3.1 (Jesus would vote) for love of neighbor and enemy

This is a series titled, "What Would Jesus Vote?" in the lead-up to the election. Here is the series so far:

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?
2.1 (He would vote) As a Kingdom Citizen
2.2 We're citizens in two kingdoms

This post is on chapter 3. Jesus would vote for the greater good.

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Chapter 3: (Jesus would vote) For the Greater Good
1. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he gave a two-pronged answer often summarized as "Love God, love neighbor." Here is the full quote:

Textbox: "Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law? 

And Jesus said to him, "You will love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart and your whole life and your whole mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it. You will love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments, the whole Law and the Prophets are hung." 

Paul is even more explicit in Romans 13:8: "The one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the Law." In other words, if you love God and love your neighbor, you will have done everything that God requires of you. The love command is not another command. It is the command. If you have loved God and loved your neighbor, you have done all that God expects of you.

Just so that there is no doubt, Jesus says the same thing another way with the Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12: "Everything that you would have people do to you, so also do to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." This is another way of saying to love your neighbor as yourself, and Jesus says that it captures all of Scripture. [1]

2. Now, I have heard some truly insidious interpretations of the love command. They are actually quite devilish, a good example of trying to evade the commands of God by ingenuity. This interpretation says that Jesus was not saying to love everyone. He was saying to love everyone in Israel. This clever (and possibly demonic) teaching tries to escape God's command to love everyone and redirects the command only to those in the church. 

Let that sink in. This re-interpretation basically says, "You only have to love other Christians. You don't have to love anyone else." And of course, you can decide who the true Christians are. It takes the clear message of Scripture -- in fact, the central ethic of the Bible -- and twists it so that we can hate whoever we want if they are not Christians. This is potentially a doctrine of demons.

What about loving your enemies? Jesus says in Matthew 5:43-44, "You have heard it said, 'You will love your neighbor and you will hate your enemies.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Here again, the insidious love-dodging interpretation says, "Jesus is only referring to your enemies within Israel. He isn't referring to people outside of Israel."

You get incredible points for cleverness, but this is again a doctrine of devils because it directly undermines Jesus' central teaching. After all, what examples does Jesus give to support what he is saying? Jesus says that God sends rain and sun on both the righteous and the wicked (5:45). That is, God gives good gifts to everyone on the planet. Jesus doesn't say, "Be like God who gives sun and rain only to Israel." He says, "Be complete [in your loving] just as God is complete [in his loving]" (5:48). In other words, you must love everyone.

What about the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10? Doesn't Jesus explicitly pick someone outside of Israel as his example of who our neighbor is? The response of this group of interpreters is that Samaritans were still within Israel. They are the kinds of enemies that we must love, enemies within the church (and true America). In this line of thinking, the church is usually thought to have completely replaced Israel.

I'm quite sure that the Jews of Judea didn't see it that way. They saw the Samaritans as vile outsiders. Jesus was deliberate in his choice of a Samaritan. His point was to pick someone that a Jew would not want to show love to, an outsider.

What about the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25? Doesn't God sort out who gets to enter the kingdom and who doesn't based on whether they have helped anyone in need? Once again, a devilish ingenuity comes into play. The parable is no longer about helping those in need. It is about the way people have treated Christian missionaries. So God is not angry at the way people have treated others in general but the way people have treated Christians. Ingenious! Devilish!

This insidious line of interpretation gets even worse. It not only sees the church as a complete replacement for Israel, but it sometimes equates "Christian" America today with Israel. It thus blurs into the blasphemous America worship that we strongly warned against in the previous chapter. Now it is potentially a tool for Christian fascism.

See what this interpretation has done with the Bible. It has made it possible to hate everyone but "true" Americans and "true" Christians. In theory, it could open the door for the mass slaughter of those who aren't pure like the real church. It could open the door for a Holocaust of whomever you don't want to consider to be truly under the umbrella of God's people. In short, it is an incredibly scary, hard-hearted line of interpretation.

3. But Jesus did not filter his audience by whether they agreed with him or not. Yes, he did focus on Israel and Israelites in his earthly mission (Matt. 10:5-6). But this was never the end game. The long term goal was to see the whole world reconciled to God. The Great Commission was always the end game -- to make disciples of all the nations. This mission was not a "convert or die" one but one bringing good news to everyone. 

This is the message of Ruth and Jonah. God is not just concerned with his people. He cares about Moabites and Ninevites too. Look at the family tree of Jesus in Matthew 1. There you'll find Tamar who was likely a Canaanite and Rahab who was from the city of Jericho. Jesus says that God's eye is on the sparrow (Matt. 10:29-31) -- not just the Christian sparrows. Although it was not part of his earthly mission, Jesus casts a demon out of the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30). His conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4 falls into this same category.

Someone might say, "But all of these ended up joining the people of God." True, but Jesus' talk about going two miles when compelled to go one (Matt. 5:41) was possibly an allusion to a Roman solider -- another confirmation that the enemy Jesus is commanding to love in Matthew 5 included non-Israelites. The transformed mind that Paul urges of the Romans (12:2) did not distinguish between those who do evil to you within the church and those who do evil to you outside the church (12:17). Rather, he says to try to live at peace with everyone.

He slides from these comments in Romans 12 into a conversation about the Roman state at the beginning of Romans 13, a clear sign that he has always had worldly enemies in view. This whole train of thought leads up to the love command in 13:10. If Paul means for us to restrict the love command only to others in the church, he has been very unclear about it, for he has been talking about the secular state.

No, the core Christian ethic is that we must choose to love everyone. This is its radical message. This fact makes any attempt to undermine this message all the more devilish, for it undercuts God's central command to us. It opens the door for us to unravel the very heart of Scripture. It must therefore be rejected in the strongest of terms. 

4. Rather, Paul says in Galatians 6:10, "Therefore, as we have occasion then, let us do good towards all -- and especially toward those in the household of faith" ...

[1] The phrase, "The Law and the Prophets" is a shorthand way of referring to all of the Old Testament. Jews conceptualized the Old Testament in three parts: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. "The Law and the Prophets" thus referred to the two main divisions of the Jewish Scriptures.