Love of Self

Self-Love

What does it mean to have a healthy self-love?

The great commandment enjoins us to Love God with all our heart, all our soul and with all our strength (Deut 6:5; 10:12; 26:16; 30:2,6; Jos 22:5; Matt 22:37; Mar; 12:30; Luk. 10:27). When Jesus spoke these words, he was firmly in the tradition of what righteousness was in Israel. He added to it what had been taught in the wisdom traditions as a practical manner of existing with one’s neighbor. Love your neighbor as yourself.

What is this self-love that he speaks of? I suggest that it is a love which is proper in its orientation because it emerges from the first two commandments love of God and neighbor. It is not a selfish and jealous possessiveness. It is not a self-absorbed obsessive-ness. It is a love which gives of itself until there is nothing of itself left to give and keeps giving because it has its source in the eternal abundance of the Godhead.

We are created in the image of God. To truly know ourselves, we must know God. To know God, we must know Christ, since Christ is the great mediator between God and humanity. He is our Great High Priest (Heb 4:14).

The good news is that we have a high priest who is not a self-righteous monarch sitting upon a lofty throne and far-removed from our everyday existence. Christ entered into the humble life of a Galilean peasant who laughed and cried, was hungry and thirsty, got angry and frustrated. He even entered into the very dark place of abandonment by God that we all feel at some point or another. “My God my God; Why have you forsaken me?”

That is the kind of love Jesus was. The kind which is faithful until the end. Faithful even when those he trusted had run. Faithful even when His Father had abandoned him to the cross. Faithful unto the emptiness of death. With a view to the resurrection we know that this is the kind of love Jesus is.

If we want to love ourselves, we must love God. If we want to love God, we love His son the Christ, Jesus. Because in the light of that love, death doesn’t have the last word.