Should we love ourselves?

Pay attention to the voice in your head the next time you drop a glass, forget an appointment, or sleep through your alarm clock.

What is it you tell yourself in the immediate aftermath of such an "oops" moment?

For many of us, the words that come are sharp: You idiot.

We would never speak that way to a friend. Most of us wouldn't even speak that harshly to a stranger.

But there's also that opposite voice. One we hear all over the place in our culture. The one that fills self-help books, and even decorates coffee mugs and motivational posters: You are enough. Treat yourself. Follow your heart.

Two voices, apparently at war.

Yet they share something in common.

Both are a conversation the self is having with the self.

So should a Christian love himself?

The question makes some people nervous. Isn’t the whole point of the Gospel to die to self? Yet the question is not as simple as it sounds, and the answer Jesus gives is more surprising than either voice that we might speak to ourselves in the mirror, or we're given in the self-help industry.

 

The Old Measure

The command is ancient. God told Israel, "you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD" (Leviticus 19:18). Jesus Himself repeats it and calls it one of the two commandments upon which depend all the rest of Scripture (Mark 12:31).

Notice, though, the command implies something of an assumption that you already do love yourself. It takes that almost for granted. It sounds as if self-love is the ruler God holds up and tells you to measure your love for others against it.

There is something of a concession here. Much the way that God says that Moses allowed divorce (another issue, perhaps for another day) on account of the hardness of one's heart, but that was not how it was supposed to be from the beginning.

God knows already our weakness, our preoccupation with self-interest. He knows how quick we are to offer ourselves excuses, to justify our own faults. He knows that we spend most of our time looking out for "number one."

The command in Leviticus does justify that truth, exactly. It doesn't put a stamp of approval of self-interest. It conscripts it, it uses that in order to turn our gaze outward. Whatever care you show yourself, show it to the person next to you.

But Scripture is also honest that this kind of self-love is a kind of "warped" love, a bent-inwardness of something meant to be directed straight out to others. The self that loves itself is the same self that fell into sin in the garden. It loves disordered things in disordered ways. It can be both greedy, and merciless in self-indictment, sometimes all in the same day, or hour!

But if this is our measure for loving others, we'll never get there completely. A ruler that is "bent" won't give you straight lines.

 

The New Measure

Then Jesus comes and does something with this command that no prophet dared to do. On the night before He died He said, ”I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (John 13:34).

The standard changes. No longer “as yourself” but “as I have loved you.”

This is not a contradiction, though. I'll explain more on that below, so keep reading.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux deserves the credit for this insight. I got it from her. Near the end of her autobiography, Story of a Soul, she writes:

“When the Lord commanded His people to love their neighbor as themselves, He had not yet come upon the earth. Knowing the extent to which each one loved himself, He was not able to ask of His creatures a greater love than this for one’s neighbor. But when Jesus gave His Apostles a new commandment, HIS OWN COMMANDMENT, as He calls it later on, it is no longer a question of loving one’s neighbor as oneself but of loving him as He, Jesus, has loved him” (Story of a Soul, Manuscript C).

Thérèse is not saying the old command was wrong. She is saying it was a shadow of a greater love, a foreshadowing of a love that could only be fulfilled once Jesus loves us, and invites us into His love.

Jesus did not come "to abolish but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17).

It's easy to miss this point. If the measure of love for my neighbor is now Christ’s love for him, then the measure of love for myself must also be Christ’s love for me.

The old ruler is not thrown away. It is straightened. I am still commanded to love myself, but no longer by my own crooked mesaure, no longer "bent" inward, as a template.

I am to love myself through His eyes not through the mirror. I am to love myself because He loves me.

And if I see myself as unlovable, well... that's something of an insult to the great love He showed me on the cross.

 

A Love That Does Not Start With Me

John said all of this in just a few words: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

The order matters. Love that begins in the self and returns to the self is a closed circle.

It ends we me lovin' myself a lot of me!

But love that begins in Christ and passes through Him before it reaches me brings in an outside assessment, and one with more credibility than any love the world either offers or withholds.

What does that love say? Not “you are enough just the way you are.” Something far better. "God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

Christ’s love for me is not a verdict that I am fine, a-ok, or just swell.

It is a verdict that I am worth dying for.

Dying for even when I'm not fine, a-ok, or swell.

It takes my sin with total seriousness (it comes at a heavy cost!) but in the very same movement it embraces me with divine tenderness.

No self-help book offers that. Only the Cross does.

That is why this self-love is cruciform. It bears the shape of the Cross.

It does not flatter me, because the Cross tells me honestly what my sin cost.

It does not turn to self-hate, because the Cross tells me honestly what I am worth to Him.

St. Paul puts his own name inside that love: "the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).

Paul knew exactly what he had done. He had hunted the Church. He'd overseen the stoning of Christianity's first martyr. He called himself the chief of sinners! And he could still say that the Son of God “loved me.”

That is not self-esteem.

Some years ago a Lutheran pastor, Don Matzat, coined a better word for it in the title of a book: Christ-esteem.

My worth is not something I generate by looking inward, it's not an exercise in self-help. It is something I receive, when I allow my own "gaze" in the mirror to be changed to His eyes, His vision, looking at me.

He who has the eyes to see (yourself as He does), let him see.

 

Learning to Look Back

Here are the practical tips, how to "train" your vision to see yourself through His eyes.

First, when you find yourself speaking harsh words of self-accusation, do not argue with it. Don't address it on its own terms. Do not reach for the motivational poster, and don't look for the things the world offers to make you "feel" better. Reach for the Cross. Say to yourself, honestly, “Yes, I did that. And He died for me anyway.” The sin mattered. But His love overcame it, and it's in His love that you find not your sin, but yourself.

Second, when tempted to self-aggrandizement or flattery of the ego, don't listen to that either. Be just as suspicious about "positive self-talk" as you are about "negative self-talk." Praise that begins and ends in you is a closed circle, always turned back on you. Instead, look deeper. Both to He who dwells in the center of your Soul, and who comes to you from beyond yourself, with a love that's always bigger than yourself. Whatever is good in you is His gift, and there's only one way to respond properly to a gift: say thank you.

Third, practice seeing yourself through His eyes. Each evening, if you do the daily examen I've often recommended, imagine Christ looking at your day. Where did you fall short/ Bring to mind the look He gave Peter in the courtyard, after his denial. Think of how he turns, in agony, to gaze upon the thief on the next cross. He does not turn with a look of disgust, or even indifference. He looks with a gaze that sees all—even the sin—and does not look away. There's something passive here, to learn to be looked at, and for something that we simply receive, it's incredible how hard this can be for some of us. So stop forcing it. Just let go, turn your focus away from your effort to see it, and look at what He did for you. For some of us, learning to receive this takes years. If it does, well, it's worth every year it took.

Finally, let that gaze transform the way you see others. Once you can see yourself through the eyes of Christ, you'll start seeing your neighbor through His eyes, too. Not just your friends. Even your enemies. That is the whole point. That's why He gave the new commandment. Not because the first was wrong, it just needed fulfillment. Because the command to love your neighbor was never about you alone. It was about a love so large it can hold both you and the most irritating person in your life, even someone who persecutes you. Because it allows us to see, in every human face, a person made in His image, a person He died to save. A person He loves.

 

God Bless,

Judah