Starting with the ordination sermon to his apostles, and for the remainder of his earthly career, Jesus encouraged his would-be followers to raise the standard of love implied in the age old Jewish invocation to love our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus required his followers to manifest fatherly love.

   To the Jewish people of two thousand years ago, loving your neighbor had some quite clear lines of demarcation. The immediate neighbors of the Jews were the Samaritans, a people who by race, language, and even religious traditions, were closely related to the Jews. But the Jews despised the Samaritans. And the remainder of humanity, they classified as gentiles. They would not eat a meal with a gentile, nor even eat anything over which the shadow of a gentile had passed.

   But within the Jewish nation, the concept was applicable and appears to have had the connotation of the kind of love shared among members of extended families, a degree of tolerance usually somewhat above that extended to strangers at one end of the scale and sibling love at the other.

   Jesus raised the standard to, at its lowest, the kind of love expected from really good fathers to their children and at its best, the kind of love the heavenly Father, as revealed in the actual life of Jesus, extends to all of his earthly children. He raised the standard with these memorable words:

You well know the commandment which directs that you love one another; that you love your neighbor even as yourself. But I am not wholly satisfied with even that sincere devotion on the part of my children. I would have you perform still greater acts of love in the kingdom of the believing brotherhood. And so I give you this new commandment: That you love one another even as I have loved you. And by this will all men know that you are my disciples if you thus love one another. (1944)