Love Is His Meaning: Understanding The Teaching Of Jesus

By Keith Ward

Jesus’ teaching has changed the world. Yet his sayings can often seem cryptic and hard to understand.

In Love Is His Meaning, Keith Ward explores the various figures of speech and images that Jesus used, and finds they are all ways of expressing and evoking the self-giving love of God, manifested supremely in Jesus’ life. They communicate spiritual truths, often not in a literal but in a poetic way. They encourage us to take our own moral decisions with sensitivity and care for others. They show that God’s love will never abandon anyone, and that it extends to everyone in the world without exception. And they promise a fulfilment of our hopes for a just and peaceable world that surpasses anything we might describe or imagine.

Putting aside literalist, authoritarian, legalistic, judgemental and divisive presentations of Jesus’ teachings, the author shows that what remains is the gospel of a divine love – a love stronger than death, and the only power that can and will redeem our disordered world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Jul 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780281077649

Keith Ward

Keith Ward is a fellow of the British Academy and Professional Research Fellow at Heythrop College, London. He was formerly Professor of Religion at King's College, London, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He is also a well-known broadcaster and author of over twenty books, including More than Matter? and Is Religion Irrational?

Book preview

Preface

The teachings of Jesus are of vital importance to Christians. No doubt there are many of Jesus’ teachings that have not been recorded, just as there are many of his actions that were not recorded: ‘There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written’ (John 21.25). The records we have in the Gospels are the first and only direct testimonies to the teachings of the person who is at the heart of Christian faith.

Christians often begin with the idea that the teachings of Jesus will be easy to understand and apply. I remember being told, a long time ago, that Jesus spoke in parables to make things easy to understand. But as we grow older it soon becomes apparent that these teachings are not at all easy to understand. According to the Gospels, the parables, for instance, are told specifically so that many people will not understand them (Mark 4.11–12)! And many of us have great difficulty in seeing exactly what it means to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22.39), or ‘do not resist an evildoer’ (Matthew 5.39).

One way to understand his teaching is to see that the language of Jesus is the language of hyperbole, symbol, metaphor, icon, prolepsis, epitome, paradox, parable and sublation. These are all figures of speech that Jesus used in his teaching. They may be unfamiliar to us, and my aim is to show what they mean, how Jesus used them, and why it is vitally important to understand them if we are to grasp what his teaching really is. I will try to show that these figures of speech are meant to drive the hearer or reader to move beyond a literal meaning to a deeper spiritual meaning. This meaning is the secret of Jesus’ teaching, a secret in the sense that many of his hearers, and even sometimes his disciples, failed to understand it. To put it in a nutshell, to take Jesus’ sayings only in a literal sense is to miss their meaning. To reveal their meaning we have to reflect, consider who it is that spoke these words, what they might have to say to us, uniquely, and how we must receive them and put them to practical use.

This may seem difficult, but it can be put very simply: love is their meaning. But what love is, and what God’s love is, and how that love is shown in the person of Jesus, and how we should imitate Jesus in the very different conditions of our own lives, and how we can come to have such love ourselves – these are things that it is hard to understand fully and even harder to put into practice in our lives. Learning how to do that is perhaps the most exciting and challenging thing about being a Christian.

I have divided the book into five parts. In the first part I outline the difference between literal and poetic truth, draw attention to the different perspectives of the four Gospels, and suggest that what we have in the Gospels are four different perspectives on Jesus’ life and teachings, intended to evoke a personal encounter with God in Jesus Christ, and largely written in forms of poetic language. In the second part I begin to analyse the nature of this poetic language, and the figures of speech it employs, mostly by considering the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5—7), and trying to work out a coherent and consistent way of interpreting it. In the third part I examine Jesus’ recorded teaching about ‘the kingdom of God’ and about his role as ‘the Son of Man’ and the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. I suggest that a non-literal, spiritual interpretation of these teachings best reveals their real spiritual meaning. In part four I go on to apply this ‘spiritual’ interpretation to Jesus’ language about judgement and ‘the end of the age’, again suggesting that he was talking about important spiritual realities in a non-literal way. And in the final part I tackle the question of why Jesus taught in parables, and why it is only in John’s Gospel that he explicitly refers to himself as ‘the light of the world’ and ‘the way, the truth, and the life’. My conclusion is that Jesus taught in a non-literal way about God’s absolute love, and that the various figures of speech which he used are ways of evoking an apprehension of God’s love in the hearts of his hearers. Their function in the Gospel records of his teaching is to evoke such an apprehension in us.

