Jesus, Law and Love

Today it is not unusual for North American Christians to assume that Jesus was all about love
rather than law and to assume that love is a matter of feelings. Since Christian doctrine is based
on the story of Jesus’ life as well as on the apostles’ proclamation of his death and resurrection,
such notions about Jesus’ teaching can contribute to an antinomian attitude toward the Christian
life, that is, a view that the law of God has little to do with Christian living.
One of the most important books written about the “historical Jesus” (the portrait of Jesus which
is based on scientific historical research) is John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the
Historical Jesus, Volume Four, Law and Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). This
book fills a gap that is often missing in many commentaries, namely, a direct discussion of
Jesus’ teaching on the law in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament.
Meier demonstrates that Jesus was engaged in halaka, the practice of making legal rulings on
how to interpret the law in the Torah regarding how people should behave. Meier’s mantra is,
“The historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus.” Jesus was not a teacher of general moral principles,
but he was a Jew who claimed authority as the prophet of the kingdom of God to make rulings
about how to interpret the law in the Torah. In his rulings on how to observe the Sabbath, he
contested the strict rulings of the Essenes and some of those of the Pharisees and confirmed
the commonsense approach of the peasants, who believed that it was necessary to take actions
to care for their animals on the Sabbath and to rescue human beings who had accidents on the
Sabbath which endangered their lives, such as falling into a cistern.
There are two instances in which Jesus issued pronouncements which abrogated the law.
Jesus forbade divorce, which the law permitted, and he forbade the use of oaths, which the
law required in certain judicial cases. His prohibition of divorce was grounded in God’s will in
creation that “God made them male and female,” and “For this reason a man shall leave his
father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 1:27
and 2:24; Mark 10:2-9). His prohibition of oaths was apparently for the sake of protecting the
sacred name of God from being used by people to attest to the truthfulness of their testimony
(Matthew 5:33-37). Even though Jesus claimed authority as the prophet of the kingdom of
God to issue pronouncements which went beyond the law, this does not mean that he was
opposed to the law but only that he was engaged in the Jewish debate about how the law
given to ancient Israel should be appropriated. Other Jews in Palestine were giving their own
interpretations, and some of them actually rewrote provisions of the law without implying that
their rewriting was a lack of reverence for the law as the will of God.
Meier thinks that the closest Jesus ever came to articulating a general principle for interpreting
the law was in his teaching (Mark 12:28-34) that the first commandment is to love God
(Deuteronomy 6:4-5) and the second commandment is to love one’s neighbor (Leviticus
19:18b). Meier thinks the idea that on these two commandments “hang all the law and the
prophets” (Matthew 22:40) is Matthew’s interpretation. Jesus himself only emphasized that there
is a first and a second commandment in the law. Jesus is the first person to ever link these two
commandments in the law together. Jesus did not merely allude to these two commandments
(the great Shema in Deuteronomy and another commandment buried in a series of laws in
Leviticus), but he literally quoted them and named them first and second. In doing so, Jesus
indicated that he was a student of the Hebrew Scriptures and that he was proficient in a
technique of exegesis whereby a rabbi was allowed to bring together two different texts for
mutual interpretation if both contained the same key word or phrase. The meaning of the key
word “love” in these two commandments of the law is not that of “strong emotions,” but of
“willing and then doing” so that love of God is primarily obedience to the one, true God and
love of neighbor is the commitment to will and do good toward a fellow Israelite even if one
feels some personal enmity toward him. In this teaching, Jesus is not making the rest of the law
superfluous, for if there is a “first” commandment and a “second” commandment, then there is
also a “third” commandment and so on.
Meier observes that “love” as a noun or a verb “occurs relatively rarely on the lips of Jesus,”
and when it does occur Jesus is often citing a text from the Scriptures or commenting on it.
The notable exception is Jesus’ command, “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44b; Luke 6:27b),
which is not an interpretation of the Scriptures but a unique pronouncement of the prophet of the
kingdom of God.
Meier does not think that Jesus made love “the hermeneutical key for interpreting the whole Law
or the supreme principle from which all other commandments can be deduced or by which they
can be judged.” Yet what Jesus said about love is “startling and innovative enough.” In the end,
Jesus’ reflection on the Torah as a whole “led to love–specifically to love of God and love of
neighbor as supreme. All you need is love? Hardly. For Jesus, you need the Torah as a whole.
Nothing could be more foreign to this Palestinian Jew than a facile antithesis between Law and
love. But love, as commanded by the Law, comes first and second.”
In Meier’s judgment, a portrait of a Jesus “who is not involved in the lively halakic debates of
his fellow Jews in 1st-century Palestine, who does not reason about the Law in typically Jewish
fashion, and who does not display his charismatic authority as the eschatological prophet by
issuing some startling legal pronouncements, is not the historical Jesus. He is instead a modern
and largely American construct, favored by some Christians because he is appealing to the
marketplace of popular religion in the United States today–a religion that is highly emotional,
mostly self-centered, predictably uninterested in stringent commandments, and woefully
ignorant of history.”
This “modern and largely American construct” of Jesus is not uncommon in our discourse in the
United Methodist Church today, including our conversation about God’s will concerning human
sexuality. Too often Jesus is portrayed as an idealist or a teacher of a kind of love which is
divorced from the law and whose name is evoked to support an antinomian agenda. It is ironic
that this occurs in a church which derives from John Wesley. If there is one thing certain about
Wesley’s theology, it is that he integrated law and gospel. His three sermons on the moral law
of God in his standard sermons clearly demonstrate Wesley’s conviction that the gospel did
not annul the law, but it “established” the law “through faith” for those who have been justified
by God’s grace through Jesus Christ and who are going on towards “perfection in love” by the
energy of the Holy Spirit.