Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

“What credit is that to you?” The translation is unhelpful. In this passage in the Greek we find charis three times. What it means is: if you have already mutually lent and paid back, what “reward” or “thanks” do you expect from God? But charis is also, and primarily, “charm,” “beauty,” “grace.” If everything depends solely on precisely calculated mutuality, on “you help me, then I’ll help you,” the world is not only devoid of grace, it lacks any kind of charm or beauty. But in the company of the people of God there is supposed to be the beauty of freedom and complete undeserving. The people of God should reflect God’s graciousness.

The ancient world thought differently: one was reasonably expected to give only where one received, and it was perfectly all right to hate one’s enemies. In fact, one should do them harm whenever possible. So, for example, Meno, in Plato’s dialogue with that name, is supposed to have been asked by Socrates about the specific virtues of a man. He replies, “This is a man’s virtue: to be able to manage public business, and in doing it to help friends and hurt enemies, and to take care to keep clear of such mischief himself.”¹⁶ And one last example: the Greek poet Archilochos (seventh c. BCE) writes, “I know how to love those who love me, how to hate. My enemies I overwhelm with abuse.”¹⁷

That is, in fact, how the majority of ancient society saw things. This was the normal, usual, commonsense attitude. Plato was one of the few who disrupted that line of thinking. In the very first book of his great work on the state, through the mouth of Socrates, he picks apart the basic premise that it is justice to do good to friends and evil to enemies, to love those who deserve it and hate those who are wicked.¹⁸ And in the dialogue Crito, again through the mouth of Socrates, he proposes as a basic principle that no one may do injustice under any circumstances. It is true that most people (!) believe that someone to whom injustice has been done is entitled to do injustice in return. But no, one may not slander in return, one may not mistreat someone in return, not even when it has been done to oneself.¹⁹

It was not until the Roman Stoics that these basic principles proposed by Plato were again taken up—especially by Musonius, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca (d. 65 CE) warns to answer evil not with evil but instead with good. He gives as a reason: “If… you wish to imitate the gods, then bestow benefits upon the ungrateful as well as the grateful; for the sun rises upon the wicked as well as the good, the seas are open even to pirates.”²⁰ Seneca is very close to the Sermon on the Mount here. But such thinking remained an exception in antiquity, and the Stoics themselves usually gave other reasons for their aversion to hatred. For example, they reflected on whether it was good for the human being to hate and to get angry. Perhaps it was contrary to the dignity of one’s own person, and it could also be that it was not beneficial to the soul’s tranquility.

That was certainly not stupid, but such reasoning is worlds removed from Jesus. His challenge to love of enemies was for him the consequence of the reign of God, now coming to pass. It was a consequence of the love with which God loves the world and of God’s will to transform the world.

So we should not underestimate the breakthroughs regarding the thought patterns of antiquity accomplished by Plato and the Stoics. But at the same time we must see clearly what was commonplace and widely held at the time. Only then can we ask: where did Jesus get his idea about love of enemies that confronts us with such elementary force in the Sermon on the Mount? Is he not, at least in the case of love of enemies, going far beyond the Torah?

Apparently not. For the holiness code, where it speaks of love for one’s “brother/sister,” for one’s “kin,” and for one’s “neighbor,” includes the enemy as a matter of course. It is said that “you shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin.… You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people” (Lev 19:17, 18). The person against whom one bears hatred in one’s heart is one’s enemy. And the one against whom one seeks vengeance is one’s enemy. But even the enemy in Israel is a “brother/sister,” is “kin,” and therefore there can be no hatred against him or her. So the commandment to love one’s neighbor in Leviticus 19 includes the enemy. But the Torah says it much more clearly in another place: within the still older “book of the covenant” incorporated in the book of Exodus (Exod 21:1–23:33) there is a very explicit commandment about how to behave toward one’s enemies:

When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back. When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would hold back from setting it free, you must help [your enemy] to set it free. (Exod 23:4-5)