“Jesus said to him, ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.'”
Matthew 19:21 ESV
Compare this to the statement in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus says, “To be perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect.” The context is the same as the Sermon on the Mount, and a wealthy young man had come to him and asked him what good deed must be done to earn eternal life. Jesus responded first by saying that no one is good but for the Father in heaven. Then he went on and said that a person should keep the commandments.
Jesus didn’t really answer his question to begin with. He needed to correct an assumption the young man was making, which is that people can be good enough to gain eternal life.
The young man wasn’t catching on, though. The man pressed Jesus further, asking which commandments must be kept to gain eternal life, as if there was some formula that would work. He wanted Jesus to boil it down to the right formula so he could do what he needs to do and get on with his life and check them off and get on with his life.
So Jesus played along and began to recite the commandments:
“And Jesus said, ‘You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother, and, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.'”
Matthew 19:18-19 ESV
Notice that Jesus doesn’t go through all the Ten Commandments. If we are paying attention, we notice that Jesus started in the middle of the Ten Commandments, and he recited only five commandments. In fact he only recited the commandments on the horizontal plane – the commandments focusing on our relationship with others. He skips over the commandments, focusing on our relationship with God (love the Lord your God, keep the Sabbath, etc.)
I will come back to the fact that Jesus only focused on half the commandments, but I want to tie this passage back into the Sermon on the Mount first. The entirety of the Sermon on the Mount is a reflection on moving from the commandments as a list of rules to a heart attitude toward God and people.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus upped the ante. Jesus repeatedly recited a rule, like you shall not murder, followed by a statement that goes to the heart. If you are angry with your brother, if you have contempt for him, if you call him a fool, you have violated the spirit of the rule. (Matt. 5:21-22)
If you do not commit adultery, that’s great: but if you lust after someone, you have violated the spirit of the rule about not committing adultery. In your heart you have violated the rule.
We can control our conduct so as not to violate the rules outwardly, but the real point of the rules gets at the attitude of our hearts. If our hearts are wrong we have violated the spirit of the rules. The rules are not what God ultimately wants us to master. He wants us to see the attitude of our hearts and recognize that something is amiss.
The whole point of the rules is to understand that God wants us to love each other. He is not looking for rule followers. He is looking for people whose hearts have the right orientation – to love each other.
The same is true of the rest of the Ten Commandments that focus on our relationship with God. Go is not looking for people who are able to master the rules. He is looking for people who genuinely love Him from the heart. This is a much more difficult standard to achieve than merely following the rules.
Both the Sermon on the Mount and the response Jesus gave to the rich young man focus only on the commandments. The focus is on our relationship to other people. These commandments can be summarized in one statement: Love others as you love yourself.
The word love can be misunderstood. When people critique the phrase “Love is love,” putting parameters on what love. People say things such as, “Love does not mean that we should tolerate sin.” People say, “It isn’t loving not to point out the sin in others.” People say it isn’t loving to allow others to continue in their sin that jeopardizes their salvation” (as if we have something to do with their salvation).
While there seems to be some logic in this thinking, the orientation is wrong. We are not the judge of another person. We don’t save anyone. It isn’t our job to convict them of their sin or to make sure that they do not sin.
Jesus told us to love others. Full stop. There is no commandment making us responsible for the actions or the attitudes of other people. The commandments focus on us and on what we do or do not do. We usurp God’s authority to think that we have any responsibility or authority beyond that.
(There may be some exception to this to the extent it relates to someone who has already committed themselves to Christ. Paul says we have no business judging the world (they have a judge, and it isn’t us), but we should judge those in the church. (1 Cor. 5:13) we can judge the actions of people who have made the commitment to Christ based on our mutual commitment, but those outside the church have not made that commitment. They are lost in their sin, and it isn’t our business to judge them.)
We all know John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son into the world, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.” But perhaps, we forget John 3:17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
This should be our orientation toward those in the world – those outside the church. We are not to judge or to condemn. We should have the same attitude as Jesus, who was sent into the world to save it. Not that we are the saviors of the world. We aren’t. We are simply called to love the world as God loves the world.
Jesus also described love. Jesus didn’t leave it as a mystery. Love is reflected in the Ten Commandments. Love is reflected in the extension of the Ten Commandments to a heart attitude toward people. Don’t kill anyone, and don’t be so mad at someone that you despise them. Don’t commit adultery, and don’t lust after women in your heart.
In these descriptions of what love is, there is not one hint of limitation based on who the other person is. The only focus is on actions flowing out of a right heart from the person who is to love, which is all of us.
