A Sentence Heard at Mass

On Sunday, my wife and I attended Mass. The second reading came from Romans 13:8–10, where Paul recalls several familiar commandments: do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, and do not covet. He then gathers them into one sentence: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

The sentence sounds disarmingly direct. Commandments usually appear as boundaries that tell us what we must or must not do. They provide standards for examining our own behavior, but we also use them to evaluate the conduct of others. Once a rule has been established, it becomes possible to identify who has followed it, who has broken it, and who deserves correction.

Paul then takes this entire structure and places it under the command to love. He does not say that the commandments are unnecessary. He says that they are fulfilled through love. The many instructions reach their purpose when we learn to recognize another person’s life, dignity, and well-being as seriously as we recognize our own.

This becomes more surprising when we consider how moral and intellectual knowledge often operates in practice. Laws can become grounds for accusation. Religious teachings can divide the righteous from the unrighteous. Political principles can separate allies from enemies. Academic knowledge can give authority to those who possess it and place those who do not in an inferior position. Knowledge is power, but power can protect, educate, control, or injure.

The words heard during Mass therefore carried a challenge extending far beyond personal kindness. If every commandment is fulfilled in loving one’s neighbor, then love must govern how knowledge is interpreted, applied, and communicated. A moral truth that becomes permission to humiliate another person has been separated from the purpose Paul gives it.

The Unexpected Center of the Law

Paul did not invent the command to love one’s neighbor, nor was he quoting only a teaching that began with Jesus. The sentence comes from Leviticus 19:18. Jesus later identifies it, together with love for God, as one of the two greatest commandments. Paul returns to the same words because they reveal something already present within the law.

This continuity matters. Christianity is sometimes described as though the Old Testament offered only rules and punishment, while Jesus arrived with an entirely different message of love. Such a contrast misrepresents both traditions. The law was given within a covenant between God and Israel. The commandments taught a liberated people how to live with God and with one another. Justice, protection of the vulnerable, responsibility, and mercy were already woven into that relationship.

Jesus did not abolish this moral structure. He brought its deepest purpose into clearer view. The prohibition against murder protects the neighbor’s life. The prohibition against theft protects the neighbor’s possessions and livelihood. The prohibition against adultery protects trust and fidelity. The prohibition against coveting confronts the desire to possess what belongs to another. Love does not float above these commands as a pleasant feeling. It gives them their direction.

Paul’s phrase “the fulfillment of the law” is therefore more demanding than it first appears. Fulfillment requires more than technical compliance. A person might refrain from stealing while exploiting someone through lawful means. Another might avoid physical violence while damaging a person’s reputation. Someone might memorize every religious requirement while treating those who fail with contempt. Outward compliance can coexist with a heart trained in superiority.

Paul had already explored this contradiction in Romans 7. The law is good, yet sin can seize the commandment and turn it toward death. Something intended to guide human conduct can become material for pride, fear, rebellion, or condemnation. The problem does not lie in knowledge itself. It arises from the human capacity to appropriate knowledge for purposes opposed to the good that knowledge was meant to serve.

That is where Paul’s summary becomes both a warning and a safeguard. Love is not one commandment placed beside the others. It is the standard by which their interpretation and application must be tested. If our use of a moral rule destroys concern for the person before us, we may be defending the wording of the law while betraying its fulfillment.

How Righteousness Manufactures Enemies

Rigorism is one expression of a wider human tendency. The same structure appears in religion, political ideology, professional culture, academic debate, and ordinary social life. We begin with a belief that something is right. Over time, that belief can become evidence that we ourselves belong among the right people.

Rules then produce a hierarchy. When we believe we have followed them, we feel superior to those who have not. When we fail, we may feel inferior, ashamed, or tempted to conceal what happened. We can occupy both positions at different times, looking down on one person while fearing the judgment of another. Legalism does not create only proud people and humiliated people. It moves each of us between pride and humiliation, depending on where we stand in relation to the rule.

The hierarchy becomes more severe when righteousness joins identity. A political opinion is no longer an argument we hold but proof of what kind of person we are. A religious doctrine becomes evidence of our faithfulness. A professional standard confirms our competence. Disagreement then feels larger than disagreement. It threatens our intelligence, community, history, and moral worth.

