Love your neighbour and other knee-jerk reactions

The two most important commandments, according to Jesus, are to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Matt. 22:37-40). Add to this his teaching about love for enemies, while perhaps quietly sidelining the commandment to love God, and we have the defining Christian ethic for the modern era. How should we respond to the refugee, the migrant, the asylum seeker, the foreigner, the Muslim, the Jew in our midst? We should love our neighbours, we should love our enemies.

It seems so fundamentally biblical, so fundamentally Christian that we wouldn’t dream of questioning the moral principle. But let’s do just that, in case we’ve overlooked something. These are good times to be wary of knee-jerk reactions.

There is some debate going on at the moment about whether the church should side with the incoming Other or with native communities which are feeling increasingly threatened by immigration. It has at least become rather less obvious who my neighbour is, who my enemy is—who is deserving of compassion. That is to be welcomed.

But how well do the biblical ideas map on to the current political-religious debate?

This is more an exercise in determining the proper boundaries of biblical teaching than a response to the current situation. For that reason, it may be experienced as disabling rather than enabling. Theology tends to collapse time and space to make things easier; history has a distancing and alienating effect, and that complicates matters. But I see no way to do justice to scripture now other than to go back and take the longer route.

The Old Testament background

The Old Testament background to the two-fold principle of love both for neighbour and for enemy is found in the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus 17-26. Chapter 19 begins with a call, issued through Moses, to the “congregation of the people of Israel” to be holy, “for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:1-2).

The command to “love your neighbour as yourself” is attached to a more detailed command not to “hate your brother in your heart”:

You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall reprove openly your neighbour and you shall not incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance and be enraged against sons of your people; and you shall love your neighbour as yourself. I am YHWH. (19:17-18*)

This is all internal to Israel, but it is stated later that the Israelite is not to wrong the resident alien:

And when an alien sojourns with you in your land, you shall not oppress him. The alien who sojourns with you shall be to you as one from the soil among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am YHWH your God. (19:33-34*)

The Holiness Code establishes the conditions for Israel’s possession of the land: “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you” (18:3). This is why the sojourner is included—the foreigner in the land which YHWH gave to his people. The supreme sanction is being vomited out of the land (18:25, 28).

A cheek for a cheek, a cloak for a tunic, a mile for a mile

The pattern of Leviticus 19:17-18 is reflected in Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: do not hate your enemy, love your neighbour.

The Sermon on the Mount is not general ethical teaching. It is a radical and difficult Community Rule for a small band of messianic Jews in a period of political-religious turmoil at the end of the age of second temple Judaism. It begins by identifying those in Israel who will inherit the age to come; it ends with a warning of a great storm that will sweep away the house built on the sand.

Jesus’ Jewish disciples know that the Law says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” According to Leviticus 24:19-20, if a person injures a neighbour, the same injury is to be inflicted on him: “If anyone injures his neighbour, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him” (Lev. 24:19-20; cf. Exod. 21:24; Deut. 19:21). The wrongdoer suffers the same actual or intended (cf. Deut. 19:18-19) harm.

Jesus instructs his disciples, however, not to “oppose the evil person” but—acting necessarily outside the judicial system—to submit to greater hardship and suffering (Matt. 5:38-42).

Instead of taking an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth, they are to give the left cheek in addition to the right cheek, a cloak on top of a tunic, a mile after a mile. Perhaps this included being requisitioned by Roman soldiers (cf. Matt. 27:32; Mk. 15:21), but it is followed by the command to give to the beggar and the borrower (Matt. 5:42). The immediate social context remains in view.

There is no reason to think that this applies beyond the field of the daily life of the Jesus community and their mission to the lost sheep of the house of Israel in the years leading up to the war against Rome.

Love your enemies

The disciples have heard it said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy” (5:43)—no doubt a commonly expressed sentiment among a people under a corrupt régime, an oppressive and self-serving elite. But Jesus tells them to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors, for two reasons.

First, they are to be seen as “sons of your Father who is in heaven” and “perfect (teleioi), as your heavenly Father is perfect (teleios)” (5:45, 48). This echoes the principle stated in Leviticus 19:2: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” The Septuagint has teleios in Deuteronomy 18:13, where the thought is likewise of the distinctive behaviour of the Israelites in the land, from which the Canaanites will be driven: “You shall be perfect (teleios) before the Lord your God.”

