In chapter 12 of Mark’s Gospel Jesus is asked which is the greatest of all the commandments. He answers:
‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, The Lord is one; and you shall 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, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’[1]
Both these are quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. The first, Deuteronomy 6, verse 4, and the second Leviticus 19, verse 18.
A near contemporary of Jesus, Hillel, a Rabbi who lived c.110BCE-10CE [2], said:
‘Do not do to another person what is unwelcome to you: this is the entire Law, and the rest (of Scripture) is interpretation.’[3]
In the same way, I would argue that the real message of Christianity, the real point of it, are those words of Jesus. The rest of scripture, indeed, the rest of Theology, is a comment on those words… So let me comment:
It is often said that religion is about morality. Christianity has been called an ethical monotheism, that is, a belief in one God who requires our good behaviour. I do not think this is true at all. You might ask “Why?”
All living things, including plants, have some sort of consciousness. For instance, at night time, daisies will be closed. They respond to daylight by opening up. However primitive and simple, that is a form of consciousness. The higher primates, like Orangutans, do have something that approaches self-consciousness, but only human beings, so far as we know, are fully self-conscious. You and I are aware that we exist as separate beings; not only separate, but finite. We know we have a beginning and we are also aware that our existence as self-conscious beings will come to an end. We have sought to alleviate the anxiety this obviously produces by creating for ourselves a being outside of, nature, who will guarantee our existence after death. I think this makes us look in the wrong place for comfort and a source of ethical living.
Nearly every religion in the world has a theology of atonement (at-one-ment). Despite the benefits self-consciousness gives us, we are nevertheless left with a sense of disconnection from everything else, including other people. Your cats and dogs live in the moment, so do newborn babies. The whole of reality is a unity to them, of which, of course, they are unaware.
It seems to me that the true message of religion, and certainly of Christianity, is not to be found in following a ‘God’ given rule book, nor either in putting our hopes in a supernatural guarantor of life beyond life. God and the good, are not to be sought in the non-real or the un-natural. Rather, God, and therefore goodness, is found at the very heart of what is real and natural. Jesus calls us to love the totality of being, that is God; one another and ourselves. I would rather see that totality as a unified whole, rather than a collection of separate beings.
As Einstein said,
‘A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty’.[4]
It is in this totality of being that we find God. It is in loving that totality of being, that we find goodness. To misquote John Donne:
‘No being is an island, entire of itself;
every thing is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
Any thing’s demise diminishes me,
because I am part of everything;’[5]
For me Christianity is not about believing in and obeying a supernatural being who will reward us in the afterlife. Christianity should be about loving, now. In loving we can find union, now, and through that union we acknowledge that what hurts another hurts me.
In loving we find that we are loved. So;
Beloved,
Let us love one another;
For there is no fear in love, since perfect love casts out fear.
If we love one another, love dwells in us and love is perfected in us.
Love is,
and whoever lives in love is truly alive, for love lives in them…[6]
So, Happy New Year everyone, and may it be a loving one too.
[1] Mark 12.29-31 RSV
[2] It’s commonplace now, in Religious studies, to use BCE (Before the Current Era) and CE (Current Era), which are identical to BC and AD. Given that Hillel was a Jew it seems appropriate to use these abbreviations.
[3] Carpenter, Humphrey, Jesus, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) 51.
[4] Wikiquote, Pantheism, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pantheism
[5] John Donne, Meditation XVII see Oakley, Mark, ed. John Donne, Verse and Prose, (
[6] Based on 1 John 4, 7 ff
