II JESUS’ BREAKTHROUGH

SELF-TRANSFORMATION … 43

The context of revelation … 43

Jesus’ indictment of legalism … 44

The universality of the new ‘law’ … 46

The ethic of intent  … 46

The priority of intentions … 46

The self before God … 48

THE FIRST COMMANDMIENT  … 48

Its ethical aspect … 48

Its religious aspect … 51

The meaning of ‘firstness’ … 53

NOTES AND REFERENCES ... 55

II

JESUS’ BREAKTHROUGH

SELF-TRANSFORMATION

The context of revelation

Palestine had witnessed the rise and fall of the Greek Empire and before that the succession of the Babylonian and Persian empires. The Roman Empire was still at the peak of its power, though its ideological self-confidence was weakening and giving rise to skepticism and stoic withdrawal. The separatist, legalist, enclosed communalism of the Pharisees was utterly out of place in a Palestine that was, in terms of religious and cultural influences, as cosmopolitan a part as any of the ancient world. Phariseeism brushed shoulders with the Near Eastern cults, with Persian Zoroastrianism, with Hellenism in all its varieties of rationalism, mysticism and naturalism, with the imperialist nationalism of the Romans, as well as with Roman empiricism and skepticism. Nor was the universalist ethic of monotheism in the tradition of Abraham completely forgotten, All these had their representatives, their sects and parties, their speakers and orators in the market-place. Some were obviously stronger than others in certain sections of country and population; but nobody concerned in the moral and spiritual life of man could fail to find them all to nourish and educate the seeking spirit, or to arouse its indignation against the suffocating narrowness of Phariseeism.

Into this environment Jesus was born. His ministry did not start until he was thirty years of age. Until then, he was a Jew among other Jews. But from the earliest times he was a keen observer and student of the systems of ideas surrounding him. As a child he astounded the learned rabbis in the temple by his brilliance in argument with them on matters of the Law, while his worried parents anxiously looked for him everywhere (Luke 3:34-2). The Qur’an affirms a precocity more astonishing still, having Jesus utter these sublime words in his infancy: ‘Lo! I am the servant of God. It is He that gave me the Scripture; and He that sent me a Prophet. It is He that blessed me wheresoever l may go. He has enjoined upon me always to worship Him, to give in charity, and to honor he who bore me…’ (19:30-2).

Neither account need be read as journalistic reporting of an historical event. Neither is for that reason any less true. The meaning or in-

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tent of both is historically true and stands beyond question. Jesus, the man, was not only piercingly intelligent but also profoundly learned in Jewish Scripture, the Torah, the rabbinic traditions, and the whole ethical and spiritual condition of his people, the Jews. He studied closely and reflected deeply, to familiarize himself with these systems and grasp their inner meanings. Indeed, he went beyond this, to discover where these systems fell short of an ethic adequate to the moral and spiritual potential of mankind.

This acute awareness on the part of Jesus stands as the material circumstance or context of his divine inspiration. Whether the reader takes Jesus to be God, as Christians do, or takes him to be the Prophet of God, as Muslims do, it cannot be doubted that Jesus conveyed a divine message. Divine messages could never be understood if they came in a vacuum. By the divine mercy they are sent to be understood and so they come into a human context where ideas, events and possibilities are in urgent contention. Revelation is given to a mind fully alert to all the dimensions of that contention and it is given in order to bring peace to that mind to settle the contention.

The ethical contentions of the Jews were the context in which the revelation to Jesus operated. I do not intend to imply here that the ethic of Jesus only had to do with the Jews’ ethic and not with the other ethical systems of that time. As will emerge more clearly in Part 2 of this book, my argument is, rather, that while the ethic of Jesus was predominantly God’s answer to the Jewish problem, it provided no less final answers to the other patterns and directions of life with which Jesus had come into contact.