Jesus doesn’t qualify the command to love. He doesn’t tell us to love people only if they deserve it, or only if they acknowledge their sin, only if they believe in Jesus
Let’s get real here. Jesus didn’t say that we should only love people who are attracted to the opposite sex, that we should only love people who are married to a member of the opposite sex, or that we should only love people unless they are transgender or Democrat, or anything else.
Let’s get even more real. Jesus made it pretty clear that love has nothing to do with affection. Love doesn’t matter with how we feel about someone else. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Good Samaritan loved the man who was beaten and left dying on the road because of what he did for him. There is no hint that the Samaritan’s feelings about that person had anything to do with loving them.
Jesus does not talk about our feelings toward other people in his commands or descriptions about what love is. Our feelings have nothing to do with love. Jesus said:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
Matthew 5:43-44
Few people, if anyone, have affections toward their enemies. We might not even like our neighbors. If we love only the people that we like, we are no different than anyone else in the world. “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?” (Matt. 5:46)
The love Jesus is talking about is not driven by feelings. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the focus of Jesus was on doing what he said. (Matt. 8:24) Love is an action. The kind of love that Jesus told us we should have toward our neighbors and even our enemies is reflected in what we do.
In this world influenced by Disney movies, we have reduced love to affectionate feelings, and we have idolized romantic feelings in particular. The logical conclusion of this limitation on love is that we justify not loving people when those feelings go away, and we should pursue those feelings if they become attached to someone else. This has led to an anemic church in which divorce is as common as it is in the world.
Standing opposed to that is Jesus’ teaching on marriage and divorce. He says in Matthew 19:7-8 that Moses allowed people to divorce because they were hard of heart, but that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be from the beginning.
The vows between a man and a woman were intended to be a lasting covenant that is not to be broken. The highest form of love in a biblical sense is not limited to affectionate or romantic feelings. In fact, the highest form of biblical love is the opposite. We are to love even our enemies.
When the rich young man claimed to Jesus that he has kept the commandments since he was young and asked what he lacked, Jesus told him to go sell everything he has and give it to the poor. (Matt. 19:21) In this final interchange, Jesus got to the heart of the rich young man. He wasn’t willing to part with his possessions to love other people.
I don’t think Jesus was necessarily saying that a person who holds on to his possessions cannot have eternal life. I think the point was similar to the point he makes in the Sermon on the Mount – that we don’t get to heaven by following a list of rules. We need to understand the spirit behind the commandments – to love others.
I find it interesting that Jesus told the rich young man that to be perfect (not just good) would require him to sell off his possessions and give them to the poor. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus used the same phrase, “being perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” in the context of loving even our neighbors. (Matt. 5:48)
Of course, no one is perfect but God. No one is good but God. No one is righteous but God. No one can earn their salvation by being good, perfect, or good, because we all fall short. The rules were not given to us as a means for our salvation. The rules were given to us to show us our need of a Savior and to lead us into a loving relationship with God and each other.
Jesus upped the ante to show us that we cannot hope to accomplish our own salvation. He upped the ante to show us our need for God’s mercy. He upped the ante to show us that we should have the same attitude of mercy toward others as God has toward us.
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
Matt. 7:1
We may not be able to be perfect or even good. We may not be able to keep the Ten Commandments perfectly. We may fall short, but we can love others as we love ourselves. We can do unto others as we would have them do unto us. We can extend to others the same mercy God has extended to us.
If we love others, we fulfill the law. (Romans 8:10; Galatians 5:14) “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love…. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:8, 20)
Jesus does not even get into the vertical commands – love God, keep the Sabbath, etc. – in the Sermon on the Mount or in his response to the rich young man, perhaps, because the most objective way for us to know whether we love God is how we relate to other people. If we do not love people, we cannot even talk about loving God. If we fail to love people, we can see, we do not love God.
Jesus summarizes everything he said in the Sermon on the Mount. He says simply to put into practice the things that he said, and the things that he said are all about loving our neighbors and even our enemies. These are the things we should do.
Doing these things does not flow from our feelings toward people, and it has nothing to do with the virtue or character of people. It flows from our relationship with God – from the forgiveness and the mercy He has shown us. We can only love because God first loved us. We demonstrate our love for God by doing what Jesus told us to do – which is to love other people.
The illustration Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount of God’s love is that “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matt. 5:45) He loved us while we were yet sinners. (Rom. 5:8) We should extend this same love toward others. This is the perfection toward which God instructs us to devote our lives.
