Jesus famously said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40 ESV). When Jesus said to love your neighbors as yourself, he was quoting from Leviticus 19:18. In order to fully understand what Jesus was saying about loving your neighbor, we need to understand the background for the text in Leviticus.
The Israelites were transitioning from a nomadic life to an agragarian life where they were producing abundant wealth. Think of people who win the lottery and go from poverty to wealth overnight. Most people pursue greed and lose everything. There is a real risk when we combine wealth with greed. It can cause complacency and even oppression. God gave a list of rules for treating their neighbors with fairness, including paying wages to workers on time and leaving grain on the edge of the fields for poor people and sojourners.
Loving your neighbor as yourself is known as “the Golden Rule.” When we love God above all else and love our neighbors by serving them and caring for the needy, the rest of the Law and Prophets will not be a burden. Loving your neighbor should not be a huge burden. If it is, we should check our heart to see what is hindering us from treating people the way that we would expect to be treated.