IN JESUS’ DAY, there were two major schools of rabbinic thought. Some rabbis followed the teachings of the great sage Hillel, while others followed the teachings of his colleague Shammai. Hillel and Shammai often disagreed on matters of Jewish law and ethics; Hillel tended to give the more lenient interpretation versus Shammai’s stricter reading. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Hillel’s reading was usually more widely accepted. And by the time of Jesus, Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel would become one of the teachers of the apostle Paul.

There’s a famously charming story about Hillel and Shammai in the Talmud (you can think of the Talmud as an encyclopedic rabbinic commentary on the Law and Jewish life). A Gentile who was considering converting to Judaism came to Shammai one day and issued this challenge: he would only convert if Shammai could teach him the whole of Torah while the man stood on one foot. Insulted, Shammai scoffed at this ridiculous and impossible challenge and threw the man out.

So the Gentile took his challenge to Hillel instead. But unlike Shammai, Hillel was game. I imagine him smiling as he told the astonished Gentile, “What is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else. This is the whole Law; all the rest is only commentary.”

THE GOLDEN RULE, as it’s often known, may be the most widely known verse from the entire Sermon on the Mount, and it’s easy to see how what Jesus says parallels the teaching of Hillel:

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matt 7:12, NIV)

The version of the saying in Luke’s gospel is shorter and more direct:

Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6:31)

Consider this question: how does one teach ethics and morality? Indeed, how does the Bible teach ethics and morality? The late theologian Richard Hays, in a highly influential book entitled The Moral Vision of the New Testament, suggested that there are four ways Christian ethicists have appealed to Scripture, and that these in turn reflect the variety of ways Scripture itself teaches morality. Here, I want us to focus on just the first two.

The first and most obvious way to shape morality is to make rules like the Ten Commandments. But second and more generally, we can also find moral principles in Scripture, such as “Love your neighbor as yourself,” or the Golden Rule. We may call these commandments or rules, but neither is as concrete, say, as the prohibitions against murder or adultery. They function more like moral guidelines, so Hays calls them principles instead.

Think, then, of what both Hillel and Jesus were doing. One could go the route of the scribes and Pharisees and make the whole of Judaism and obedience to God’s law a matter of making and following rules. This is an endless and exhausting task, as new situations would require creating and remembering new rules.

The other approach would be to summarize the essential spirit of the rules into a life principle, to capture the heart of the Law in a memorable phrase that would guide people in God’s way without telling them exactly what to do in every instance.

In Matthew’s gospel, this is what Jesus did when debating the Pharisees in the courts of the Jerusalem temple during the last week of his life. The Sadducees had tried to embarrass Jesus publicly but failed, so the Pharisees took a turn. With mock sincerity, they addressed Jesus as “teacher,” then asked a question to test him and potentially embroil him in controversy: “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” (Matt 22:36). Unfazed, Jesus responded:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (vss. 37-40)

“All of the Law and the Prophets,” Jesus says, referring to whole of Hebrew Scripture. It all depends on these two commandments, drawn from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, respectively. Notice that with this answer, Jesus goes beyond the question put to him by the Pharisees. They had asked which of the commandments was the greatest. He gave them two, which together were not only greater than any other commandment, but the most essential to the whole.

All of the teaching of Scripture, Jesus told the Pharisees, boiled down to love: a wholehearted love of God and an unselfish love of neighbor. I’ll say more about this in the next post, but we should probably take the Golden Rule as a different way to say the same thing Jesus said to the Pharisees: we are to treat others with love, just as we would want to be treated with love ourselves.

THE TEACHING OF Jesus and Hillel go hand in hand. But they’re not the same. Hillel frames the teaching negatively: Don’t treat other people the way you would hate to be treated yourself. Think of the things you wouldn’t want someone to do to you, and refrain from doing those things to others. Jesus, however, frames it positively: In whatever way you want other people to treat you, that’s how you should treat them.

Hillel’s teaching, frankly, is easier. Let’s say I’m angry at someone else and tempted to bite their head off. Hillel might put a kindly hand on my shoulder and ask, “Would you want someone to bite your head off if they were angry at you? No? Well then, don’t do that to them.” By that standard, as long as I resentfully bit my tongue and didn’t say what I was actually thinking, I’d be in the clear.

But the teaching of Jesus demands more. If someone were angry with me, how would I want to be treated? I would want them to treat me with patience, care, and consideration. I would want them to give me the benefit of the doubt. I would want them to listen to whatever I had to say.

If that’s what you want from others, Jesus says, then that’s what you owe to others. And as we’ll see next, this is how we fulfill not only the command to love our neighbors, but to love our enemies.