The Jesus ethic is the ethic of his and our Father God. It is not an ethic given to us to navigate the craziness of this world because passivity is dangerous in our world. Maybe that’s the point? The ethic, turning the other cheek, is a promise of another existence beyond the grave. The ethic is a promise that a new kind of life will exist in the other world of eternity.
Jesus preached
to all the people on that Judean hillside to love your enemies and those who spitefully
use you in this world. We all know our dismal
success rate following this believer’s expectation but when we arrive at eternities
door, we all, the successful, those who have tried and failed or those who never tried, shall be welcomed home.
Wait one
minute you say. The Bible does not say
that! The Bible says that God is the
eternal judge of our earthly lives. Yes,
God is the judge but as has been stated previously, we can find everything in
the Bible if quoted with assumptions. When Jesus spoke about
knocking at the door, was he describing our spiritual search on earth or was he
describing a passport to a blessed eternity?
You decide.
St. Luke’s
Gospel chapter 13 records the Jesus’s understanding of eternity. We can experience eternity in the now and it
is a narrow door that few will choose to access. However, the spiritual now is not
eternity. In eternity we all shall be
judged and given a seat at the table according to our God worthiness. Some of us will be seated up close to the honored
table and some of us will be seated at the outer fringes of eternity. God will decide but there is no hell talk
from Jesus.
Verse 30 has
bugged me for some 40 years. How can we
make any logical sense out of this verse if God is the judge of our eternal
destiny bound for heaven or bound for hell? One cannot. The
religious crowd that was hounding Jesus and who would finally hang him on a cross were the crux of this Jesus description of eternity. They were there, the one's who killed Jesus but they were
judged by God as unworthy of honored seating. Jesus says that in eternity, “Indeed
there are those who are last who will be first and first who will be last.”
I ask you,
who will be seated close to the action, could it be “the sinners”?
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca
