Jesus & Economic Life (13) Love

Jesus agreed that loving God was the greatest commandment.

The most important one is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’. There is no commandment greater than these (Mark 12:29-31).

Love of neighbour was the second greatest commandment. It was the heart of the Torah teaching and energised the instructions for economic life.

Jesus gave a new commandment.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another (John 13:34).

Giving a new commandment would be a little strange, as Jesus had already affirmed the two greatest commandments. However, he was not really giving a new commandment, but was shifting the old one into a new environment. The Torah commanded us to love our neighbour. This made sense in a tribal culture in an agricultural economy. The world was changing and it was impossible to go back to the world that Moses lived in, so Jesus put a subtle twist on the second greatest command. Love your neighbour became love one another. Love continued, but the object of love changed. This made the commandment relevant to people living in cities separated from their tribal and family groups. Jesus modernised the commandment, because “Love one another’ can be applied anywhere, including cities and industrial societies.

We think about loving one another in an abstract way. It would have been different for Jesus listeners. They understood what loving one another meant, because it was no different form loving your neighbour, and they knew what that meant, because it was the heart of the Torah that Jesus had taught them in their synagogues. Loving your neighbour encompassed all the instructions for economic life contained in the law. Loving one another should be the same.

Changing the object from “neighbour” to “one another shifted the application of the instructions for economic life and the judicial laws of crime and punishment from the tribal groups of Israel to groups of people who chose to follow Jesus. And the shift of love from neighbour to one another would mean that the “one anothers” would have to become “neighbours” to make the instructions for economic life real.

The church in Jerusalem described in Acts was not a new form of proto-communism. It was an attempt to restore God’s social model in a city by applying the instructions for economic life, taking into account the changes wrought by the resurrection and ascension, Jesus becoming king, and the Holy Spirit being sent to establish the Kingdom.

When Jesus us told us to love one another, he extended our social and economic responsibility to everyone in our neighbourhood. Those who are not “one anothers”, are neighbours. The “one anothers” need to become “neighbours” to fulfil the new commandment.