How do we understand the "...as yourself" in the "love your neighbor..."?

Sometimes the commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31) is understood as implying that you should also love yourself, or that you cannot love others if you do not love yourself first.

Hence the  door is opened for a mediocre bourgeois morality: I cannot love others if I don't love myself first, which means I at least need a place to live, a good bed, food on the table, a job, a car, and... The result is that we forget our neighbor.


Or even worse: To love yourself, we hear, means doing what is good and natural for you, and so on. Hence the gates are opened for a flood of moralism. Loving others as yourself, we are told, means having a certain lifestyle in compliance with God's plan "for you", nature or whatever.

But.

First, the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself should be considered identical to the Golden Rule ("do unto others as you would have others do unto you", Matt. 7:12). In this there is no "love yourself". Rather it means putting yourself in the place of others, seeing yourself in the other. In this sense, to "love your neighbor as yourself" means loving your neighbor as if your neighbor were you, or as if you were in the shoes of your neighbor.

Second, the understanding of love in the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself should be understood from the cross. Christ's self-sacrificial love was a love that was ready to give up itself completely. Christ did not "love" himself, in the sense of seeking to uphold a decent way of life, human happiness, or whatever. Instead he gave up these things for the sake of others.

This is not to say that Christians are obliged to be self-destructive, and so on, but only that the commandment to love others is not simultaneously a commandment to love yourself. If there are ways of loving others that does not imply self-destructive behavior, these should of course be preferred.

It is not because we love ourselves first, that we can love others. It is because God has loved us first, that we can love others. You should, of course, not hate yourself. That would be contrary to God, who loves you! But your love for yourself has nothing to do with the commandment to love others.

No personal morality follows from the commandment to love others. The law of love, the Golden Rule, the commandment to love others, etc., is also the law of freedom (Jam 1:25). Why? Because we are freed from ourselves while at the same time set free to decide for ourselves what is right. Knowing the meaning of "do unto others what you would want..." implies knowing what you want. We decide that ourselves. We are that free.