Prince of Peace II(a): Jesus' Teachings

To understand Jesus, I want to take the two-track approach and look at his teachings, then examine his life and how he lived-out what he taught. I have no idea how many posts it will take to move through his teachings, which is why I have included an (a) to the title of this post. Let’s see where this takes us…
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The first teaching from Jesus I would like to examine is his command to love our enemies. We find him saying this in Matthew 5:44 as well Luke 6:27 (the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, respectively). Simply put, to understand this we need to seek some idea of what Jesus means by love and what he means by enemies. Both of these seem like silly notions, like revisiting the lessons one might have heard in Sunday school. Yet I think the results of such a project are potentially mind-blowing, so will shamelessly move forward with my study.
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First of all, let’s look at love as Jesus might have understood it. The word for love in both passages is the Greek word agape, a word used in countless sermons and focused on by such great teachers as C.S. Lewis or even Martin Luther King Jr. To this day it is a word with power and emotion behind it, and here we find it in the Sermon on the Mount/Plain. Dallas Willard says of Matthew 5; “in this crucial passage, where the rightness of the kingdom is most fully displayed, there is a sequence of contrasts between the older teaching about what the good person would do – for example, not murder – and Jesus’ picture of the kingdom heart. That heart would live with full tenderness toward everyone it deals with. This passage in Matthew 5 moves from the deepest roots of human evil, burning anger and obsessive desire, to the pinnacle of human fulfillment in agape, or divine love. In this way the entire edifice of human corruption is undermined by eliminating its foundations in human personality” (The Divine Conspiracy, 137). Willard describes the love we are called to have for our enemies as divine love!
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The love we are called upon to have for our enemies is a divine love, a love that comes from God and was displayed by God in the flesh. After all, it was agape love that caused God to send his son to earth (John 3:16), and the Bible tells us that we know what love is because Jesus gave his life for his enemies (1 John 3:16). So we know that this love is the same kind of love God showed us, people who deserve death but were instead given life.
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As for enemies, the word Jesus uses is echthros, a Greek word for an enemy, hostile neighbors or individuals, the hated or hateful, those who hate or oppose God, or even the devil himself (see Luke 10:19 or Acts 13:10, for example)! This is not a gentle word. This is not describing the person who cuts you off in the parking lot or gossips behind your back. We are looking at a word that describes the people we fear the most, those who wish to take our lives or even destroy our very souls! This is the other at his/her worst, the epitome of all that is evil and bad and wrong in your world. Jesus says this is the person you must love with a divine love.
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I do believe that this is a love that can only come from God, that we cannot love our enemies without the Holy Spirit moving in our hearts and transforming us into the likeness of Christ. It is divine love in this respect most of all: that is must come from God because we are incapable of loving in this way on our own. Yet it is what we must do. We must love our enemies in the way God loves, which involves giving our own life rather than taking theirs. But we’ll get to that later. For now, take some time to think on these things and meditate on the pictures below, which came from here.

Peace,
Matt

Prince of Peace I: Jesus Binoculars

I have been delaying the writing of these posts as I tried to systematize my thoughts before spewing them out. Unfortunately I’m not sure I am up to it still, but am going to attempt it anyways. For who knows how long, with an unknown amount of posts and words and hopefully many generous exchanges with you, I am going to share why I believe in nonviolence and why I believe this is the only course of action for anybody who wants to follow Jesus.

The first premise I would lay out for this discussion is that a follower of Jesus has to begin their understanding of following Jesus by listening to Jesus first. This sounds obvious, if not absurd, but regardless it is necessary to say. This means we read and interpret Paul, Revelation, the prophets, Moses, the taking of the Promised Land, exile, etc, through the lens of Jesus and his revelation of the Father.

The way I can best describe why this is important is to liken our Biblical hermeneutics to binoculars. Growing up I loved to play with my dad’s binoculars. It was fun to spy on my brothers or try to spot animals from great distances away. It was even more fun to turn them around and make things feel smaller and further away.

What I see in the church far too often is a spinning of the binoculars. We interpret Jesus through the Old Testament and Paul, shrinking Jesus in the process. If we try to disregard something Jesus says or does in the New Testament by saying “but the in the Old Testament…” we are forgetting that Jesus has fulfilled and expanded the Law. That is why he came teaching “You have heard it said…but I tell you…” The same goes with Paul (or any other NT writer for that matter), who was interpreting Jesus’ teachings for specific situations, but was nonetheless trying to follow Jesus.

If we flip our hermeneutical binocular, starting with Jesus, the Old Testament comes into focus, the epistles of the New Testament are read with more understanding, etc. What I am saying is that we have to start with Jesus not just with lip-service, but truly interpret who God is and what the Bible teaches through Jesus. If we cannot start with this common assumption, I cannot move on.

Agree? Disagree?

Peace,
Matt