Jesus of Nazareth
Page 27
And yet, at a later time people read Psalm 139:21-22 with some justification as a call to separation from and hatred toward God’s enemies. Anyone who entered the Qumran community had to swear “to love everything that [God] selects, and to hate everything that he rejects” (1 QS 1, 3-4), “to love all the [children] of light” and “to detest all the [children] of darkness” (1 QS 1, 9-10). It was forbidden to hate any member of the community (1 QS 5, 26), but one must nourish “everlasting hatred for the men of the pit” (1 QS 9, 21-22). The children of light are the members of the Qumran community, the children of darkness everyone else. That is how some people in Jesus’ time interpreted the Bible.
Only against the background of these voices can we clearly see the certainty, clarity, and absolute conviction with which Jesus understood Leviticus 19:18 at its heart and uncovered the whole import of that text: love of neighbor includes the enemy and precisely in its treatment of the enemy demonstrates itself as genuine love.
But Jesus not only taught love of enemies; he lived it in his behavior toward those who in his time were excluded and socially stigmatized: in his attitude toward the “tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7:34), the “toll collectors and prostitutes” (Matt 21:31), the “thieves, rogues, and adulterers” (Luke 18:11). People in Israel at that time felt themselves morally superior to such types. They were despised in the name of God; people avoided them and as far as possible shunned social contact with them. Jesus did the opposite and so made them his “neighbors.”23
Anger Is Forbidden
The antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount are especially important for the question of Jesus’ attitude toward the Torah; hence, our next sample will concern the first of those antitheses.24 It begins as follows:
You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that if you are [merely] angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment. (Matt 5:21-22a)
The thesis that precedes the antithesis is clear. “Those of ancient times” are the Israelites who received the Torah at Sinai. To that generation, and thus to all of Israel, “it was said.…” The passive construction is used at this point to avoid employing the name “God.” What it means is that God said to Israel, when proclaiming the Torah at Sinai, “You shall not murder.” This is a word-for-word quotation of the prohibition of murder in Exodus 20:13, with the addition of “whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” There is nothing more said about what will then happen to the murderer on trial, since that is obvious. One who murders another human being is punished with death (cf., e.g., Lev 24:17). That is the thesis. Jesus is only reminding his hearers of what was known to every Jew of his time.
But now comes his antithesis: “But I say to you.” This “but I” is uncanny, because if God has already spoken, then “but I” can only mean: “Now I am speaking with the same authority with which God formerly spoke. I am speaking in the role and in the place of God.”
And what does Jesus say? What does he proclaim with the same authority once exercised by God at Sinai? He says that bitterness against one’s brother or sister, that is, against one’s fellow believer among the people of God, is the same thing as murder. Just as a murderer is brought to judgment and then punished with death, so will anyone who is merely angry at the fellow believer be brought to judgment and punished with death.
Given the way the antithesis is laid out, the anger against the fellow believer can, naturally, only be an internal emotion, anger in the heart, cold rage against the other—that is, something that would never bring anyone before the judge because it is not justiciable. Otherwise, the antithesis would not function.25 Jesus is saying: “God has ordered that for murder one must be brought to judgment. But I am now decreeing that one must be brought to judgment even for holding anger in one’s heart.” It had to be clear to every hearer, at least after the initial shock, that while Jesus is formulating his words as a legal decree (if someone does such-and-such, then this and that will follow), in reality he is using that form only to uncover what it means to be angry with a fellow believer. It is like murder.
This play of language, sharpened to the utmost, is characteristic of Jesus. He can use imagery that is scarcely bearable, such as that of a beam in the eye (Matt 7:3), of tearing out one’s own eye (Matt 5:29), of swallowing a camel (Matt 23:24). But he can also play with rhetorical genres to provoke or, better, to bring his hearers to insights they constantly repress. In our case this is the recognition that the deep division in the people of God that prevents them from becoming a sign for the world begins with anger against the sister or brother. No, it does not merely begin there; when anger is present, destruction is already at hand. Internal bitterness is murder of the sister or brother, murder of the people of God.
What was Jesus doing with this antithetical speech in Matthew 5:21-22? Did he abolish the Torah, or the fifth commandment of the Decalogue? By no means! Did he replace the Torah with a new commandment? Not that either! He left the fifth commandment as it stands, irreplaceable and unconditionally necessary. But he grasped it down to its roots. Murder begins in the heart and the head. It begins with anger.
And now the crucial point: this working out of the root of the fifth commandment happens already in the Torah itself. It is nothing new. When Cain was envious of his brother, when his anger boiled over and his face sank to the ground, God said to him, “If you do well, can you not look up? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen 4:7).26 This assumes that murder begins in the mind. Outwardly Cain had not yet done anything. But he is already on the point of murdering his brother. The evil intent is working in him. Sin is already threatening.