Secondly, they will have no reward if they act out of self-interest, like the tax collectors and gentiles (5:46-47). They will be rewarded on the day of God’s wrath against his people for being perfect Israel.

The enemies in view here are Jewish—those in Israel, the authorities in particular, who would violently oppose this prophetic-messianic movement after Jesus’ death. The Law will not be on the side of the disciples, but they believe that YHWH is doing a work that will exceed the normal application of the Law—for the simple reason that Israel has persistently failed to observe the Law. The parable of the widow who repeatedly seeks justice against her adversary from a judge who “neither feared God nor respected man” illustrates the point (Lk. 18:1-3).

So the disciples’ behaviour must align them with the work of the Father, who will soon judge righteously, and must distinguish them from a system that does not uphold righteousness.

The command to love their enemies is neither as original nor as broad in scope as is usually thought. It is worded rather more provocatively than the prohibitions against hating the brother Israelite or taking vengeance in anger against sons of the people in the Holiness Code: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you….” But that is only because Jesus has in mind the quite specific circumstances of eschatological resistance to the gospel of the coming rule of YHWH.

Likewise, it is the Jewish neighbour who is to be loved—the second of the two great commandments. The rich young man who “would be perfect” must demonstrate his love for his neighbour by selling his possessions and giving to the poor in Israel, before following Jesus down the dangerous path leading to the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:16-22; cf. 22:38-40; Mk. 12:28-34).

The parable of the good Samaritan

When a hostile lawyer, wishing to justify himself, asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?,” we are pointed in a rather different direction.

• Magnificent Samaritan Village Discovered

Jesus tells the parable of a Samaritan who takes care of a Jew who has fallen among robbers (Lk. 10:29-37). This seems to be a precise retelling of the story of the benevolent treatment of Judean captives by the Samaritans in 2 Chronicles 28:8-15. It highlights the failure of the priestly caste to provide a solution to the crisis represented by the presence of “robbers”—in one form or another—in Israel. It is certainly not a simple exhortation to show compassion to strangers.

Love those of the household of faith

The saying is quoted three times in the New Testament letters. The love of believers for one another is the fulfilment of the commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Rom. 13:8-10). Like Jesus, Paul connects this with the prospect of eschatological hardship (13:11-14). In Galatians the context is clearly internal:

…through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. (Gal. 5:13-15)

Later in the letter, Paul talks about doing good to all people but especially to the “household of the faith”:

But let each approve the work (ergon) of each, and then he will have reason to boast in himself alone and not in the neighbour. For each will bear his own burden. … So then, as we have opportunity, let us work (ergazōmetha) the good for all, especially for the household of the faith. (Gal. 6:4-5, 10*)

This may extend the scope of moral responsibility beyond the church, but I wonder if the distinction is not, in fact, between all believers and the “household of faith” to which a person belongs. Another time perhaps.

Finally, James reproaches those Jewish Christians in the diaspora (Jas. 1:1) who have dishonoured the poor in their fellowship—ironically emulating the behaviour of the rich, who “oppress you, and… drag you into court” (2:6). Instead, they are to ‘fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”’ (2:8). Again, the eschatological circumstances are prominent: they face suffering, an intense testing of their faith (1:2-3); and the Lord is coming, “the Judge is standing at the door” (5:7-9).

Who is my neighbour? Who is my enemy?

So a few limited conclusions:

• The thrust of the commands to love both neighbour and enemy is internal to the people of God, both in Torah and in their messianic reapplication. It has to do with the core identity of the people. If I’m overlooking something here, please let me know.
• In the Old Testament, the commands presuppose the presence of the covenant community in the land. In the New Testament, the need was to define a new covenant community, distinguished both from failed second temple Judaism and the gentiles.
• The New Testament churches bore witness by their behaviour to a coming judgment and the advent of a civilisation which acknowledged Christ as Lord—a civilisation which, therefore, would be in some measure accountable to the priestly-prophetic command to love neighbour and enemy.
• With the passing of that Christian civilisation, we are having to reimagine, renegotiate, the relation between the church as a holy, priestly people and an emerging global order suffering the birth pains of eschatological transition. The form of this world is passing away.
• The church should not be silent, but it should think carefully about how it addresses a changing situation. The Bible teaches that historical context matters.