Some words from Jesus to remember

I was a child of the Great Depression in the 1930s. My grade school years were right in the middle of that painful era. I was the 5^th of 7 children. We were poor. So also were a lot of other people. Many were poorer than were we. My mother was a genius of cooking and feeding. There were no leftovers. She knew exactly how much to cook. Food was rationed. Each of us knew how much we could take from the large serving bowls. We were expected to eat every morsel that we took from the servings bowl or platter. We all were familiar with Mom’s words. “Clean up your plate.”

“Clean up your plate” was an aphorism that transmitted a cultural and social value. To this day, I find it almost impossible to leave a single bite of food on my plate. Darlene and others who eat with me will verify that I practice this standard. I clean up my plate. My family passed on to me other values by the same method. Aphorisms.

When reading the Gospels of the life of Jesus, we find that the very same teaching method was used by Jesus. Jesus taught in the context of an illiterate peasantry. Without a keen ability of his illiterate audiences to remember, we would know almost nothing about what Jesus said and taught. Two forms of speech were most easily remembered: stories and aphorisms. Much attention has been given to the parables (stories) told by Jesus. All too little attention has been given to the aphorisms of Jesus.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the Matthew gospel are commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount. The mountain setting is a literary device of the author. These three chapters are in fact a collection of Jesus’ aphorisms with brief commentaries by the Matthew author. The collection is a marvel of the record of Jesus’ beliefs. They summarize Jesus’ interpretation of Jewish Torah.

Aphorisms are a special kind of communication tool. They do not need a specific context. They beg for reinterpretation in every generation, in every place, in every culture. They are often blunt and hard to the point. Taken seriously, they are as hard to side-step as “clean up your plate.”

I was horrified some years ago when I first heard of the “enhanced interrogation methods” that were being used by the CIA on detainees from the Near East. A new president stopped the tortures that were being defended by the CIA and other high U.S. government officials. The subject dropped out of news coverage and out of the public mind. However, it did not drop out of the hands of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee has been investigating the CIA’s interrogation operations and has now reported back to the Senate. The report states that the CIA’s “enhanced methods” were used more extensively than was known earlier and that the CIA had withheld information from the president. The practice had produced no intelligence of value. The ugly fact is that the CIA was regularly torturing detainees and had nothing to show for their efforts other than disgrace.

My mind raced to an aphorism of Jesus. In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is reported to have said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” In the Luke gospel a slightly different version of the aphorism is reported. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”

Aphorisms are very repeatable. They are also easily remembered. I suspect that Jesus spoke some form of the “Love your enemies” aphorism dozens or even hundreds of times. He repeated it so often that the command could not leave the memory bank of his followers. Followers of Jesus knew he meant what he said and knew further that there were no exceptions. Those who took him seriously knew that enemies were to be included in their definition of neighbor. The command to love neighbor was second only to the command to love God.

The United States has no obligation to do things the way Jesus taught. However, Christians have a sacred obligation to train the conscience of the nation. Christians are utterly failing in their obligation to train the American public conscience. “Love your enemies” is about as blunt as words can be. Is there something that Christians do not understand about the aphorism? Can loving include torture? “Love your enemies” is an aphorism that we should be repeating so often that it cannot be erased from the public mind.

My mother was a soft-spoken, kind and gentle woman. When she told us “clean up your plate” there was no raised voice, but somehow we knew that when she spoke the words, she had expectations. Seventy-five years later, I am still cleaning up my plate.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

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