2a The Christian Life Means Loving Your Neighbor
Stand Firm: Living in a Post-Christian Culture • Sermon • Submitted
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“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Leaning on Tradition, Losing the Truth
Leaning on Tradition, Losing the Truth
Throughout Matthew 5, Christ repeatedly employs a phrase to introduce a new point of discussion. Over and over, Jesus uses some variation of His words in Matthew 5: 43, “You have heard that it was said.” This brief introduction was used to identify the prevailing tradition that dominated Judaism at the time. It was a familiar phrase, used in rabbinical teaching to introduce doctrine and tradition that had been passed down through Israel’s history. However, in the mouth of the Lord, it was a subtle way to differentiate Israel’s low, defective theology from the truth of Scripture and the clear teaching of God’s law. He was effectively alerting His audience that the following statement did not represent God or the Old Testament— it simply reflected the Jewish tradition.
In this case, the rabbinical teaching was a poor and misleading paraphrase of God’s commandment in:
“You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
Comparing these two scriptures, what is missing?
Comparing this to the words of Leviticus, it’s clear that the rabbis had made some alterations. To begin with, they left off the final two words of the original command (“ as yourself ”), a convenient omission.
It’s possible— perhaps even likely— that the rabbis and scribes were simply too proud to tolerate the implications of loving anyone else as much as they loved themselves. Remember, these were the same hypocrites Jesus was about to single out for their arrogance and their love for the praise of men. “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. . . . When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men” (Matt. 6: 2, 5). Even their acts of piety and devotion were staged to draw maximum attention back onto themselves. And although the command to love others the way they loved themselves was unmistakably part of God’s law, the prospect of obeying it would have been offensive in the extreme. Such equal love for others would have been an affront to their high view of their own spiritual status. For Israel’s religious elite, loving those they considered beneath them as though they were equals would have been inconceivable.
The fact is that it isn’t easy for any of us to love someone else as thoroughly as we love ourselves. Our love for ourselves is unfeigned, fervent, habitual, and permanent. It generally respects and prioritizes all our needs, wants, desires, hopes, and ambitions. It consistently promotes our well-being. It does everything possible to secure our own happiness and satisfaction, protect our own welfare, produce our own comfort, and meet all our own interests. It seeks our own pleasure and fulfillment, and it knows no limit of effort to secure all of these things. Scripture says that is exactly how we are to love our neighbor. But Israel’s religious elite left that out, reducing “love your neighbor” to something less than such consummate devotion.
Worse still, the rabbis and scribes had narrowed the definition of “neighbor” to exclude virtually everyone but themselves. That meant the command didn’t apply to social pariahs like the tax gatherers, who had betrayed their fellow Jews by siding with Rome and extorting their countrymen through excessive taxation. In the eyes of the Pharisees, even sharing a meal with such villains was enough to call your character into question (Matt. 9: 11). In the same way, the Jews believed that the command to love one’s neighbor did not apply to adulterers, criminals, and other overt sinners (cf. Luke 18: 11). Naturally, it excluded all gentiles. In fact, the narrow definition of “neighbor” even left out many of the common folk throughout Israel— for the most part, the religious leaders had nothing but disdain for their fellow Jews. Such exclusivity only served to further feed their prideful, evil hearts.
But it wasn’t enough to redact God’s instructions and deny vast swaths of the population “neighbor” status— the rabbinical tradition had also added a clause to the command. Christ’s quote of their teaching indicates that they tacked on a spurious phrase: “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy” (Matt. 5: 43). The law of Leviticus did not have any such limitations. It said nothing about who was considered a neighbor. It didn’t separate gentiles or sort out people of a lower socioeconomic status. The divisions the rabbis and scribes were creating and enforcing had no biblical basis whatsoever. In other words, they legitimized antipathy, enmity, and hatred for others by shoehorning it into their theological tradition. Worse, they equated their sinful, self-serving addition with God’s Word. In other words they used the Scripture to try and support their unloving and ungodly traditions.
In fact, their teaching overtly contradicted God’s law. Leviticus 19: 34
You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
Furthermore, Exodus 12: 49 says,
There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.”
God’s law did not change from person to person. It was not limited by ethnic or geographical lines. It set a fixed standard that applied equally to both the Jews and the gentiles in their midst. But the religious elite had conveniently ignored that too.