Once this transformation occurs, those who oppose us cease to appear as neighbors who understand the world differently. They become representatives of ignorance, corruption, danger, or evil. Correcting them begins to feel like a duty. The more certain we become of our righteousness, the less restraint we feel in exercising that duty.

Good intentions offer little protection against this danger. People who harass, shame, or attack others often believe that they are educating them, defending society, protecting victims, or resisting injustice. Intention remains morally relevant, but it cannot justify every method chosen in its name. We must also examine the conduct itself, its effects, its proportionality, and the possibility it gives another person to respond.

A correction offered in love seeks recognition, responsibility, and restoration. An attack disguised as correction seeks submission, exclusion, or defeat. Both may use the language of truth and justice, but they move toward different ends. One keeps the wrongdoer within the circle of human concern. The other uses wrongdoing to remove the person from it.

Jesus’ command to love our enemies exposes the hidden movement behind this exclusion. An enemy is not a different kind of human being. An enemy is a neighbor whom we have come to fear, oppose, or condemn. Love does not require us to agree with that person or excuse harmful behavior. It refuses the conclusion that error has cancelled their dignity.

The Intelligence That Cannot Yield

We often expect educated people to avoid these failures. A professor, philosopher, theologian, or political thinker has spent years studying society, ethics, history, and human behavior. Such people should recognize contradictions, understand competing perspectives, and appreciate the dangers of dogmatism. Yet intellectual ability does not guarantee the ability to examine oneself.

Knowing about humility differs from becoming humble. A person can explain prejudice while remaining vulnerable to prejudice. Someone can teach critical thinking while reacting defensively to criticism. A scholar can analyze systems of domination while using institutional authority to silence others. Knowledge can illuminate our failures, but it can also help us hide them behind better arguments.

Intelligence expands our capacity for reasoning and rationalization at the same time. A person with limited argumentative skill may deny a mistake in a few sentences. A trained intellectual can surround the same denial with historical background, conceptual distinctions, theoretical references, and qualifications. Each new layer makes the defense appear more sophisticated without making the person more correctable.

The role of the apologist contains a related danger. There is nothing inherently dishonest about offering a reasoned defense of a religious tradition, political philosophy, or moral position. Serious beliefs deserve serious articulation. Trouble begins when the role permits no genuine possibility of revision. If every challenge must be defeated, knowledge ceases to be a means of discovery and becomes an arsenal for protecting the conclusion already chosen.

Prestige can reinforce that pattern. Students and junior colleagues may hesitate to challenge a respected authority. Admirers interpret mistakes generously, while ideological opponents are dismissed as hostile or uninformed. The intellectual receives praise from allies and aggression from enemies, but little trusted correction from people whose judgment carries both honesty and care. The higher the status, the easier it becomes to mistake a defended position for a defensible one.

The recent controversy involving Yuki Honda, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Education whose specialty is the sociology of education, provides one visible example. She has also expressed public support for the Japanese Communist Party and regularly comments on political affairs. None of these facts disqualifies her from political expression. Academics are citizens, and their expertise does not require political neutrality.

The controversy arose after Honda quoted a post concerning Princess Akiko of Mikasa and the family of Taro Aso, a veteran politician from the conservative Liberal Democratic Party who served as Japan’s prime minister from 2008 to 2009. For readers outside Japan, the connection between the political and imperial families is significant. Princess Akiko’s mother, Princess Nobuko, was born into the Aso family and is Taro Aso’s sister, making Princess Akiko his niece. The quoted discussion treated this family relationship as politically relevant in debates about imperial institutions and public funding.

In her original post, Honda referred to the frightening nature of “genetic factors.” Critics argued that the wording attached a negative judgment to heredity or bloodline and therefore carried discriminatory or eugenic implications. One public statement by an education scholar requested a withdrawal and explanation while explicitly rejecting harassment, collective denunciation, and efforts to punish her through organized pressure.

