You Cannot Love Your Neighbor While Empowering Their Oppressor

Love is not neutral.

To love someone is to stand with them, advocate for their dignity, and resist the forces that harm them. Yet, in the name of civility, balance, or even faith, we sometimes find ourselves attempting to love our neighbors while simultaneously upholding the very systems, leaders, or ideologies that cause them harm. This contradiction is not just unhelpful, it is unjust.

Love that seeks to be neutral is not love at all. It becomes a quiet accomplice to injustice.

Redefining How We Love

When Jesus was asked, "Who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29), it was an attempt to limit love, to create boundaries around who deserved care and who did not.

But Jesus did not answer with a definition, He answered with a story, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In doing so, He shifted the focus from Who do I have to love? to How do I love?

Jesus showed it is not about determining who qualifies, it is about embodying love wherever suffering is found.

At the end of the story, Jesus asks, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" (Luke 10:36).
The answer is clear. Being a neighbor is about crossing boundaries, dismantling prejudices, and choosing mercy over indifference.

The weight of Jesus’ teaching echoes the voice of the prophets.

Throughout Scripture, God confronts those who perform religious rituals but ignore the suffering of their neighbors like the priest and the Levite. In Amos, God declares, "I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies... Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them" (Amos 5:21–22). Instead, God calls for something deeper: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24).

Neighborly love, according to Jesus and the prophets, is not sentimental, it is sacrificial.

This redefinition challenges us to move beyond passive concern and into active, costly care. It demands that we cross lines of fear, prejudice, and self-preservation to bind wounds, bear burdens, and embody mercy.

So ask yourself, “Who is my neighbor?”.

Love Requires Action

Love is not merely an emotion, it is an active commitment to the well-being of others. When we profess love for our neighbors, that love must be evident in our choices, not just in our feelings or words.

It is not love to comfort the afflicted while enabling the afflicter.
It is not love to pray for the oppressed while endorsing the policies, practices, or individuals who perpetuate their suffering.

Love without justice is sentimentality at best and complicity at worst.

If we desire to love well, we must recognize that love demands something from us. It demands that we refuse to live with comfortable contradictions. It demands that our lives align with the dignity and freedom of our neighbors.

The Myth of Neutrality

There is a persistent temptation to believe that in moments of injustice, we can remain neutral, holding a place of harmony above all else. But neutrality in the face of oppression is a myth.

To prioritize peace over justice is to side with the oppressor.

Silence, when injustice is present, is not benign, it is a choice to protect the status quo.

History offers painful testimony to this reality.
When churches remained silent during the Civil Rights Movement, their neutrality became a shield for injustice.
When citizens looked away during the rise of authoritarian regimes, their neutrality empowered harm.
Even today, when policies marginalize the vulnerable and voices go quiet in the name of “not getting political,” neutrality becomes an agent of harm.

Love requires clarity.

When systems wound our neighbors, when leaders weaponize power against the vulnerable, love cannot shrug its shoulders and call itself neutral. Love must see. Love must speak. Love must move.

Discomfort is Not the Enemy

If we are willing to examine our lives through the lens of love and justice, we will encounter discomfort.

This discomfort is not a sign we are doing something wrong, it is often a sign we are waking up.

It is uncomfortable to confront complicity.
It is uncomfortable to acknowledge when we have been silent too long.
It is uncomfortable to imagine sacrificing our privilege for the good of another.

But if our love is only willing to travel as far as our comfort will allow, it is not love in the way of Christ.

True love pushes beyond comfort toward transformation.

The Cost of Love in Our Relationships

Choosing courageous love will often place us in conflict not only with systems of injustice, but with people we know and care for. It may cause tension with family, friends, mentors, or leaders. It may make us vulnerable to misunderstanding, rejection, or loss.

But love does not excuse us from care, even when it costs us security. True neighborly love calls us to act with both conviction and compassion, to resist injustice without surrendering to bitterness, and to care for those who cause us discomfort without allowing harm to persist unchecked.

Our vulnerability is not an excuse to abandon love, it is an invitation to embody it more deeply.

What Loving Our Neighbor Looks Like in Practice

If we are serious about loving our neighbors in a way that resists oppression, it will demand tangible, uncomfortable, courageous steps.

Love that resists oppression requires:

Examining Our Own Influence — Are our votes, purchases, affiliations, or social connections reinforcing systems of harm?
Love asks us to reflect on the ripple effects of our decisions, and when needed, to change them.

Using Our Privilege for Justice — If we have a voice, a platform, or access to power, we must leverage them on behalf of those whose voices are too often silenced.
Love does not hoard influence, it shares and surrenders it for the sake of others.

Refusing to Normalize Harm — It is not enough to feel sorrow over injustice, we must name it.
Calling out injustice, even when it is inconvenient or costly, is a form of love.

Investing in Change — Love compels us to invest, not only emotionally, but practically.
Supporting policies, leaders, and organizations that dismantle oppression is an essential expression of neighborly love.

These are not one-time actions but ongoing postures of heart, mind, and life.

Neighborly love becomes real in the patterns of our living, not merely in the moments of our feeling.

A Call to Courageous Love

Justice is love in action.

Loving our neighbor is not simply about kindness, it is about costly commitment.

It is about friendship over distance, mercy over judgment, and sacrifice over self-protection.

Courageous love moves us beyond advocacy into real relationship, where mutual care and shared struggle dissolve the barriers between "us" and "them."
It draws us into proximity with those who suffer.
It teaches us that liberation must be mutual, or it will not be full.

Love, in the end, is not safe.

It will ask more of us than we wanted to give.
It will cost us reputation, comfort, certainty, and power.

But in that surrender, we will find the deeper life we were made for, the life where justice and mercy walk hand in hand.

The work of love is not finished.

It begins again, with every choice we make.

The choice before us is whether love exists for our comfort or the lives of our neighbors.

Reflection Prompts

1. What vulnerable group are you scared to publicly advocate for?
2. Where might you be valuing your social preservation over the lives of others?