Jesus’ indictment of legalism

Rightly, Jesus discerned that the Jewish ethic ascribed to the survival of the community the highest, and therefore false, order of value. Further, he discerned that, of the Jews, the Pharisee majority at least, had lost sight even of that false order of value, since they observed the rigors of legalistic discipline for their own sake, forgetting ‘the weightier matters of the law’.¹ By Jesus’ time, they had been long on the road to ethical decay. The road begins with a genuine intuition of a value, but once a false priority is assigned to it, it suppresses other values from the field of moral vision. The moral faculty itself is warped as a result, with the further consequence that the value, falsely valued, itself becomes false. Thus, the value of seeking or needing a special relationship with God had decayed into the idea of being special to God simply by belonging to a particular race. That in turn had decayed so that belonging to that race meant simply observing the laws and customs exclusive to that race and doing so in an absurdly literal and external manner. It was this absence of inner value in the consciousness of his contemporaries that Jesus diagnosed as a sickness of the spirit and proposed its cure

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The sickness was not simply that the Jews did not value themselves as a special community in the right way. Rather the sickness lay in the very fact itself that they valued themselves as a special community. Because the value itself was false, complying with it was, inevitably, also false. By bringing down the walls of community survival, Jesus opened minds and hearts to the proper foundation of ethical consciousness and ethical value: the individual person. For what is the value of a community’s survival or prosperity, if the individual selves which make up that community are ethically sick; if they do not realize the values of purity, of chastity, of sincerity, of charity, of forgiveness, of loving-kindness and goodness? Jesus’ first answer to the predicament of the Jews was to teach that the goal of moral life is not the chosen community but the individual.

Community has worth only at the level of a means to the quality of life of the individual. But even at that level, it does not have the first order of rank. The general conditions of life and existence which ‘parent’ the growth and development of the individual, are of a higher order of value. The immediate family, surely, with its giving, loving environment, is of higher worth than the community where, to a great extent, everything must be impersonalized, legalized, exteriorized. To take this argument further, should not solitude rank higher even than community? For, in solitude, eyes can tum inward, the individual self can reflect upon the space between how it is and how it ought to be in relation to God, and then commit itself to closing that space.

Jesus saw that a community’s reason for being can only be service of the individual person. Instead of a law (Torah) aiming at the perpetuation of a communal-racial identity, he drew attention to another, deeper and more significant, law—the properly moral law, which is yet not ‘law’ in the sense that, by its nature, it cannot ever be legislated or enforced on others. Its nature defies every kind of exteriorization. For its concern is the self, the inner being which only the individual can reach in moments of ethical self-consciousness. Whereas Jewish Law (as the rabbis and Pharisees had found out), struggled to cover an ever-widening range of affairs by systematic but ever more strained and artificial means, Jesus’ ‘law’ restricted itself to the individual’s inner self. The self he rightly discerned, is the main battle-ground of all higher, properly ethical values. It must, therefore, have the first and highest priority in matters ethical. Within its narrow but infinitely deep bounds, the ‘law’ of Jesus found all that it required for full realization. What it lost in scope of jurisdiction, it gained in depth. A whole dimension to ethical life lay open for discovery. Morality took an enormous leap forward when it shifted its focus from the communal will to survive to the personal will to self-surmounting and self-giving, to the personal will to love.

Being focused on the survival of the community, the Jews’ Law was bound to be separatist in character. If the Law was a ‘good’ it was because it was one for the Jews exclusively. The Law was not in itself a ‘good’. That is the explanation for the oath of perpetual observance

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that Ezra extorted from the Jews. He and Nehemiah sought to preserve the non-goyim identity of the Jews from assimilation. For the same reason, as the new Law required, they persuaded or coerced Jews to divorce their goyim wives. The new ‘law’ of Jesus indicted all this as the racist nonsense that it was. Jesus’ interest was in humanity: he was interested in the Jews only inasmuch as they were a part of that humanity and inasmuch as they were his immediate audience—he lived amidst them and spoke their language.