Human judges cannot govern thoughts; they are not justiciable. But before God the human being is a single unit, irreducible, indivisible. Therefore, one is to love God with the whole heart, soul, and strength (Deut 6:4). The trinity of “heart, soul, and strength” encompasses everything that is human: from the heart, the innermost sphere of the human, through the realm of communication (“soul” in Hebrew = “throat,” “speech”), to the external, material sphere that surrounds us (“strength” in Hebrew = “ability,” “property”). It is as this all-encompassing, indivisible unity that a human being is to love God.
No one can honor God externally while remaining far from God in one’s heart. In essence Jesus did nothing in the first antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount but set before the eyes of his audience this basic knowledge of the Torah about the indivisibility of the human. Certainly in doing so he was being provocative and speaking with the utmost radicality. But for him it was about the Torah of Sinai.
Divorce Is Forbidden
In very similar fashion Jesus provokes his audience in the third antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. The antithesis form is secondary here.27 Also, the clause that permits divorce in the case of adultery was added by Matthew or the tradition before him. Originally the prohibition of divorce was probably worded something like this: “Anyone who divorces his wife causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matt 5:32).28
What is he saying? We can only understand it if we are familiar with divorce law in Palestinian Judaism. Divorce was permitted—for the man. He was allowed to divorce his wife by appealing to Deuteronomy 24:1, should it be that “she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her.” In light of that very loose formula it was relatively easy for a man, at least as far as the law was concerned, to dissolve his marriage to his wife. He only had to utter the formula of divorce, “You are no longer my wife, and I am no longer your husband,”29 and hand her the writ of divorce. The marriage was at an end. But only the husband could do it. A wife could not dismiss her husband from their marriage.
Other parts of Palestinian-Jewish marriage law based on the Torah also show how unequally the wife was treated under
the law. Thus a man who had intercourse with another woman by no means violated his own marriage; at most, if the other woman was married, he committed adultery against her husband. It was a different matter for the wife! In committing adultery she violated her own marriage. Here it is quite clear that the wife was not regarded as a partner but as part of her husband’s property; he had an almost material right to treat her as he wanted. By committing adultery a wife diminished her husband’s property; he, in contrast, by committing adultery could at most diminish the value of another man’s property.
Only when we consider this social background can we understand why Jesus formulates his prohibition of divorce altogether in terms of the husband. The wife had no right in any case to divorce her husband, so Jesus speaks to the man. He puts this before his eyes: anyone who divorces his wife may force her to seek another husband because otherwise she cannot exist economically. So with the new husband she violates her first marriage, and her first husband is guilty of it because, in sending her away, he has driven her into that situation. But the new husband is also committing adultery, namely, against the first marriage from which the wife had been dismissed. To us the prohibition of divorce in its Matthean version seems extremely complicated and awkward, but Jesus had to speak that way against the background of the Palestinian-Jewish marriage law then in force. But this is by no means an adequate explanation of Jesus’ harsh prohibition.
We first have to be clear about what it means for Jesus to declare that divorcing a wife or marrying a divorced woman is adultery. According to the Torah, adultery was a capital crime deserving punishment, in fact, the penalty of death (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22-27). But that means that Jesus calls something the Torah presumes permissible a capital crime. That was, obviously, a massive provocation.
But the provocation was all the greater because Jesus clothes what he says about divorce in the form of a legal decree. There are such decrees in the Torah, with the form “Anyone who does X shall be held guilty of Y” (e.g., Lev 17:3-4; Num 35:16-21). In legal statements of this sort the first clause is the “definition of the deed” and the subsequent clause is the “determination of the legal consequences.” Jesus’ prohibition of divorce follows this model exactly. First, in the initial clause, the action is defined: “Anyone who divorces his wife.…” In the subsequent clause this action is further defined as a serious sin, namely, causing adultery: “…causes her to commit adultery.” In this case the “determination of the legal consequences” need not be articulated because everyone knew it: if adultery was proved, the punishment was death by stoning.
So Jesus uses a legal degree as provocation. But does he really intend to establish a law? Certainly not. He is not making law here any more than he is when he says “If you are angry with a brother or sister you are liable to judgment.” The intention of his words is to shake people up, to uncover the truth, to show up the falsity of the divorce practice of his time. It is true that he plays on the form of legal decrees, but not in order to give a new law; rather, he means to carry his contemporaries’ practice ad absurdum.
And what is Jesus’ attitude to the Torah in this instance? Is he destroying it? Is he declaring it invalid, at least on the question of divorce? Is there a concrete point at which he shows how questionable it is for him? None of these questions does justice to Jesus’ true intent. First of all, we must point out that the Torah contains no specific law that permits divorce. Deuteronomy 24:1-4 forbids any man to remarry a woman previously his wife whom he has divorced and who has then married another man. The procedure for divorce through the giving of a writ appears rather incidentally, namely, as background to the whole legal problem. The process is thus assumed as the normal course of things. So Jesus does not speak against an ordinance, certainly not a commandment in Torah, but instead against the old common law to which the Torah does not object.
