Love is All in All

I have been kicking around the following hypothetical question with some friends: what if “Love your neighbor” was the only thing that survived Jesus’s teaching? I know I am kicking a dead horse about Christian dogma having become problematic at best and toxic at worst, but I wonder how long it would have taken institutional Christianity to muck up those three words? The more I think on it now, the more convinced I am that Jesus would see those three words as being two too long.

“Love.”

What happened to keeping the main thing the main thing? What happened to making sure we master the basics before moving on to the rest? Does it get any simpler than Jesus’ insistence to love one another by practicing compassion for self and others? It would have been one thing if Jesus only modeled love to his disciples or to the Jewish people. But he didn’t! He loved the people he wasn’t supposed to! He loved those from the next town over that nobody wanted anything to do with. He loved those people that the religious leaders of his day labeled “the unclean.” He loved children, and women, and even advised people to love their enemies!

A primary teaching of Christianity is that Jesus was "God in the flesh," and I think such a profound declaration like this misses the mark in more ways than one. For starters, it smells a lot like Greek mythology. Secondly, it set Jesus apart unnecessarily. Lastly, it distracted people of Christian faith away from what Jesus was really embodying while physically alive—God’s Love. What does love with flesh and bones and a heartbeat look like? Jesus the Christ.

“Compassion” is largely absent from the lips of what most outsiders say institutional Christianity stands for today. Right belief (and judgment of those without the right beliefs) are stressed far more than “loving our neighbors as ourselves.” The same Christians who tout “Jesus loves us unconditionally” as a core teaching have labeled certain people as unworthy of Jesus’s unconditional love and acceptance. Would this happen if all we ever knew of Jesus’s teachings was the command to “love”? I don’t know. But somehow the man we worship on a weekly basis for his demonstrations of compassion and unconditional love has been lost in translation when it comes to what the church is often known for.

The cold, hard, truth is that “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself” was not the only thing that survived Jesus’ life as the New Testament emphatically reflects. We have a whole host of other things he allegedly said and did to wade through and weigh, plus all the stuff that the apostle Paul wrote on top of that. Even if we could all agree on what the scriptures assert, followers of Jesus would still have to tackle all the dogma that the early Church fathers established which would eventually become Christianity’s tried and true best beliefs and practices.

The Truth of the Gospels as I see them is that what Jesus’s disciples believed was never as important as how compassionate they were.