THERE ARE 39 books in what Protestant Christians call the Old Testament, and the books vary greatly in style and content. Some give mostly historical accounts of the lives and exploits of God’s people, including such key figures as Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and David. Some teach wisdom like Job and Proverbs, and may even be poetic, like Psalms and the Song of Songs. And some are oracles of God delivered through his chosen prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Who would even try to distill all of this depth and diversity into a pithy sentence or two?

Jesus would. For that matter, as we’ve seen, so would the Rabbi Hillel in the century before Jesus was born. But Jesus did it in two related ways. First, he taught what we know as the Golden Rule in the Sermon on the Mount: “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 phrase “the Law and the Prophets” is roughly equivalent to what we would now call the Old Testament. Second, in debating the Pharisees, he summarized the essence of the Law and Prophets — again, the Old Testament — through the two great commandments to love God wholeheartedly and one’s neighbor as oneself (Matt 22:37-40).

With the Golden Rule, we come to the end of the main section of the Sermon’s teaching. Matthew 5:1-16, which includes the Beatitudes and Jesus’ call for his followers to be salt and light, functions like an introduction to the teaching. The verses that follow the Golden Rule in Matthew 7, then, function as something of a corresponding conclusion, with Jesus giving various warnings about heeding his words.

In between, he teaches the nature of true righteousness, the kind appropriate to the kingdom of heaven. The entire section is bracketed by references to the Law and the Prophets, to the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures. Listen again to what he says in Matthew 5:17, as he kicks off this major block of teaching:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

Here, he reassures his hearers that even if he is teaching them something that sounds quite different from what they’ve learned from their religious leaders, he’s telling them the truth about what kind of righteousness fulfills the Law and the Prophets. That’s why at the end of the section, he circles back to where he started by teaching the Golden Rule as an even pithier summation of the essence of the moral core of the Law and Prophets.

All of this suggests that the Golden Rule should be taken together with the second greatest commandment, like two ways of phrasing the same moral instruction. To love one’s neighbor as oneself is, to some extent, to treat others the way we would want to be treated.

This is in contrast to those who read Jesus as teaching that we must love ourselves first, in order to love our neighbors as ourselves. Don’t get me wrong. I understand the motivation for reading Jesus that way, and indeed, inasmuch as God loves us, I believe we also should love ourselves in a godly way. I just don’t believe that Jesus is instructing or commanding us to love ourselves when he preaches neighbor-love. Rather he assumes that we already love ourselves, in the sense of caring how we’re treated. On that basis, he then instructs us to extend the same loving courtesy to everyone else as well.

And the hard part, of course, as taught in the Sermon on the Mount, is extending that neighbor-love even further, to loving our enemies. That’s the context of the Golden Rule as we find it in the gospel of Luke. There, the verses leading up to the Golden Rule echo what Jesus teaches in Matthew 5 about non-retaliation and loving our enemies:

But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6:27-31, emphasis added)

Likewise, the verses immediately following also echo the final verses of Matthew 5:

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. (vss. 32-36)

In Luke 6, therefore, the Golden Rule is firmly embedded in the teaching that we must love our enemies, and that in so doing, we mirror the character of our heavenly Father.

SOME YEARS AGO, a corrupted version of the Golden Rule became a staple of American pop culture: “Do unto others, then split.” You can still find the slogan on t-shirts, patches, and even refrigerator magnets for sale on the Internet. The spirit of the slogan, obviously, stands in direct opposition to the teaching of Jesus — but in a way that’s revealing. “Do unto others, then split” is the world’s attitude toward enemies; we are to treat them as we please and run before we have to face their retaliation.

But Jesus teaches his followers to become people who forego retaliation themselves, who love their enemies and follow the Golden Rule. It doesn’t have to be complicated. But we have to be willing to exercise some empathy and compassion toward others. We have to look at the other person, imagine ourselves in their shoes, ask ourselves how we would want to be treated if we were in their place, and act accordingly.

For as Jesus says in Luke, we are to be merciful, just as our heavenly Father is merciful.