The universality of the new ‘law’

Jesus understood that merely to extend the Jewish Law to non-Jews, to make it inclusive instead of exclusive, even if possible, would not realize the values of a true morality. Only by centering morality on the inner self of the individual could the true dimensions and purpose of moral value be realized, and embrace the whole of mankind. Whether Jew or non-Jew, every person born is endowed with all the dignity of being human. Each is a world in which truly moral values can and must have the ascendancy that is their due. Thus, against Jewish ‘apartness’, Jesus proclaimed the universal brotherhood of man. He did so by showing the possibility of deepening and interiorizing morality, by recognizing ethical worth as a function of the moral state of the inner self in its solitude before God. While not a law in the normal sense, the new ethic is a command, an imperative. To satisfy that imperative is, in addition to being saved and blessed to be ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and ‘mother’ in relation to Jesus (Mark 3:34). Only that is needed in order to belong to the community and do so in good standing. But, at that very moment and by that means, ‘community’ has ceased to mean Israel; it now means humanity.

The ethic of intent

The priority of intentions

The fact that Jewish Law was community-bound meant that it was, fundamentally, an ethic of consequence. The desirability of each of its provisions rested on its achieving some particular, real-effect which was valued for its own sake. True, the provisions of the Law also produced ‘community’ or corporate identity among those who observed them. But the content of this identity—all  members wearing and showing their identity to each other—was itself only a particular, real-effect multiplied many times over. For example, by commanding all hands to be ceremonially washed before eating, the Law achieved ‘community’ among all Jews; but that ‘community’ consisted in no more than many pairs of ‘washed hands’, the particular, real-effect of doing what the Law commanded. However, particular real-effects of this son are not in themselves values, certainly not moral values. Any

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ethic built upon the desirability of particular, real consequences is not, strictly speaking, a moral ethic at all. It is, at best, a code of utility, not of morality.

Jesus saw that the higher value lies, not with the effect of an action, but with the intent of its doer. The effects actually produced may be good or bad according to the criteria of utility applied in the particular ease. But intent is what gives to the act its moral character. To produce a good effect, but with evil intention, is morally evil though good from the standpoint of utility. On the other hand, to produce a mediocre or bad effect, but with good intention is, in strictly moral terms, good. The unworth of such an action is judged by a utilitarian code; its ethical quality remains unaffected. The ethical character of an act is a function of the will that willed it. Why (how) the will decided to do that act is, strictly speaking, the only ethical question.

An ethic of intent sees the individual separately from his or her community (even if ‘community’ includes the whole of mankind). It emphasizes the quality of the doer’s intent, and de-emphasizes the actual consequences of the intended action. From a strictly ethical viewpoint, how the will is, matters more than what the will achieves. In abstract terms, what the ethical will wills is the ‘higher good’—of the whole of mankind, the whole of creation. To have such a consequence in mind is proper to an ethical intent, but it is meaninglessly general until the ‘higher good’ has been defined in some particular: we cannot seriously will the good of the whole of mankind and not will the good of our next door neighbor. Consciousness of the goodness (the desirability) of a particular good action has a role within the ethical intent to do the deed. But the deed itself, the real-effect produced in space and time, does not (according to the terms of Jesus’ ethic) weigh as much as a mosquito’s wing on the scale by which the properly ethical quality of a human deed is decided. The whole force of Jesus’ breakthrough, its sublime distinction and merit, lies in this perception: that the ethical worth or unworth of any human action is determined, solely and exclusively, by the inner self in its willing the act in question.

The interiorization of morality achieved by Jesus was a reaction to, and a cure for, the exteriorized, legalistic ethic of the Jews. It was also a revolution, long overdue, which placed morality where it belongs: in the will, which is the source of action. If it is good, wholesome, rightly guided, its action will be also: ‘A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit’ (Matthew 7:18; 12:34-6; also Luke 6:43-5). Actions (the fruits) and their consequences in the real world can certainly be improved. That is what social reforms of all kinds attempt to do; namely, to better real conditions and relations by subjecting them to certain regulative standards. But however praiseworthy such betterment may be, judged by the criteria of utility, it certainly misses the center of the problem of evil in the world. Therefore, in Jesus’ view, it is only a half-measure, or less than half. Transform the inner source of all human action, Jesus would

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say, and you have transformed the whole person, and the change becomes evident in the outer presence and reality of that person, in deeds done and their consequences, and in the real world around that person.

