A friend recently asked me, “Why do some Christians focus on the Old Testament more than the New?”
There may be several reasons but certainly one of them is because it can be easier to live an Old Testament morality than one based on the Gospels.
Using the Old Testament you can build a morality around the 10 Commandments, a simple, clearly defined, list of "Thou shalt nots." You can sit down at the end of some days and say, I did not do that; I did not do that.... OK I have done everything God wanted me to do today.
New Testament morality has to be built around Jesus’s command "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength [and]You shall love your neighbor as yourself." The phrases, “love your neighbor” and “love one another” are repeated again and again in the teaching of Jesus. They are backed up by the Beatitudes, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:1-12, by the Last Judgement scene in Matthew 25: 31-46, and by Jesus’s last command to his disciples in John 13:34, “love one another as I have loved you.”
These are positive open ended commands. You can sit down at the end of a day and say, "This has been a good day" but you can never say, "I have done everything God has asked me to do." There is always room for doing more. Christian perfection is a lifelong pursuit that can only be completed when we get to heaven.
Ten Commandment Christians can stand on their moral high ground and sneer down at "them." A Gospel Christian is often called to get down in the mud and help lift up a fallen fellow creature of God.
Put it another way; Voltaire wrote, “In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.” People with a narrow judgmental soul will build a narrow judgmental God for themselves. You can do that by cherry picking verses from the Old Testament. But even there, if you read whole passages, you will find that almost every “fire and brimstone” passage is followed by a reaffirmation of God’s love.
How could I give you up, Ephraim, or deliver you up, Israel?...My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred. I will not give vent to my blazing anger, I will not destroy Ephraim again; For I am God and not a man….I will not come in wrath. — Hosea 11: 8-9.
True Christians, must have a generous, loving soul. The best way to develop that is by following the example of Jesus.
Fr. Dave Stump, S.J.
Monday, Mar 27, 2017 · 8:31:20 PM +00:00 · DaveStump
After publishing this I decided to add four comments I found elsewhere in the Daily Kos.
I will never understand how politicians who call themselves Christian can read the Gospels and then treat the poor and the sick like dirt. - James Martin, S.J.
Only in America can you find so many angry conservatives claiming to love their country, while hating almost everyone in it.
If this country was half as Christian as it likes to proclaim it is, there would be no need for a government role in caring for the poor. - Paraphrase of Jimmy Carter
Charity is not an acceptable substitute when justice is missing.
Tuesday, Mar 28, 2017 · 7:49:32 PM +00:00 · DaveStump
After reading some of the comments below I revised this to make it clearer that the problem is not that the Old Testament does not call us to love one another but that people who prefer to hate anyone not just like themselves find it easier to cherry pick around the love passages in the Old testament than to do so in the New.
I also want to add reference to two interesting articles I found recently that bear on the same topic. Nicolas Kristof’s imaginary conversation between Jesus and Paul Ryan and John Gehring’s description of a $1,250/person Conference for Conservative Catholics held at Trump International Hotel in DC which apparently spent 2 days discussing modern moral problems without ever mentioning the poor, the sick, the homeless, or refugees.
Fortunately the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has a long history of advocating Comprehensive Immigration Reform, including a path to citizenship for the Dreamers and some others and not breaking up families. And many Catholic institutions and parishes are active in the Sanctuary Movement. Unfortunately too many are not.