<p>12:31 <i>The second is this: You shall love your neighbour as yourself- </i>This is indeed a challenge; not only to love ourselves, but to relate to our neighbour as to ourselves. It suggests a unique unity between us and our neighbour within the Israel of God. That humanly impossible unity is only achievable by loving the one God. To love God and our brother is all part of the same thing. It is indivisible; the two commandments are in fact one commandment in practice. To claim to love God but not love or even be involved with our brother means, therefore, that we don&rsquo;t actually love God. John makes this explicit in 1 Jn. 4:1, and much of the Lord&rsquo;s teaching does likewise. Yet our tendency is to isolate them, claiming to love God whilst ignoring our brother, and maintaining a strong sense of separation from him.</p><p><i>There is no other commandment greater than these</i>- Again, the Lord makes the point. They wanted&nbsp;<i>one</i>&nbsp;commandment isolated as the greatest, and He gave them two, with the further comment that &ldquo;all the law&rdquo;, all the others, hung equally upon those two. The spiritual way of life is not a case of isolating one or two commandments and keeping them, but rather living a spirit of life and thinking. Loving God and our neighbour are seamlessly united, although so many try to do one without the other. On the one extreme is the person who sits at home in splendid isolation with their love for God, on the other is the person who thinks that love for neighbour- some neighbours, anyway- is quite enough, and needs no underpinning in a love for God, which involves keeping His commandments.</p>