The self before God

Jesus conceived of this radical self-transformation in terms of the individual’s relationship with God. In that relationship is implied the individual’s whole attitude to life and reality. In the Jewish Law, the self was oriented to ‘Israel’, so that the will could see no further than the Jewish community in whose service the self was to do its willing. Jesus sought to re-orient the self and its willing, towards God, and God alone. That is the only orientation worthy of the creature, man. Only man is, properly speaking, religious, because only man reaches so deep and by doing so achieves wholeness and fullness of being.

Radical transformation of self is the first condition of Jesus’ ethic. That is the only sense he had—indeed the only sense there can be—of repentance and conversion. It is expressed in the metaphor of a new birth: ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (John 3:3). ‘New birth’ means undergoing the radical re-orientation of the soul to God. It is not always easy to disentangle the inner transformation from its outward effects, whether within the self-undergoing it or in its conduct in the world. But the distinction between the two needs to be emphasized: it is of decisive importance. It is most fully exemplified in the orders of Christian asceticism. The primary concern of these orders is not to bring about particular changes in the individual or in the world—even though these changes may be morally desirable. Nor even to train those who enter these orders to do good deeds—however much love and self-sacrifice such deeds may involve. Such aims are secondary. The primary aim is to transform the individual’s inner self so as to achieve total re-orientation to God. That is why vows of celibacy are among the necessary qualifications for full membership in these orders.

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT

Its ethical aspect

Once such transformation is perfectly accomplished, the individual stands in need of no law—certainly not of a regime such as the Jewish Law provided, with its 613 exact precepts. Perfect self-transformation implies a will so purified that it is contradictory to assert of it that it can do evil. Hence, the first Christian converts’ disregard of the Jewish Law. For the already transformed, any law is superfluous. In this light, Augustine’s remark—‘Love   God and do what you will’—makes sense. It anticipates graceful ease and freedom before the ethical choices facing the individual, placing the transformed will, as it were,

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above or beyond law. This ease may seem complacent to the outsider, but it rests upon a premise which is incontrovertible: if the self really has undergone a perfect, radical transformation, it can be trusted to do what it wills. In other words, if the self has become such that it cannot will evil, it will not do so.

The point is not entirely tautologous. For the will is dynamic and creative. It can, and in fact always does, find new ways to meet the situations with which real life confronts it. And once the self is properly re-oriented, it will not fail to bring its choices and deeds into proper relation with God, the goal of the total transformation. What the self wills will always be new inasmuch as life itself is continually and continuously new. The dynamism of the transformation Jesus sought to achieve in man, therefore, lies in seeing the new situations of life in the new perspective and, having done so, judging them under the framework which that perspective opens up to the innermost springs of action.

Clearly, this allows to the individual, in principle, the widest possible scope for freedom and spontaneity of conduct. For that reason, Jesus elaborated no law; and if his followers have done so, they have mistaken his spirit for Ezra’s.² Certainly, he gave many precepts for conduct; and in his own life, he furnished an example for the emulation of all mankind. But these precepts and type of conduct and all that may be deduced from them by way of laws—whether religious or ethical, individual or collective—are not laws in the sense the provisions of Jewish Law are. They are only illustrations, real-life instances, of what a radically transformed will would do, of what a radically transformed life will be. The emulation of Jesus, the famous imitatio Christi of the Christian tradition, is good only as a teaching aid, a prop, to help achieve the desired transformation. Taken for its own sake, that is, ‘for Christ’s sake’, it loses the significance that Jesus might have attached to it. For the end of ethics, the purpose of morality—as we explained above—is not the realization of particular real-effects, however noble. To imitate, to seek to reproduce, particular actions, even Jesus’, is far removed from the spirit of his ethic. His teaching, his acts, his whole life on earth, exemplify the complete orientation of self to God, which God had sent him to bring to human consciousness. Their status and worth is wholly didactic: they are meant to inform and instruct. They are not meant to be taken as particular laws, nor as a framework for action.

