Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Lent Reading Day 24

The Golden Rule:

Matthew 7:12

"In everything

do to others

as you would have them do to you;

for this is the law and the prophets."

What radical words. Love your neighbor as yourself - that's how Luke tells it. So simple. Yet so impossibly difficult! I know in my own life it has seemed so easy, yet in the past 5 years I've realized how challengingly difficult it actually is. Until recently I hadn't had the exprience of really hating someone - hating them for their actions, how they treated me, treated my family, and then hating themeven more because they were the first to make me realy hate someone. Am I screwed up, or what? Yet in getting myself so wrapped up in my passionate feelings...I forget about the call to do to others and I would have them due to me. Look at the Freudian slip that I just said...I want people to do to me as I think I'm due....yet that's not what Jesus said. So what does that say about me? What does that say about our culture when that's how we operate?


I've been told - and studied - that Jesus isn't actually the only one to say this, and that he might not have been the first in ancient Palestine, and the Jewish worldview to proclaim this simplification of the 10 commandments, yet when I read it I'm convinced of the truth I've experienced in his words as they ring in my life, echo in my mind, shape my actions, and form my opinons.