Us versus them. It is one of the oldest sentences the human heart knows how to say, older than language, certainly older than scripture. Us is the circle drawn warm and close, the people whose grief is our grief, whose children we would run into a burning house to save. Them is everyone on the far side, the ones we have decided, somewhere below conscious thought, we are allowed not to love. Tribe and tribe. Nation and nation. The people who pray the way we pray and the people who do not. We did not invent this; we inherited it, the way you inherit the color of your eyes. It goes so deep that most of the time we mistake it for common sense, for the plain way the world is arranged. There is us. There is them. Everybody knows that. And then a man came walking out of Galilee, dust on his feet, and said the single strangest thing anyone had ever said about it, a thing so strange that two thousand years later we still have not really begun to believe he meant it.
He said: Love your…