To see the mission of Jesus as the provision, among other things, of a new law reduces it to the level of a reform, with ethical and social consequences to be sure, but no more than an improvement of a reality that remains, at root, un-transformed. Jesus’ emphasis was on the religious, on the necessity of a total re-orientation towards God. Jesus’ instruction was: ‘... love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’ (Matthew 22:37-8; Mark 12:30). That is the first and great commandment. Although a great many ethical precepts flow from it, it is not, clearly, just an ethical command

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but also a religious one. The commitment it requires (heart, soul, mind) was, for Jesus, the be-all and end-all of endeavor. That is why in his admonition to his disciples and followers, he gave no laws, no directives for particular actions, nor resolved any of the particular issues presented to him. Instead, he seized every opportunity to reiterate the one theme he considered important: transform the human self radically; once that is done, the kind of issue you raise will never arise.³

Self-transformation results not in individual good deeds, one here, one there. It produces instead a new ethos: the person’s temperament and character, the whole environment of the will, is transformed. Such an achieved temperament and character neither obeys nor needs precepts. If it is genuine, it finds its directives within; and however novel its pursuits may be, they nonetheless carry its mark. Thus the transformed self, when making its decisions, does not refer to any law, to any example, not even to Jesus himself. Man needs Jesus, his precepts and his example, as a means to help him towards that radical self-transformation. His example provides the inspiration to awaken the self and shake it from its spiritual lethargy. But once Jesus has done this work, the convert does and must feel free to proceed without Jesus. On this new road, Jesus has ceased to be master, teacher, inspirer, and becomes a fellow-traveller. The need for Jesus may in a sense be external, but it is so only inasmuch as a person cannot keep going on that open road and needs Jesus’ inspiration to recover from the occasional lapse.

The interiorized ethic has therefore no tribunal except personal conscience. Conscience is the voice within; only it can penetrate the will and uncover the motives and preferences it hides amid its many subtle folds. The law must wait until these hidden motives have been translated into outward acts (real-effects), before it can pass judgement. But conscience is competent to pass judgement on the will before that. When the law considers inner motives as relevant at all, it does so only as attenuating or exacerbating the deed in question. Intent by itself is beyond the law's jurisdiction, and cannot be the object of legal inquiry or judgement. Conscience, by contrast, is the faculty whose very subject-matter is intent. Jesus, therefore, in making his ethic one of intent rather than consequences, rightly based it upon the inward voice of conscience. It was to conscience alone that he appealed when, in the case of the adulteress the Pharisees sought to stone, he adjudicated: ‘He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone at her... And they which heard it being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one’ (John 8:7, 9). In the ethic of Jesus, writes T.W. Manson (1959, p.302), moral questions, ‘that is, all questions concerning man’s life, are taken out of the jurisdiction of all other parties, including even Jesus himself; and brought before the bar of the conscience of the responsible person’.

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Its religious aspect

Some students of religion, too keen to find ‘lowest common denominator’ identities among the religions of the world have often said that Christianity’s be-all and end-all is the so-called golden rule of ‘as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise’ (Luke 6:31; Matthew 7:12). This and similar reductions of Christianity do not even give it the benefit of being an ethic. Much more serious is that they do not grant it to be a religion. An ethic exhausts itself when it has raised and answered the questions: What ought l to do? How may l know what I ought to do? Religion is necessarily more comprehensive than this. The ethical questions can be answered from other standpoints than religion. The answers offer some account of what is ideal, and philosophy can describe and analyze why the ideal is so. What philosophy cannot do is to affirm that the ideal is real, and yet we do need to believe that the ideal is real in order to pursue it with conviction and vigor. From the viewpoint of the quality of our commitment to the ideal, it matters less that the ideal is real, than that we believe that it is. The need to affirm the ideal as real stands therefore as the necessary ground of any ethical intention or deed. That need has priority over any ethical command, and until that need is met, the ethical command is, as it were, disabled.

