Love your neighbor as yourself

Today the message of Jesus is ignored in many communities of faith, which have become a den of thieves, negotiating the faith, taking advantage of the pain of the believer, of the suffering of those who consider that in God they will find rest. Unscrupulous shepherds who take advantage of their condition to make the faithful believe that God is bought with money. Neoliberalism touched the churches, corrupted them; individualism is reflected when I congregate but I do not know my brother who sits next to me, I do not know his name. I am only interested in my salvation, my encounter with God, something personal, nothing communitarian as it is reflected in the example of unity in which the disciples of Jesus lived. The Pastor is the one who serves him and is no longer to serve, he is a figure that is above the flock. Love your neighbor as yourself is the invitation of Jesus to return to the roots of Christianity. Love your neighbor as yourself is the invitation of a humble man of the 1st century AD that today he shouts the message of unity, of love among all human beings. In the midst of human pain, of inequality, of displacement due to violence, in the midst of hunger and thirst for justice in a society that deteriorates due to the lack of values, which is sunk in the midst of technological pride, of its "armored" economy "Savior, Jesus invites us to reflect, to understand that we should love ourselves, that we should value ourselves; reflect on our true role in the universe; stop being instruments, production machines; to stop entering the consumerist dynamic that returns slaves to people. To love your neighbor is to understand that my neighbor is not only human, but also universal, my neighbor is also everything created, the earth, the water, the jungle, the animals, everything that exists, that shares this planet. We are all one in Christ. In that understanding I stop believing to be the king of the universe and I begin to understand that I am part of the cosmos, of that immense, complex, fantastic universe.

We are living in a difficult world, violence is through the roof, destruction of ecosystems is triggered, crime is not even mentioned; In any of the world's great metropolises, violence and crime reach unimaginable levels. Poverty is excessively high worldwide, inequality is evident, forced displacement due to violence and hunger occurs in the vast majority of countries that exist, in short, we live in a complicated scenario. The sad thing is that we are all aware of reality but we do not do anything to improve it, to change it, to transform society. News saturates us with cruel, inhuman reports, human beings are not treated as such, to put it another way, we are dehumanizing humanity, it may sound sad but it is obvious. In some way we all participate in this disaster, precisely because we all live on this planet, still beautiful, called earth, so we are all aware of what is happening, we tolerate the cruel and no longer wears so much violence in the world.

Regarding the economic, we live by running over in order to achieve what according to the market "gives us happiness", we have become numbers in the great global production chain. We are ceasing to be human to be converted by the market into machines of consumption and production, the beauty of life is distorted every day, reaching the limit of thinking that only in the possessions is the synthesis of life. Today we live in a world dominated by Capital; the big multinationals run over with their philosophy of production, where the employee produces more than he earns, so the balance always tilts unfavorably for the worker and there is no control of the State before that, philosophy and execution of the neoliberal model. This inequality leads to poverty becoming more evident every day, because the greater wealth of those who have capital, the greater the poverty.

For Jesus it is clear that the neighbor is anyone who is not me, and from that perspective I help him, I feel compassion for him, I do not take into account his social condition, race, religion or sex (Luke 10, 25-37). I see in the neighbor the visible manifestation of God, his perfect work. Jesus begins to teach this to his disciples, to recreate in them the old alliance, where all were equal to each other and where the social pyramids did not exist. Among them, the prevailing, pyramidal social model must never be repeated. In fact, the greatest is not the one who serves him, but the one who serves; all a revolutionary message for his time. The teacher teaches by example. Remember the woman who was about to be stoned; a law sentenced his execution, but he puts forward the highest law, the greatest of all, love. So his words, "Love your neighbor as yourself," are not only an expression of a loving man, but of someone who understands that this principle goes against the whole social, economic and political order, order by the way tyrannical, excluding, because only think from the individuality and not from the collectivity. For Jesus, this brief but profound message is an invitation to understand the Kingdom of God, that is, to understand that justice, equality, love, respect, tolerance, are principles of the kingdom, "I want you to have life and they have it in abundance (John 10,10). "