Honda later explained that she had intended to refer to blood relationships, political connections, and the possibility of preferential treatment, not to inherited appearance, personality, or ability. She also characterized the damaging interpretations of her words as distortions. Her explanation provides relevant context, but intention does not settle every question. Public communication also creates responsibility for wording that reasonably conveys meanings the speaker says were unintended.

It would be easy to treat the episode as poetic justice because Honda has often used confrontational language against political opponents. That reaction would reproduce the very structure under examination. If critics enjoy seeing her humiliated because she previously attacked others, moral criticism has again become permission for cruelty. The case deserves scrutiny, but it should not turn Honda herself into a target whose dignity no longer matters.

Her situation is valuable for reflection precisely because it does not belong to one ideological camp. Conservatives, progressives, religious believers, secular activists, and political leaders all become vulnerable to the same pattern. The content changes, but the movement remains recognizable: knowledge joins identity, identity resists correction, and resistance generates further words intended to preserve righteousness.

The Blindness Within Religious Knowledge

The Christian tradition has long recognized this danger through its accounts of Jesus’ conflicts with the Pharisees. Those passages must be approached with historical care. The Pharisees were not a single group of foolish hypocrites, and Christians should not turn a complex Jewish movement into a convenient symbol of everything wrong with religion. Pharisaic traditions contributed greatly to Jewish life, and Paul himself identified as a Pharisee.

Jesus’ criticism addresses a spiritual tendency that can arise in any community. Religious knowledge becomes a source of status. Those who possess it gain the power to define faithfulness, identify transgression, and impose burdens. The person trained to observe the smallest failure in others may lose the capacity to recognize the same disorder within himself.

The image of the speck and the plank captures this condition. We see another person’s error with sharp precision while remaining blind to the structure of judgment through which we are seeing it. Greater knowledge can sharpen our view of the speck without helping us notice the plank. Expertise then increases confidence while reducing self-awareness.

Paul expresses the danger in one concise sentence: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). He does not reject knowledge. His own letters display formidable learning, intellectual discipline, and argumentative ability. He rejects knowledge that enlarges the self without strengthening the community.

First Corinthians 13 extends the warning. Paul imagines someone capable of understanding mysteries and possessing extraordinary knowledge. Without love, he says, that person is nothing. Intellectual achievement can explain moral truth without embodying it. Religious learning can describe love while leaving the learner governed by pride.

The danger affects not only public intellectuals or religious professionals. Anyone who learns the language of justice, trauma, discrimination, doctrine, psychology, or social responsibility can use that language to illuminate suffering or to gain advantage in conflict. New knowledge gives us new ways to recognize harm, but it also gives us new accusations to direct against people we dislike.

Christian maturity therefore cannot be measured by how many errors we can identify in others. It appears in our increasing willingness to receive correction, especially when correction threatens the identity we have built around being knowledgeable, righteous, or helpful. The capacity to say “I was wrong” is not a failure of intelligence. It is evidence that intelligence remains answerable to truth.

The Cross and the Collapse of Righteousness

The Cross reveals where enemy-making can lead. Jesus becomes the object of religious accusation, political calculation, institutional authority, and public hostility. It would be inaccurate to say that everyone agreed to crucify him. His followers, sympathetic listeners, and others did not form a unanimous community of rejection. Yet a powerful convergence of authorities and a mobilized crowd transformed him into someone whose death could be presented as necessary.

Different forms of knowledge contributed to that judgment. Religious leaders possessed interpretations of law and tradition. Roman authorities understood political control and public order. The crowd responded to accusation, fear, and collective pressure. Each element had its own logic, but together they created a situation in which an innocent person could be condemned while participants believed they were defending something important.

The Crucifixion shows that human beings do not require openly evil intentions to commit terrible acts. They can act cruelly while invoking law, security, loyalty, order, or faithfulness. Once a person has been designated an enemy, knowledge supplies reasons why ordinary moral concern no longer applies.

Jesus had already commanded his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecuted them. On the Cross, that teaching ceases to be an inspiring ideal spoken from safety. Christ enters the place occupied by the condemned enemy and refuses to answer hostility with the same hostility. The one treated as a threat continues to seek reconciliation.