That is why we described Jesus’ command to love God with heart, soul, mind, as a religious rather than ethical command. Indeed, that command is religion. It is religious because it is comprehensive and fundamental; and because it affirms that only God, as the First and last Reality, is worthy of man’s love and devotion. Comprehensiveness and affirmation—the essentials of religion—are both present in the command to love God.

In ‘love thy God’ Jesus has affirmed that God is the Reality to which the inner being must be oriented willingly, totally: ‘love...with heart, soul, mind’. And in those words he has also affirmed that Reality commands. ‘Love thy God’ is not an abstract idea, a metaphysical proposition, offered for discussion and debate. It is an imperative, the imperative. For, when Divine Reality enters our consciousness at all, it does so as a commanding reality. A God that did not command would not be God, just as a good that did not value (and so seek) the real would not be good. A good that; so to speak, kept itself to itself; would not be known to us at all. What God commands through the revelation to Jesus is not, as explained above, some particular good, nor the doing of the good in general. Rather, God commands us to locate ourselves in a certain relation to Him. That location of ourselves is a radical transformation away from servitude to other Gods—however they may be defined—to the state in which we serve only God’s Will.

The transformation is rightly described as a religious event on account of its comprehensiveness. The whole spiritual being is re-

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oriented to Divine Reality. Necessarily, such a re-orientation permeates the ethos—the will, temperament and character—which in turn affects all conduct and life. Ethical intent and action flow from it freely. Yet, that is not the reason for desiring the intense turning of oneself, heart, soul and mind, toward God.

Is this turning toward God then an irrational act, a ‘blind leap’ of faith? By no means. It is undertaken (undergone) in full consciousness, with a present mind which recognizes that to which the orientation has taken place as the First and Last Reality. It is undertaken (undergone) for its own sake, that is to say, for the sake of the Reality which has brought it about by ‘moving’ man towards it. It is a natural fact that all human beings are ‘moved’ by God, but few are those who enable His movement to ‘determine’ the inner will, that is, to give to the will its content and form. To enable the inner will to be ‘determined` by God only, is what transformation of the self means.

The transformation is a disposition, an attitude. It is not an abstract idea; nor does it exist in the abstract. It exists in the decisions, intentions, and actions which flow from it and are experienced as its real-instances. The content of the attitude is opening oneself to ‘determination’ by God alone. This is not a passive state, but a dynamic invitation to God to invade and to pervade, to ‘determine` and to orient. The religious expressions--worshipping God, serving God, loving God—suggest a single direction or movement toward God, as though man offered and God accepted (or not). But in reality worship is not something given and then taken. Worship is the concentration of man’s faculties upon God to the end that His moving power may ‘determine’ man’s consciousness according to His Will. Every true act of worship implies such shaping by God of man’s will. The so-called ‘pure’ contemplation of God is not different from the so-called ‘pure’ aesthetic contemplation of a work of art. Both are wasted if the contemplative soul is not open to, and does not actually receive, ‘determination’ from the object of contemplation.

The self-transformation Jesus called for is thus religious as well as ethical: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment’ (Matthew 22:37-8; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27). It is religious inasmuch as it is a total re-orientation to God; it is ethical inasmuch as it makes the re-orientation consist in loving God, with all one’s heart, soul, and mind—which is a poetical way of saying that God alone shall give form and content to one’s will. Love is a name for the warmth and ardor of the invitation to God to shape the character and temperament, the whole environment of the will. Active acceptance of the will’s ‘determination’ by God is also love. When the transformation is perfectly achieved, the ethos is determined by God, and the will inhabiting it is then, but only then, His Will.

