When Israel’s Messiah arrived, He wasn’t exactly what they expected. His life and teaching were shockingly different to what the nation anticipated—especially in the case of the religious elite.

One of Jesus’ clearest breaks with the Messianic expectations of His time was in His Sermon on the Mount.

Throughout Matthew 5, He repeatedly highlights the fact that the Jewish establishment had perverted the Word of God with traditions. Over and over, Jesus uses some variation of His words in Matthew 5:43, “You have heard that it was said.” This brief introduction was used to identify the prevailing tradition that dominated Judaism at the time. It was a familiar phrase, used in rabbinical teaching to introduce doctrine and tradition that had been passed down through Israel’s history. However, in the mouth of the Lord, it was a subtle way to differentiate Israel’s low, defective theology from the truth of Scripture and the clear teaching of God’s law. He was effectively alerting His audience that the following statement did not represent God or the Old Testament—it simply reflected the Jews’ traditional dogma.

In Matthew 5:43, He says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’”  This rabbinical teaching was a poor and misleading paraphrase of God’s commandment in Leviticus 19:17–18: “You shall not hate your fellow countryman in your heart; you may surely reprove your neighbor, but shall not incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord.”

Comparing the rabbinical tradition with Leviticus, it’s clear that the rabbis had made some alterations. To begin with, they left off the final two words of the original command (“as yourself”)—a convenient omission.

It’s possible—perhaps even likely—that the rabbis and scribes were simply too proud to tolerate the implications of loving anyone else as much as they loved themselves. Remember, these were the same hypocrites Jesus was about to single out for their arrogance and their love for the praise of men. “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full . . . When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners to that they may be seen by men” (Matthew 6:2, 5).

Even their acts of piety and devotion were staged to draw maximum attention back onto themselves. And although the command to love others the way they loved themselves was unmistakably a part of God’s law, the prospect of obeying it would have been offensive in the extreme. Such equal love for others would have been an affront to their high view of their own spiritual status. For Israel’s religious elite, loving those they considered beneath them as though they were equals would have been inconceivable.

The fact is that it isn’t easy for any of us to love someone else as thoroughly as we love ourselves. Our love for ourselves is unfeigned, fervent, habitual, and permanent. It generally respects and prioritizes all our needs, wants, desires, hopes, and ambitions. It consistently promotes our well-being. It does everything possible to secure our own happiness and satisfaction, protect our own welfare, produce our own comfort, and meet all our own interests. It seeks our own pleasure and fulfilment, and it knows no limit of effort to secure all of these things. Scripture says that is exactly how we are to love our neighbor. But Israel’s religious elite left that out, reducing “love your neighbor” to something less than such consummate devotion.

Worse still, the rabbis and scribes had narrowed the definition of “neighbor” to exclude virtually everyone but themselves. That meant the command didn’t apply to social pariahs like the tax gatherers, who had betrayed their fellow Jews by siding with Rome and extorting their countrymen through excessive taxation. In the eyes of the Pharisees, even sharing a meal with such villains was enough to call your character into question (Matthew 9:11). In the same way, the Jews believed that the command to love one’s neighbor did not apply to adulterers, criminals, and other overt sinners (cf. Luke 18:11). Naturally, it excluded all gentiles. In fact, the narrow definition of “neighbor” even left out many of the common folk throughout Israel—for the most part, the religious leaders had nothing but disdain for their fellow Jews. Such exclusivity only served to further feed their prideful, evil hearts.

But it wasn’t enough to redact God’s instructions and deny vast swaths of the population “neighbor” status—the rabbinical tradition had also added a clause to the command. Christ’s quote of their teaching indicates that they tacked on a spurious phrase: “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy” (Matthew 5:43, emphasis added). That law of Leviticus did not have any such limitation. It said nothing about who was considered a neighbor. It didn’t separate gentiles or sort out people of a lower socioeconomic status. The divisions the rabbis and scribes were creating and enforcing had no biblical basis whatsoever. In other words, they legitimized antipathy, enmity, and hatred for others by shoehorning it into their theological tradition. Worse, they equated their sinful, self-serving addition with God’s Word.

In fact, their teaching overtly contradicted God’s law. Leviticus 19:34 says, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” Furthermore, Exodus 12:49 says, “The same law shall apply to the native as to the stranger who sojourns among you.” God’s law did not change from person to person. It was not limited by ethnic or geographical lines. It set a fixed standard that applied equally to both the Jews and the gentiles in their midst. But the religious elite had conveniently ignored that too.

In order to understand just how deeply this was entrenched, one needs to look at the literature of the time. If you read any of the Essene literature—the Qumran community where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found—you find statements like “Love all that [God] has chosen and hate all that He has rejected.”^[1] Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), 98.

We also find the exhortation to “love all the sons of light, each according to his lot in God’s design, and hate all the sons of darkness.”^[2] Vermes, Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, 99.

For such an exclusive religious sect, that could mean all non-Essenes—that’s how isolationist they had become. Across the scope of first-century Judaism, the idea of loving your neighbor had really become a license to hate. One of the maxims of the Pharisees in those days was, “If a Jew sees a gentile fallen into the sea, let him by no means lift him out, for it is written, ‘You shall not rise up against the blood of your neighbor,’ but this man is not your neighbor.” Through their reckless reinterpretation of God’s law, they could make a case for allowing a gentile to drown. They had effectively canonized their haughtiness and hatred. That was the dominant religious tradition that Jesus confronted.

But these outrageous beliefs did not develop in a vacuum. The traditions that Jesus destroys in this passage developed over generations. Next time, we’ll see how Israel perverted even more passages of Scripture to legitimize their unloving attitude toward their neighbors.

(Adapted from Stand Firm)