loving families a dynamic of keeping the family together in ways that can very much hinder the lines of personal development and of possibilities for some members of the family. What this works out to is a version of not loving ourselves enough, because we are prioritizing a love and commitment to the expectations of others. This creates a profound undertow of guilt any time we might try to move effectively toward new goals, new ways, new horizons, because this is experienced (irrationally) as a betrayal of the system of one’s origin. Being all that one might be is undermined by unconscious guilt, and so the goal in this psychotherapeutic process is to learn to recognize that dynamic and feeling, and then to have the courage to live through the changes that will be life-enhancing. That is one version of a profound loving of oneself that can then lead to a much greater capacity to love others.

            Let’s take one final example. The inability to say “no” to other people without feeling guilty also stems from a lack of the right kind of self-esteem. Some of us have never really gotten to the point where we can say comfortably and cheerfully, “What I want to do or not do is just as valid and important as what this person wants me to do.” Ironically, the inability to say “yes” stems from the very same source. Some of us always find excuses for not taking on responsibilities for which we are actually well-equipped because we harbor a deep-seated feeling that what we are and what we can do are not as good as what others are and what others can do.

            So, we have heard the commandment that we shall love our neighbor as ourselves, but the one side of the equation has gotten most of the play over the centuries, and perhaps the most powerful element lies in the other half—the one so many of us fail to embrace profoundly: that of loving ourselves. Everett Kennedy Brown in a book titled Love Your Neighbor as Yourself says, “The person who has a healthy self-love is capable of loving God and neighbor because he or she has a surplus of mental energy available for giving. The person who has an unhealthy self-love is unable to love God and neighbor, except superficially, because his or her mental energy is consumed in dealing with his or her own conflicts.”

            Jesus himself models an impressive self-esteem that is tremendously productive for those around him. If you stand back and look at what the New Testament reveals about his feelings and attitudes and actions, you get a picture of an almost unfathomable concern for others that is balanced by an equally profound respect for himself—due primarily to his love of what he calls the Father. In the third chapter of Mark he once turns his back on needy people who are clamoring for his time and attention, but instead he goes off with his inner group for a retreat. He simply decides that he has given an appropriate share of his time and energy to the needs of others, and now he is going to give some time to the meeting of his own. Other views of his self-regard are revealed by the numerous instances when he is being attacked by legalists who were trying to trap him. “You asked me a question,” he would say, “and now let me ask you one.” Jesus modeled a profound and strong self-respect. He loved himself. And it was out of such a love of self and of God that he had the power to love others effectively.

            So, in his judicious summarization, Jesus said that the healthy, whole person ready for service in the realm of heaven is one who can love God by loving themselves and others. It is interesting to note how modern psychology has grown to understand this. The National Association for Mental Health publishes a little booklet titled, “Mental Health is 1, 2, 3.” It describes three characteristics of people with good mental health. What do you suppose the very first one is? “They feel comfortable about themselves.”

            The booklet goes on to describe what is meant by that. They are not bowled over by their own emotions—by their fears, anger, loves, jealousies, guilt or worries. They can take life’s disappointments in stride. They have a tolerant attitude toward themselves as well as others as well as towards themselves; they can laugh at themselves. They neither under-estimate nor over-estimate their abilities. They can accept their own shortcomings. They have self-respect.”

            As for love of others, the booklet declares that people with good mental and emotional health “feel right about other people.” People who like and trust themselves tend to like and trust others, and take it for granted that others will like and trust them. They respect the many differences they find in people. They do not push people around, nor do they allow themselves to be pushed around. They can feel they are part of a group—so we talking human community, the healthy kind of family which Swedenborg says is really heaven.

            Well, as we have delved into what it might mean to really be nourished by the nectar Jesus draws out in his second commandment, you may have been measuring yourself by the standards of self-esteem and regard for others. You may feel basically reassured, or you may feel some concern. One thing is for sure. We all have plenty of room for growth into the way of life in the kingdom of heaven.

            And that is where our faith should enter the picture. I haven’t talked much about the first commandment, because I wanted to lift up and feature the second. But as for loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, there’s an implicit reverse side that gives life to it all: God loves US with all God’s heart and all God’s soul and all God’s mind and all God’s strength. We’re special with infinite potential to enlarge in spirit and beautify the kingdom of heaven. That’s whom God thinks we are. When we really begin to know that, then does our ability to love ourselves fiercely and our neighbors compassionately really take hold.

            That is the essence of the great spiritual laws. A billion books will be filled with eternal elaboration in the deepening of our destiny into God, but the key to it all has been spoken in our hearing today.