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The meaning of' ‘firstness'

Jesus described ‘love thy God’ as the first and great commandment. What is the nature of its ‘firstness’? How is it ‘first’? As we shall see, its ‘firstness’ is not logical and not ordinal. Its not being logically first means that it is not a proposition which stands at the beginning of a series of (secondary) propositions deduced from it. Its not being ordinally first means that it is not a command that has the highest or first importance. Both these kinds of ‘firstness’ were well appreciated in the Jewish Law. The rabbis recognized that the whole Law may be deduced from some central principle such as the first commandment. Indeed, the rabbinical schools never tired of reducing the whole Torah to, or of deducing it from, such one or more supreme principles. The Midrashim and Mishnah are themselves, for the most part, illustrations of this procedure of logical deductive analysis. The radical critique of the Law which the ethic of Jesus achieved includes a critique of these kinds of ‘firstness’.

The ‘firstness’ of the first commandment is neither logical nor ordinal but valuational: it is of itself and in itself the sufficient reason of all religion and ethics. It says to do all that is necessary to do to bring about radical self-transformation. Satisfying this commandment materially entails virtue and salvation. That means not that every moral precept necessarily follows from it logically, but that every good deed necessarily follows upon it in actual human conduct.

It is an error therefore to append a second commandment to the first. In particular, Matthew has surely quite misunderstood Jesus when, as well as giving the ‘second’ commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’, it adds that ‘on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’ (Matthew 22:39-40). The second commandment is superfluous when the first has been given. It is implied by the first; and the implication is not logical, but material. That is to say, the first commandment cannot be satisfied without satisfying the second. Moreover, there is no reason why this particular command should be singled out as the ‘second’ from among all the other material implications. It is a condition of loving one’s neighbor as oneself that one has, first, repented and purified oneself Could we not say, therefore, that ‘Repent and purify thyself has a better claim to be the ‘second’?

It might be possible to claim that Matthew records the second commandment simply as one illustration of the consequents of the first. But this is unlikely since the additional remark explicitly gives to these two commandments a comprehensiveness equal to the whole Jewish Law: ‘On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’. A bias in Matthew towards the Jewish Law has been noted by T.W. Manson (1959) and Paul Ramsey (1950). Manson thought Jesus’ radical revolution against the Law in Matthew’s account unsound.⁴ And Ramsey’s judgement is that Matthew’s interpretation is

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‘far from the view of Jesus’—in part because it contrasts with the interpretation in Mark and Luke. but also because of ‘what we otherwise know concerning his [Matthew`s] relation to the law.’⁵

The ‘firstness’ meant by Jesus is uniqueness. There cannot be a ‘second’ commandment, not in any sense. Because the first is first in terms of its inherent value (it is salvation), it cannot, by its very nature, be followed by a ‘second’. Manson and Ramsey have rightly seen through the legalism of Matthew, but not seen far enough through Matthew (or Mark or Luke) to grasp that where the Evangelists give a ‘second’ commandment, they betray their misunderstanding of Jesus’ ethical breakthrough. If God and only God is the proper object of love, if He is to occupy all one’s heart, soul and mind, if He alone is to ‘determine’ one’s total ethos, what room is left for ‘the neighbor’? Is it not blasphemous to allow the neighbor any place, however small, in a heart, soul, and mind totally devoted to God?

Manson has argued that ‘the experience of God’s love brings with it the knowledge that that love is for man’ (1959, p.305). But this is an obvious case of a logical deduction. Consider what it means, Manson himself says: ‘in the light of God’s love to himself a man sees other men, as it were, through God’s eyes: and to see them in this way is to love them’. If that is so, there is little point in calling it a ‘second’ commandment, there is nothing ‘second` about it. Seeing others through God’s eyes is loving them—loving them is not a command separate from the command to love God with heart, soul and mind; loving others is already materially entailed by the latter.

Perhaps the ‘second’ commandment is emphasized to prevent too abstract or mystical a relation between the one individual and the One God (Plotinus’ ‘flight of the alone to the alone’). In other words, the 'second’ commandment commands a material content, a material consequence, for the first. The ‘second’ is, so to speak, the down-to-earth end of an axis of which the other end is the first commandment. This argument cannot belong with Jesus himself, given the Jewish context (described above) of his mission. It belongs rather to the ‘social gospel’ Christianity of the last hundred years; it is inconceivable that Jesus can have thought in such ‘socialist’ terms. The whole burden of his mission was to move the focus of moral effort away from doing good to being good: being good means being God’s, being ‘determined’ by Him. From being good, good deeds flow spontaneously. A separate command to do good to one’s neighbor is superfluous and confuses the ground of the first commandment.

