– Luke chapter six.
I regard these words as the most sublime ethical teaching ever given, perhaps this is just confirmation bias on my part, but for several years now, I’ve periodically posted a challenge on social media, inviting sceptical friends to find a block of teaching from anywhere in the pre-modern world that matches Christ’s emphasis on love and mercy towards everyone, including enemies. The challenge hasn’t yet been met, but perhaps that’s more of my bias. I’m not suggesting Jesus was the only moral teacher from antiquity to put love at the centre of ethics. It certainly wasn’t emphasised by the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the Romans, but love did feature in Jewish ethics. The Jewish scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, enjoined things like love your neighbour as yourself, Leviticus 19:18. In context, this instruction is just one of 613 commandments of the Old Testament.
On another occasion, it happened that a certain heathen came before Shamai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shamai drove him out with the builders qubit (a big stick) which he had in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he made him a proselyte. He said to him, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.”
Hillel’s ‘what is hateful to you do not do to your neighbour’ is similar to Jesus teaching, ‘do unto others, as you would have them do to you.’ Jesus’ saying seems like an intensification of Hillel’s saying. We don’t just avoid doing what is hateful to others, according to Jesus we do the good to others that we ourselves would like done for us.
The revered Jewish scholar, Professor David Fluser of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem memorably wrote about how Jesus intensified Jewish traditions. Those who listened to Jesus preaching of love, Fluser writes, might well have been moved by it. Many in those days would have agreed with him. Nonetheless, in the clear purity of his love, they must have detected something very special. Jesus did not accept all that was thought and taught in the Judaism of his time. Although not really a Pharisee himself, he was closest to the Pharisees of the school of Hillel who preached love, but he pointed the way further to unconditional love even of one’s enemies and of sinners. This, Fluser concludes, was no sentimental teaching.
Fluser goes on to make the crucial point that Jesus not only intensified an already existing Jewish emphasis on love, but that he presented this intensification as an extension of his own life and mission. Fluser writes, it was not simply his total way of life that urged Jesus to express loving devotion to sinners. This inclination was deeply linked with the purpose of his message. From the beginning, until his death on the cross, the preaching of Jesus was in turn linked to his own way of life.
Fluser isn’t doing theology, he was Jewish, not Christian. He’s just making an historical observation. Love of enemies was central to Christ’s teaching, not as an arbitrary moral innovation, but as a reflection of the entire course of his life.
The narrative of all four New Testament gospels inches inexorably towards Jesus’ self sacrifice, the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus get roughly the same space in the gospels as the Sermon on the Mount, about 2000 words. This is where the love of enemies finds its clearest expression. Jesus willingly gave his life on a cross, not as a matter for accords, but as a saviour taking the place of sinners.
By John Dickson
God's War II
Want to hear the rest of the episode?
Check out episode 42: “God’s War II”
