Loving Your Neighbor with an Unshaven Face

Leviticus 19:18 famously commands that you “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus said that as long as you love God too, keeping the command to love your neighbor automatically keeps everything else. Paul and James took Jesus one further. They said that as long as you love your neighbor, that also counts for loving God. When the lawyer in the New Testament famously requested a definition of neighbor, Jesus responded with the story of the Good Samaritan. Suddenly what looked simple became exponentially difficult.

 Since keeping all of Leviticus is a daunting task when you only have a month, a lot of us (admittedly) had to pick and choose which commandments to try (as if this wasn’t the usual way we lived our Christian lives). But because Jesus labeled Leviticus 19:18 as the summary commandment, none of us felt like we could skip over this one. One man had decided to follow Leviticus expressly so that he could relate better to his neighbor. But what do you do with the unlovable neighbor? We’d find out the hard way. But Leviticus was also calling us to love one another. Despite our common faith and common calling, loving the neighbor you like can be equally challenging. And yet, as we obeyed this commandment, what began as an experiment was turning into a community of shared experience and empathy. Opening up Leviticus was starting to open us up to each other.