We may therefore conclude this analysis by saying that Jesus universalized the community ideal of Israel by interiorizing the Law, i.e, by making all piety, ethics, and virtue dependent upon an inward, radical transformation of the self, which is possible not only for members of a chosen race but for all humankind. Of this transformation only God can judge. But after it (and indeed only after it) all contention is left for personal conscience. And then there is no further need for law or religion in the institutionalized sense. Finally, there is no

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need for Jesus as a religious teacher. When the inner being, which is the source of all action, has been wholly transformed, no action can issue from that person which is not done wholly from within the perspective of the transformed self—and that is its very title to ethical goodness. It follows that Jesus, as teacher of such radical self-transformation, did not preoccupy himself with ‘reforms’ in the world, small or large. The one commandment he gave, the first and unique, was only this: ‘love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy mind’.   He himself, of course, satisfied this command, and spent his whole life explaining and embodying what absolute re-orientation of the self to God means.

Notes and references

Notes

¹           Later still, the Qur’an found them failing in the observance of the ‘lighter’ as well as the 'weightier' matters of the law: ‘...Your hearts were hardened and became as rocks, or worse than rocks, for hardness... Have you any hope that they will be true to you when a party of them used to listen to the Word of God [Torah], then used to change it, after they had understood it, knowingly?...BeIieve ye (O Jews) in part of the Torah and disbelieve ye in part thereof? And what is the reward of those who do so save ignominy in the life of the world, and on the Day of Judgement they will be consigned to the most grievous doom’ (2:74-85).

²           Consider in this light how un-Christlike is Christian ecclesiastical law with all its legalistic minutiae of deductions; how un-Christlike is the whole tightly-knit organization of the Church, not to mention the fact that communion, the central rite of Christian worship, may be performed only by a person initiated and ‘licensed’ by the Church authority to do so after he has undergone a rigorous indoctrination.

³           T.W. Manson, in presenting this point (1959, pp.295-308), gives the following instances: (1) Matthew 5:34-7, where Jesus attempts to get to the root matter of truthfulness, admonishing the disciples to say simply Yes or No rather than engage in a discussion of the provisions of Jewish Law on perjury, which he finds by nature inadequate. (2) Mark 7:1-23, where, instead of providing further qualifications to the law of outward cleanliness when eating, or to that of freely-taken vows (vv. 1-13), Jesus dismisses the whole issue with the notion that ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, these are they that defile the man’. (3) Luke 10:25-37, with reference to which Manson concludes (p.301): ‘In place of a rule of conduct to obey, he [the lawyer] is given a type of character to imitate. This is typical of the method of Jesus in dealing with moral questions. He refuses to legislate, because he is concerned with the springs of conduct rather than with the outward acts.’

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⁴           ‘lt is worth noting,’ Manson wrote, ‘that this assertion of the absolute priority of the two great commandments has been softened down to an assertion of merely logical priority in Matthew. ‘There is not another commandment greater than these’ gives place to ‘On these two commandments hangs the whole law, and the prophets.' By this change the whole mass of Torah and tradition which has just been shown out at the front door is quietly brought in again at the back. This is just another indication that where the law is in question Matthew is simply not to be trusted.’ (Manson, 1959, p.304, n.2).

⁵           Ramsey quotes with approval Major, Manson, and Wright (1938, p.519): ‘Matthew thus tacitly excludes the possibility of a clash between the two great commandments and the rest, whereas Mark reckons with such a possibility and declares how it is to be decided’ (Ramsey, 1950, p.64).

References

Major, Manson and Wright (1938) The Mission and Message of Jesus, Dutton, London.

Manson, T.W. (1959) The Teaching of Jesus, Cambridge University Press.

Ramsey, Robert Paul (1950) Basic Christian Ethics, Scribner’s, New York.

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