In order to understand just how deeply this was entrenched, one needs to look at the literature of the time. If you read any of the Essene literature— the Qumran community where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found— you find statements like “Love all that [God] has chosen and hate all that He has rejected.” We also find the exhortation to “love all the sons of light, each according to his lot in God’s design, and hate all the sons of darkness.” For such an exclusive religious sect, that could mean all non-Essenes— that’s how isolationist they had become. Across the scope of first-century Judaism, the idea of loving your neighbor had really become a license to hate. One of the maxims of the Pharisees in those days was, “If a Jew sees a gentile fallen into the sea, let him by no means lift him out, for it is written, ‘You shall not rise up against the blood of your neighbor,’ but this man is not your neighbor.” Through their reckless reinterpretation of God’s law, they could make a case for allowing a gentile to drown. They had effectively canonized their haughtiness and hatred. That was the dominant religious tradition that Jesus confronted.
Excusing Animosity
Excusing Animosity
One could argue that Israel’s relationship to the neighboring nations had been adversarial from the start, that their animosity was divinely decreed. When the Jews first entered the land of Canaan, they were commanded to exterminate the Canaanites:
“When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.
Centuries later, did those instructions legitimize the seething animosity Israel held for its neighboring nations in the time of Christ? Did God originally institute the hatred they harbored for the gentiles? And if so, is there a conflict between Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount and God’s instructions in the Old Testament? Dietrich Bonhoeffer shed some helpful light on this seeming contradiction. He wrote: “The wars of Israel were the only ‘holy wars’ in history, for they were the wars of God against the world of idols. It is not this enmity which Jesus condemns, for then He would have condemned the whole history of God’s dealing with His people. On the contrary, He affirms the Old Covenant.”
The Lord’s commandments to wipe out the idolatrous inhabitants of Canaan weren’t the instructions of some bloodthirsty deity. God instructed Israel to destroy those idolatrous nations for the express purpose of preserving the purity of His covenant people. Furthermore
You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire. “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.
God commanded His people to drive out and destroy those wicked nations in order to defend Israel from their idolatrous influence. This was no mere feud— God was purging the land of corrupting influences. He was protecting His people, not establishing a permanent pattern for personal, ethnocentric animosity.
Moreover, the Old Testament law included specific provisions for how the Israelites were to engage with others— even with their enemies.
“If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him.
In addition, Proverbs 25: 21– 22 says,“
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.
Job summed up how God’s people were to view their enemies:
“If I have rejoiced at the ruin of him who hated me, or exulted when evil overtook him (I have not let my mouth sin by asking for his life with a curse),
So, while the Old Testament does include holy wars and pronounces judgment on nations that are the permanent, unrepentant enemies of God, there is no room for personal rancor, vengeance, or hostility. Put simply, the scribes and rabbis could not point back in Israel’s history to legitimize or excuse their hatred for the gentiles. Nor could they point to the imprecatory psalms and the severe curses passed down on people outside of God’s covenant. The Psalms contain some scathing rebukes and vicious condemnations for those who oppose the Lord. For example:
May their table before them become a snare;
Let their own table before them become a snare; and when they are at peace, let it become a trap. Let their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually. Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. May their camp be a desolation; let no one dwell in their tents. For they persecute him whom you have struck down, and they recount the pain of those you have wounded. Add to them punishment upon punishment; may they have no acquittal from you. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.
However, this is not an expression of mere personal animosity. David explained earlier in that same psalm,
For zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.
It’s the same kind of godly, righteous anger he expressed in Psalm 139: 21– 22:
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.
He was not venting his own anger; he was taking up the cause of God against the idolatrous nations that had risen up against His people. He regarded the wicked as enemies of God and the covenant people. The conflicts in view here for David were national, not personal.
It is at that point precisely that the scribes and rabbis never made a distinction. They never distinguished between what was divinely judicial and what was personal. They took the prerogatives that belonged to God in the unfolding of His covenant purpose and they personalized them into their own private relationships. Thus, they perverted God’s law of love for neighbors and inhibited the possibility of evangelistic outreach to the idolatrous nations. To love their neighbors would be to ardently desire that they would repent, believe, and enter into a right relationship with God. To hate them would be to desire, with equal ardor, that they would perish in hell. That was the attitude of the Jews in Christ’s time, as it had been for centuries.
The prophet Jonah is a prime example of this stance. God called Jonah to preach to Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, and Jonah fled in the opposite direction. The Assyrians were notorious for their bloodthirsty violence and particularly for the cruelty they showed to Israel. Jonah wanted nothing good for them, and he had no intention of leading them to repentance and faith. And when the people of Nineveh dramatically repented and turned to God, Jonah responded with a fit of rage and frustration:
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Jonah didn’t praise God for the miraculous repentance of the Ninevites. Instead, he begged the Lord to take his life so he wouldn’t witness his enemies entering into a right relationship with God. That’s how deeply the Jews hated those they considered their enemies - death itself was preferable to seeing them rescued from hell by divine grace and forgiveness.
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