The relationship between God and humanity is revealed through that act. God does not remain above the world issuing commands while protected from their cost. In Christ, God enters human vulnerability. The Lawgiver is treated as an offender when religious accusation and imperial punishment converge. Instead of destroying those who reject him, Christ bears rejection and continues to offer love.

The Cross therefore serves as both judgment and revelation. It judges our capacity to turn truth, law, and authority into mechanisms of death. It reveals a divine love that does not withdraw when humanity becomes hostile. Paul later writes in Romans 5 that reconciliation comes while human beings are still enemies. God does not wait for humanity to become lovable before loving it.

Our inability to fulfill the law through love does not make love irrelevant. It shows why grace is necessary. The Christian life is not the achievement of people who have placed themselves permanently among the righteous. It is the continuing formation of people who know they can become accusers, defenders, deserters, or members of the crowd, and who still receive the invitation to return.

Remaining a Neighbor in an Age of Attack

Social media places this spiritual problem inside an environment designed for speed, visibility, and reaction. Platforms such as X reward concise certainty more readily than patient qualification. A severe judgment travels faster than a careful question. Public loyalty to one’s group attracts approval, while reconsideration can be treated as weakness or betrayal.

Discussion then becomes performance. People stop speaking to the person they address and begin speaking before an audience of allies. The opponent serves as material through which the speaker demonstrates courage, intelligence, or moral purity. Articles, statistics, historical references, and theories become ammunition. Knowledge expands, but understanding recedes.

The cycle becomes self-sustaining. One person attacks in the name of justice. Another responds in the name of accountability. Supporters gather on both sides, extract older statements, and add further accusations. Each group experiences itself as correcting cruelty while interpreting the other group’s conduct as proof of corruption. Everyone claims the moral necessity of speaking, but few remain available to listen.

Mindfulness can interrupt this movement by creating space between reaction and expression. Before posting, we can notice whether we are angry, afraid, eager for approval, or pleased by another person’s humiliation. We can ask whether we are addressing an action or reducing an entire person to that action. We can consider whether we would use the same standard if the speaker belonged to our own political or religious community.

Yet attention alone does not determine how we should act. Christian mindfulness receives its direction from love. It asks whether our words preserve the other person’s dignity, whether they leave room for response, and whether they seek correction rather than defeat. It also asks whether we remain prepared to discover that our own interpretation is incomplete.

Love does not prohibit strong disagreement. Some actions must be confronted, some falsehoods corrected, and some abuses restrained. Refusing to condemn a person as worthless is not the same as refusing to judge conduct. Accountability protects human dignity when it treats both the harmed person and the wrongdoer as moral agents rather than objects to be used by opposing camps.

The Gospel reading accompanying Romans 13:8–10, Matthew 18:15–20, offers a demanding model. Jesus tells his disciples to approach a person privately first, then widen the conversation only when necessary. The aim is to regain a brother or sister. Contemporary public life often reverses this order. We expose someone before thousands of strangers, invite collective judgment, and only later ask whether a conversation was possible.

Returning to Paul’s sentence, its force now becomes clearer. “Love your neighbor as yourself” does not remove the need for moral knowledge. It prevents that knowledge from becoming a license to abandon the person it was meant to protect. It reminds the confident that they can fail, the ashamed that failure does not erase dignity, and the corrector that correction must remain open to being corrected.

The neighbor is not limited to the person who shares our beliefs or receives our advice gratefully. The neighbor includes the person whose arguments frustrate us, whose ideology we oppose, and whose conduct we believe deserves criticism. An enemy is often a neighbor obscured by the knowledge through which we have classified them.

The words I heard at Mass sounded like a summary of the commandments. They were also a warning about what human beings can do with commandments once love is removed. Knowledge can identify wrongdoing, explain its history, and construct a compelling case against the wrongdoer. Its final test, however, is whether we can still recognize the person before us.

The deepest purpose of moral knowledge is not to tell us whom we may cease to love. It is to teach us how to remain a neighbor, even when we believe the other person is wrong.

Photo by Bill Nino on Unsplash