Christians around the world are celebrating the Resurrection today, but it is coming at a time when many of them have apparently forgotten what Jesus said were the greatest commandments.

When asked by the Pharisees, he said “Love the Lord your God” was the greatest commandment and the second most important was “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,”

The Rev. Dr. John Robert Black, my pastor at St. Luke-Simpson United Methodist Church, in a Maundy Thursday devotional emphasized how important that second commandment is for Christians year-round, not just on special occasions.

Jesus told his disciples after washing their feet, “And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

It’s not easy, of course, to love those who have offended you in some way. You may consider others as your enemies — I’ve made some over my long newspaper career — and loving them definitely isn’t easy, either. However, that is what Christians are supposed to do.

I ran into someone I had been critical of some years ago in the Sam’s parking lot recently, and he was extremely friendly. He initiated the welcome and it was a heart-warming experience for us both.

I was happy he hadn’t held a long-time grudge, but he may be an exception in the times in which we live.

“Why People Are Acting So Weird” is the title of a March 30 article by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic. She calls actor Will Smith’s slap of comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards “the most obvious recent weirdness.”

Khazan said a man was arrested in Atlanta after he punched a gate agent at the airport. The gate agent was about to punch him back, but a female colleague stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.

The coronavirus pandemic is to blame for much of what Khazan calls “disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct.” She said bad behavior of all kinds — everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence — has increased.

“Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates,” Khazan said. “Early 2021 saw the highest number of ‘unruly passenger’ incidents ever, according to the FAA.” Most of those are over mask mandates.

Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons because health care workers said their patients were behaving more violently. Khazan added that schools, too, are reporting an uptick in ‘disruptive behavior.’

“In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021,” Khazan said. Car thefts are up and carjackings are surging in various cities, she said.

Khazan asked, “What on earth is happening? How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them?” She got answers from more than a dozen experts.

A psychology professor at Stanford told her the pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations and everyone is teetering slightly closer to the breaking point. He said someone may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic.

Another psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay said, “Americans don’t really like each other very much right now.”

A business professor at Georgetown University said rudeness can be contagious and people who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else. She thinks people might be picking up rudeness from social media and passing it on.

People are drinking more, Khazan said, doing more drugs and buying guns. Because of the pandemic, kids stopped going to school, their parents stopped going to work, parishioners stopped going to church and people stopped gathering.

The pandemic is loosening its grip, she said, but improvement may be slow. However, she said experts think human interaction will eventually improve.

That’s because masks are coming off in most of the country, people are resuming normal gatherings, and kids have returned to school. “The rules and rhythms that kept America running smoothly are settling back into place,” Khazan said.

Let’s hope she and the experts the writer consulted are right. Meanwhile, it would help everyone to remember that second most important commandment — “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

On this Resurrection and Easter Sunday, we can also find great comfort in the words from that song by Bill Gaither, “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.”