Love your neighbour

Those who visited the Bible Study corner at the last First Sunday Thing saw how a text for the day appears in three different places in the Bible. 'Love your neighbour as yourself' is tucked away in an obscure corner of Leviticus, somewhere between the insightful 'don't spread slander' and the suprising 'don't wear clothing woven from two kinds of material'. But Jewish people in Jesus' time had already picked it out as a key verse in the Old Testament. So Jesus quotes it as a key text in Matthew's Gospel, and our reading for the last First Sunday Thing from the letter of James near the end of the New Testament does so too: 'if you really keep this royal law, you will do right'.