What is the difference between the non-resistance which Jesus proposed, and cowardice?
Is there such a thing in fact as loving your enemies?
Study for the Week
I
The Hebrew religion was an unfinished religion. That is one of the best proofs of its divine inspiration. The prophets had the forward look. Great things were yet to come. As one of the most daring expressed it, the old and hallowed [pg 088] covenant, made by God at the Exodus, would be superseded by a new and higher relation; God would write his law into the hearts of the people; the old drill in outward statutes would disappear, for all men would know God by an inward experience of forgiveness and love (Jeremiah 31:31-34).
Jesus not only shared this expectation of a new religious era, but set it in the center of his teaching. Religion to him was not static. He lived in a moving world. A new age was coming, and he would be the initiator of it. “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of God suffereth violence, and men of violence take it by force.” John had been the greatest of the prophets; with him a new swift movement had begun; but something far greater was coming; even the least in the new age would have an advantage over John (Matt. 11:11-19).
The popular conception expected the new age to come by divine miraculous interference simply. The Messiah would descend from heaven with angelic legions, expel the Romans, judge the nation, punish the apostate Jews, and then the new Jerusalem, which was already complete and waiting in heaven, would descend from above. That was the Utopia of Jewish apocalypticism. Jesus never eliminated the direct acts of God and the significance of divine catastrophes from his outlook. But in his parables taken from biological processes (see especially Matthew 13) he developed a conception of continuous and quiet growth, culminating at last in the judgment act of God. The Kingdom of God, he said, is like a farmer who sows his grain and lets the forces of nature work; he goes about his daily tasks, and all the time the tiny blades come up, the ear forms and gets heavy, and then comes the harvest (Mark 4:26-29). Jesus was working his way toward evolutionary conceptions. They were so new to his followers that he put them in parable form to avoid antagonism.
Such a conception of the Kingdom brought it closer to human action. It was already at work; it was in one sense [pg 089] already present (Luke 17:20-21). It was possible then to help it along.
The most obvious duty was for every man to clean up his own backyard and repent of his sins. Every one should approximate the life of the Kingdom by living now as he would expect to live then. But, as we have seen from his sayings, Jesus went far beyond this. He demanded an elevation of the accepted ethical standards. It was not simply a matter of erring and lagging individuals, but of the socialized norms of conduct. He had deep reverence and loyalty for the religion of his nation, and never told his followers to break with it. But he asserted boldly that the customary ethics of Judaism, based on the Decalogue and its interpretation by the Jewish theologians, was not good enough. It was good as far as it went, and he had no destructive criticism of it, but it needed to be “fulfilled” and to have its lines prolonged.
We have studied the six sample instances which he offered in order to explain his principle of moral and social progress. In each case he accepts the law as it stood, but asks for more of the same thing, more respect for personality, more reverence for womanhood, more stability for the home, more truthfulness, more peacefulness, more love. Thus he combined continuity with progress, conservatism with radicalism.