". . . as you love yourself."
If Jesus were pastoring in a mainline, Protestant church today and was asked the same question scribes and scholars ask in Mark 12.28-31, I think he’d omit the “. . . as you love yourself” part. Not because its outdated or bad advice, don’t get me wrong, but because the life of pastor, the life of a minister, the life of anyone in a helping profession proves time and time again to be too demanding, too time consuming, too filled with need and pain of others to ever take time to focus on ourselves. Jesus would know this. He’d know Mondays are administrative days where we look at the week, schedule meetings, upload the Podcast from yesterday’s sermon, make plans to implement the new children’s curriculum, run a church staff meeting, catch up with what the parishioners are saying on Facebook, respond to the twenty-five emails, get a volunteer to fill in for Mother’s Day Out, correspond with the secretary, update the prayer concern list, order new lapel...