Mat 22:39 And the second [is] like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself.
Mat 22:40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

This second commandment highlights a point that is often overlooked about Christ's teaching. Christ never deals with people as abstract, ideal, or social entities. For him, the people who are important are the real, live, flesh and blood people that you come into contact with in your daily life. Christ does not expect you to love people as social classes or as "the masses" or as the faceless crowd. (The lyric from the song, Easy to Be Hard, in the musical HAIR captured this idea perfectly, "Do you only care about the bleeding crowd? How about a needy friend?")

Christ understood that we all sit at the center of our own universe. We don't have to worry about the fate of all people, everywhere. We just have to concern ourselves with the people who are physically around us. The term translated as "neighbor" here actually means "those nearby." In other words, we do not honor this second commandment by giving money to charity (not that this is bad) or voting for politicians who support welfare. If we think we are honoring our duty by these acts, we miss the point entirely.

Only God knows everyone and can make judgments about "the crowd." For God, the crowd is not faceless. He know every human being better than we know those who are close to us. However, when we try to see humanity from His perspective, we are only fooling ourselves. We can only generalize and our generalizations are based more on ignorance than understanding of the real needs of all people everywhere.

In this second verse, Christ makes the point that these two commandments (from entole, meaning "orders," "command," or "rules"), we get all of the rest of the law (from nomos, meaning "customs," "tradition," or the "law"). The Old Testament word for "law" is torah, which means not only "the law" but "the truth." So love of God and love of those around us is the basis for all the more detailed customs or laws that we create over time to enable us to live together. Both of these, the divine perspective and the personal perspective are needed.

What happens when we don't put the love of God first? One problem in modern law-making is that many people are trying to strip away one half of this historical foundation: that is, the love of God. If we make the rules only for the love of those close to us without a higher guide, only corruption results. By our nature, we cannot know the "faceless crowd" and our interpretation of "the common good" is always self-serving. The only way we can really act in the common good is to act based upon divine law, that is, the rules that God has written in each of us and that are captured in scripture.

Neighbor is from plêsios (plesion), which means "close," "near," and "one's neighbor."