He wants practical and therefore concrete love

The person who needs me here and now

Jesus however is not interested in universal, theoretical or poetical love. For him love does not consist primarily in words, sentiments or feelings.  For him love means primarily the great, courageous deed.  He wants practical and therefore concrete love.  Hence our second answer to the question on love must be stated more precisely:  according to Jesus, love is not simply love of man but essentially love of neighbor.  It is a love, not of man in general, of someone remote, with whom we are not personally involved, but quite concretely of one's immediate neighbor.  Love of God is proved in love of neighbor, and in fact love of neighbor is the exact yardstick of love of God.  I love God only as much as I love my neighbor.  

And how much love shall I give my neighbor?  Jesus recalls an isolated formula from the Old Testament - referring however only to the members of one's own nation - and answers forthrightly, and without any qualification; as yourself.  It is an obvious answer and, for Jesus, at once covers everything without more ado:  it leaves no loopholes for excuses or subterfuges and at the same time lays down the direction and measure of love.  It is assumed that man loves himself.  And it is just this obvious attitude of man toward himself which should be the measure - in practice beyond measure - of love of neighbor.  I know only too well what I owe myself and I am no less aware of what others owe me.  In everything that we think say and feel, do and suffer, we tend quite naturally to protect, shield, advance ourselves, to cherish ourselves.  And now we are expected to give exactly the same care and attention to our neighbor.  With this all reserves are broken down.  For us, who are egoists by nature, it means a radical conversion;  to  accept the other person's standpoint;  to give the other exactly what we think is due to ourselves; to treat our fellow man as we wish to be treated by him.  As Jesus himself shows, this certainly does not mean any feebleness or softness, any renunciation of self-confidence, any annihilation of self in devout meditation or strenuous asceticism in the Buddhist or supposedly Christian sense.  But it certainly does mean the orientation of ourselves toward others;  an alertness, an openness, a receptivity to our fellow man, in readiness to to help without reserve.  It means living not for ourselves, but for others;  in this - from the standpoint of the person who loves - is rooted the indissoluble unity of undivided love of God and love of neighbor. 

Hans Kung:  On Being A Christian Man's Cause: Action

It is worth asking what the past two millennia would have been like if the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels that sum that up had been the governing principle of the lives of Christians, what today would be like if it were, in fact, the governing principle of societies and the governments chosen by the people of such societies.  It is worth asking what the reputation of Christianity would be, today, if that had been the actual character of Christianity in history, if the "Christian churches" had held to that instead of the various other obsessions with creeds, dogmas, doctrines, power, adherence to other rules and the enforcement of those.  It would be worth asking if the conversion of others to belief in Christ would have been worth more if that had been based in an admiration of that conduct and character instead of political-military-fear-based conversion.  

One of the current debates within Christianity that interests me is the fury of many orthodox Christians in the West and in places where Western Christianity predominates at the resurgence of a belief in the universal salvation of all people, even the worst of us after a period of intensive correction, perhaps.  The rage is often, ironically, focused on those influenced by the Orthodox theologians of the late classical and later periods who have made convincing arguments for exactly that universal salvation being the teaching of Jesus.   The American philosopher-theologian David Bentley Hart is the focus of a lot of that rage, some of it among those who used to publish him - though he left those venues over political differences before this latest phase started.  Hart, a scholar of the ancient Greek language and literature, pagan as well as Christian, has translated the New Testament correcting some of the ancient Latin mis-translations that have persisted and intensified, especially as the Calvinist Reformed tradition  and the persistent Catholic heresy of Jansenism have valued the most appalling interpretations of those mis-translations in its infamous predestinarian-original-sin-eternal-damnation theology,  the obviously relished contemplation of even jillions of unbaptized, otherwise innocent babies roasting for an unlimited eternity in hell, not to mention we, the guilty, for the quite limited sins we are ignorantly and weakly capable of committing in our time on Earth.  Creating the god that is the entirely understandable focus of so many an atheists non-belief and their fundamentalists furious insistence that if you believe in God, that's the god you must believe in.  

I think the theory of Hart about this as the inadequate, all too human conception of God in terms of a European king has a lot of explanatory power,  attributing the worst of human character, of the means of exercising and demonstrating all too worldly human power as it is wielded by those most respected of gangsters.  

I think that discrepancy between the conception of God as the most ruthlessly cruel, all powerful, of all-too-human autocrat and the God who Jesus and the Jewish tradition says we are to love with all of our being may explain just about everything in why egalitarian democracy - the opposite political system to such monarchical- gangster autocracy - comes from the teachings of Jesus, the most radical of interpretations of the Jewish justice teachings which, as a Marxist-atheist philosopher has noted, has been nourished by no alternative substance thorough the modern even today in the post-modern periods.  It also explains how, even during the period of most strenuous profession of Christianity, actual egalitarian democracy is far, far more the exception than the rule.  You have to, as Kung notes, make that Christian requirement of love real in reality, not in words.  You have to do it and the all too human temptation is to find reasons to not do it, to ignore the most central teaching of the Gospels, the Epistles, Acts, the Law and the Prophets.