Love thy neighbour: The hardest teaching to follow in today’s world

I was shocked to receive the notification that the Middle East conflict had begun, and it was even more shocking that it had spread throughout the gulf region. I grew up in Dubai, my early memories as a child were in the UAE, and it is a beautiful country with opportunities not seen before. Hearing that they were also being attacked, and the fact that most of my family and friends are still there made this a more personal story than I thought it would be.

However, I wondered, ‘what’s going around in today’s world?’ Is everyone really that negative and unhappy? Why are we living in a time of tension and hatred?

While growing up I used to read and research a lot about history and I imagined how we have learned from it. But to my surprise, we still haven’t learned that war has no winners. After the wake of attacks in the Middle East, I realised maybe the one of the two main commandments Jesus taught us wasn’t as simple as it sounded.

Challenged

When the Pharisees challenged Jesus on which is the greatest commandment, he simply replied “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Mathew 34:40).

This answer was straightforward and simple, or that’s what people assumed. Love your neighbour as yourself is an extremely powerful statement. Showing kindness, gratitude and treating that person the same way you would treat yourself gives a different perspective. People also tend to forget the second part of the sentence. ‘As yourself’, a key contributing factor to it. If you love yourself, you automatically love others and being thankful everyday for the very life you live.

Everywhere you go, there are always people who are gloomy, faces down, getting annoyed about every small thing, but why is this the case? Some can blame social media, instant gratification, or comparing our lives to others which aren’t even the real case.

The first capital sin is pride, and pride is considered the deadliest sin because it is the root of all other sins, characterised by an excessive, ego-driven love of self-excellence that displaces God and disregards others. Pride causes individuals to believe that they are superior, which then leads to arrogance and obsessions with personal superiority.

Pride can be often mistaken for self love. In pride there is ego. In self love there is empathy, humility and acceptance. In self love, you accept your faults, you respect yourself and this automatically reflects on how you treat others. As I mentioned earlier, history is unfortunately repeating, and that’s all thanks to the pride which talks to them. The notion that my actions will be different because I am better or smarter is a dangerous one, especially when it comes to playing with people’s lives and livelihood.

Humility

The opposite of pride is humility, without humility there is no peace, to oneself or to the world. What we can do is to pray for such people to bring humility back into their lives and understand that what they are doing is more harmful than good. C.S Lewis famously quoted “Pride is a spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

The neighbourhood belongs to everyone and shouldn’t be treated in a way that destroys harmony amongst people. God created the earth for communal understanding, sharing ideas, making lifelong friends, and sharing love to one another. It is easy to accept people who are like you, who think like you, act like you, but if it was that easy, would Jesus mention this as one of the greatest commandments? The real challenge is to love someone who is completely different from you, pray for them, show them what is right and wrong, and accept them as how they are.

Let us pray for humility in this world, pray for peace, unity, and vow to help each other during tough times. Let us also pray that all our world leaders end wars through dialogue, for the betterment of humanity, and follow the simple and humble life Jesus had once lived. God bless!