Moreover, Jesus appeals, against this common law, to the true will of God—in fact, and this is crucial, to the will of God as expressed at the very beginning of the Torah. This we see in Mark 10:2-12, where Jesus refers to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24:
But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate. (Mark 10:6-9)
According to Mark 10, then, Jesus appeals to the Torah itself against a common law the Torah presupposes. He appeals to the creation story, which is part of the Torah. He appeals to the deep, inseparable unity there promised to the two marriage partners.
This should make it clear that Jesus’ prohibition of divorce is not directed against the Torah as such but instead clarifies a particular point of Torah. With his provocative statement, clothed in legal language, he extends protection to the wife who is handed over to the man’s whim and degraded to the status of a thing, and he also protects the true will of God, whose original purpose, obscured by common law, is no longer perceptible.
Jesus against the Fourth Commandment?
The next sample belongs to a completely different part of the Jesus tradition. Matthew and Luke (Matt 8:21-22 // Luke 9:59-60) both offer a saying of Jesus that calls for discipleship with the utmost harshness. In Luke’s version it reads, “To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the [reign] of God.’” Today we can only be shocked by the irresponsibility of the saying, but at that time it must have had a far more dreadful and disgusting impact on the hearers, for throughout antiquity, and especially in Judaism, it was an obvious and positively sacred obligation of a son to bury his parents with honor. Still more, in Judaism it was not merely a pious duty; it was ordered by the fourth commandment of the Decalogue.
That commandment is addressed to adults. It commanded adult sons, in particular, to attend to their elderly parents, to treat them with respect, to see that they are properly cared for and socially secure, and in the end to bury them respectfully and honorably. Tobit 4:3-5 illuminates this very concrete content of the commandment quite well:
[Tobit says to his son Tobias] “My son, when I die, give me a proper burial. Honor your mother and do not abandon her all the days of her life. Do whatever pleases her, and do not grieve her in anything. Remember her, my son, because she faced many dangers for you while you were in her womb. And when she dies, bury her beside me in the same grave. Revere the LORD all your days, my son, and refuse to sin or to transgress his commandments.”
Evidently the fourth commandment was urgently necessary for this purpose. The Torah, and the Old Testament Wisdom literature, both reveal that it repeatedly happened that weak and vulnerable parents were taunted by their sons (Prov 30:17), cursed (Exod 21:17), beaten (Exod 21:15), robbed (Prov 28:24), mistreated (Prov 19:26), and even driven from their own property (Prov 19:26). Such excesses were, of course, also related to the fact that in Israel, as throughout the ancient Near East, the father of a family possessed a power over his children that is unimaginable to us; it could not fail to provoke a reaction. Add to this that in Israel the security given to aged parents by the cult of the ancestors was a thing of the past. For that very reason, the fourth commandment of the Decalogue fulfilled an extraordinarily important social function.30 Its role was completely different from the one it serves nowadays, when it is mainly addressed to young children who are supposed to behave well and be obedient to their parents.
When Jesus says to someone who wants first to go home and bury his father, “let the dead bury their own dead!” it must have been very disturbing to those who heard him. It was fundamentally scandalous to them. The theologian and Judaism scholar Martin Hengel (1926–2009) remarks on Luke 9:60:
There is hardly one logion of Jesus which more sharply runs counter to law, piety and custom than does Mt 8.22 = Lk 9.60a, the more so as here
we cannot justify the overriding of these in the interests of humanitarian freedom, higher morality, greater religious intensity or even “neighbourliness.” The saying is completely incompatible with the old liberal picture of Jesus and with more modern attempts to resuscitate this.
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So does Jesus speak “counter to” the fourth commandment in this harsh saying, and thus against the Torah? Does he override the Torah, at least on this one important point? I most certainly would not say that, for in other places, such as Mark 7:9-13, Jesus can just as emphatically and uncompromisingly defend the rights of parents against their impious children.32
Jesus always looks at the individual case. He sees it precisely as it is. He considers each instance for its own sake. He possesses an unimaginable feeling for what God’s cause demands in each case and where God’s will is being avoided and twisted into its opposite, even when that takes place under the cover of devotion to the Law.
For Jesus, that the man who first wanted to bury his father or be beside him in his last days should instead follow him immediately was more important than the fourth commandment. The reign of God, now arriving, surpasses everything in its urgency and shoves it into second place. The advancing reign of God leaves no more time for anything else. Therefore Jesus’ disciples have to divest themselves of all familial considerations and ties.
Jesus’ intent here is neither to offend against the Torah nor to abrogate it; he is simply concerned with the more important and urgent matter within the Torah. The fourth commandment is not eliminated, but in a particular concrete instance it is subordinated to the first commandment. We have already seen that for Jesus the coming of the reign of God is nothing but the eschatological historicization and making present of what the first commandment intends (cf. chap. 11 above).