Today we’ll look at a single verse, and it’s one of the best known out of all of Jesus’ teaching. Let’s read Matthew 7:12: So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.
This verse is often referred to as “the golden rule” and it’s easy to see why. It’s a simple principle that can be applied in any and every interaction you might have with another human being. No matter when or where you live or in which circumstances you find yourself, you can always ask yourself that one basic question: how would I want this other person to treat me if our positions were reversed?
It works even in situations about which Jesus never gave any explicit instructions. How should you behave when you’re, for example, driving your car? Or browsing the Internet? Or using social media? Jesus wouldn’t have known anything about many modern scenarios, but the ‘golden rule’ he taught can nonetheless be applied to them.
Why does it work? Because it’s very easy for human beings to imagine how we’d like to be treated in a particular situation. We know instinctively what would please us or comfort us or hurt us or scare us. Our brains are naturally wired to make those kinds of judgements for our own survival and pleasure. Jesus simply taught that we should take that easily-accessible information and use it to guide the way we treat others.
Obviously there are some situations in which other principles need to take priority. For example, if you were working as a security guard and you caught someone trying to steal valuables from a shop, this would not be the right principle to apply. If you were the intruder in that situation it’s likely you’d want the security guard to let you go scot free. Would that make it the right thing for the security guard to do, based on the ‘golden rule’? Or should he ensure the intruder is brought to justice?
There are always going to be a few scenarios in which a particular principle either doesn’t apply or is overtaken by another one. Principles are not hard-and-fast rules to be applied rigidly in all circumstance. That was the misunderstanding which many of Jesus’ listeners had.
Law and order
The idea that the entirety of the law and prophets (in other words, the majority of the Old Testament) could be summed up in a one-liner must have seemed bizarre or even offensive to some of the more legalistically-minded Jews who heard Jesus teach. Many religious Jews had very detailed instructions on how the various Old Testament laws ought to be kept, along with additional laws they’d devised in order to close off loopholes or handle situations that weren’t mentioned in the Torah.
It’s essential to understand that, obviously, Jesus wasn’t advocating throwing the Old Testament away and replacing it with this one line from his teaching, or even replacing it with all of his teaching. He treated the Old Testament as holy scripture inspired by God, regularly quoted from it, and recognised that much of it was referring to his own life and role as the Messiah. While he taught that the Old Testament law was fulfilled in his own perfect obedience to God – and Paul would later teach that the law’s purpose was really only to get people to understand that they needed to rely on Jesus and not themselves – Jesus never considered the law to be useless or irrelevant.
Much of Jesus’ teaching was designed to answer the question: “OK, so you’ve decided you need to repent and believe in me – so how should you live your life from that point on?”. Jesus wanted you to be able to think for yourself and apply principles to various life experiences, not simply rely on a list of rules to be ticked off one at a time.
One for all
As always, it’s easy to make the mistake of trying so hard to avoid one extreme that you end up at the other extreme. In this case, some people can be so determined to move away from a legalistic rules-based faith that they misunderstand what Jesus said. They assume that all of Jesus’ own teaching could also be summed up in this one-liner known as the golden rule.
In effect, they distill his entire message of salvation into a single commandment to “be kind”. While Jesus would certainly have agreed that we should treat each others with kindness, that wasn’t the sum total of his teaching. It’s impossible to be a Christian without also accepting Jesus’ teaching on sin, repentance, forgiveness and eternal life in God’s Kingdom. Showing kindness to people without teaching or applying the rest of the gospel message ultimately does no good either for them or for yourself.
Context
Another mistake that’s easy to make is to take this verse out of context and treat it as something which Jesus said in isolation from anything else, like a standalone proverb or wise saying. When doing Bible study, context is always key.
In this case, the ‘golden rule’ verse seems to act as a conclusion to a passage in which Jesus has been teaching in the context of how we treat others. He’s taught the importance of not judging other people in a hypocritical way. He’s also taught that nevertheless there are some situations in which passing judgement is necessary and some people are to be avoided. He’s taught about how to ask in faith for God to give you good things, to remember that God is not some distant uncaring deity but a Father who loves you.
If there is one word which sums up the theme of this passage, perhaps it would be ‘discernment’ – whether that means discerning the same faults in yourself that you see in others, or discerning when to avoid certain people, or discerning when and how to make requests of God.
And, in the case of the ‘golden rule’, Jesus taught the need to discern the right thing to do when interacting with other people, particularly in situations when there isn’t an explicit instruction in the Bible.
As I’ve already indicated, a Christian should not blindly follow a set of rules. A Christian should use Jesus’ examples and principles to discern what to do in whatever circumstance we find ourselves.
Jesus wants you to think and he wants your thinking to be consistently changed and moulded to be more like his own. Following a set of commandments does nothing to achieve that.
In fact, it’s easy to follow a set of commandments while maintaining an entirely selfish and mean-spirited attitude. For example, some of the religious Jews had a practice known as Corban, in which a man could devote some of his wealth or property to the temple of God. That sounds like a good and pious thing to do, until you realise that the devotion of these things might not take place until after his death, meaning he was free to use them to please himself in the meantime, and in fact had an excuse to keep them to himself instead of using them to care for people who were depending on him.
Jesus called this out in no uncertain times (see e.g. Matthew 15:3-6). This is a good example of when strict obedience to a law does nothing to change a person’s heart and mind, but application of the ‘golden rule’ – asking what you’d want to be done if you were in the position of the dependent – would have shown the right way to go.
Unique to Jesus?
Some people argue that the ‘golden rule’ isn’t unique to Jesus. It’s claimed that it appears in various forms in other religious traditions either earlier or later than his own teaching.
Whether or not this is true, I don’t think it really matters, because – as I said – it’s not simply a wise saying that Jesus came out with one day and wanted his followers to memorise. It’s part of a larger body of teaching and can’t be taken in isolation on its own. Comparing the totality of Jesus’ teaching to that found in other religious traditions will quickly show that he was far and away the greatest moral authority who ever lived.
Extending it
The ‘golden rule’ is a principle to be thought about and applied to your own personal circumstances. That being so, it’s possible to apply it in ways other than direct reciprocity between yourself and another individual.
For example, it could be put this way: ‘do to others what you’d like God to do to you’. We’ve already seen Jesus teach that if you want God to forgive your sins, you’ve got to be willing to forgive other people when they wrong you.
Another example could be that if a young man is in a relationship with a young woman, he should treat her the way he’d want his own sister or mother or daughter to be treated by her partner – with gentleness, respect and integrity. And similarly from the perspective of a young lady.
Examples such as these fit in perfectly with Jesus’ preceding instructions not to be hypocritical in the way you approach others, and to recognise that God’s goodness as your Father is a blueprint for how you should treat those who need something from you.
Nihilist to Christian 