Here is a brief list of all the figures of speech I will talk about.

Glossary of figures of speech referred to in the text

Epitome A compressed or foreshortened account of a longer process or narrative – ‘On the day of judgment we shall stand before the throne of God’

Hyperbole An exaggerated or extravagant statement, used to produce a strong impression and not meant to be taken literally – ‘if your eye offends you, pull it out’

Icon A symbol referring to the person of Jesus, seen as the image of God – ‘I am the vine, you are the branches’

Metaphor A description of an object in terms appropriate to some other object, in order to pick out some unstated and perhaps unusual similarity – ‘God is a rock’

Parable A story that is not literally true, but conveys some spiritual truth, in a veiled form – ‘A sower went out to sow seeds . . .’

Paradox A description that seems self-contradictory, though it can be spelled out consistently in a less memorable way – ‘The last shall be first’

Prolepsis A future event envisaged as present – ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’

Sublation Negating (in one sense) and yet fulfilling (in another sense) a previous statement – ‘I came not to abolish but to fulfil the law’

Symbol A metaphor which describes a spiritual reality in material terms – ‘Jesus sits at God’s right hand’

1

Jesus and revelation

Literal truth and poetic truth

In the United Kingdom, in Europe more generally, and even across the Pond in the United States of America, Christianity is in trouble. In England, for example, a survey taken in 2015 recorded that less than 50 per cent of the population regarded themselves as Christian. Those who actually attend Christian churches at least once a month are less than 10 per cent of the population. And this in a country where the Church of England is established by law, and where the monarch is the supreme governor of that Church.

Of course Christianity began as a small minority movement, and there is nothing wrong with being in a minority. But after over two thousand years of teaching and preaching, and the establishment of one Christian Church as the official church of England, having had virtual control of that country’s schools and universities for a decent period of time, it is rather disappointing to find that it is now apparently a minority movement in England.

When Christians ask themselves what has gone wrong, some say that the decline is due to the fact that the original gospel is no longer being preached. ‘Liberalism’ and rationalistic trends of thought have seeped into Christianity and undermined it from within. What we must do is return to the original teaching that the Bible is the inerrant truth given by God, that eternal hell waits for those who reject Christ, that we must live by the clear moral rules set out in the Bible, that we must look for the imminent return of Christ on the clouds, and that we must insist that salvation comes in no other name than that of Jesus. There is no wholly appropriate name for those who prioritize these five truths, but I shall christen them ‘literalists’. That is because they usually try to interpret all statements in the Bible as literally as possible, and regard these truths as literally stated in the Bible.

Christians who insist on these truths often belong to vibrant and growing churches, and this helps to support the view that what is needed is a return to the changeless truths of the Bible. But though these churches are thriving, they still form a tiny part of the population, and they alienate as many people as they attract. I do not wish to criticize those churches for their devotion to Christ, for their love of the Bible, or for their commitment to faith. Nevertheless, I think they are mistaken about the strength of literal interpretations, and I think that literalism is what makes the vast majority of the population feel estranged from the Christian faith. That might be all right if the majority of the population were evil or stupid. But I do not think that is the case. It is just that the literalist gospel does not seem to connect either with the best scientific and moral thinking or with the cultural life of a scientifically and historically literate country.

Quite simply, a literalist interpretation of the book of Genesis is at odds with almost every scientific and historical fact that most people now learn in school. A literalist interpretation of hell as a place where many, possibly most, people will suffer for eternity, is at odds with almost every moral feeling that torture and suffering cannot be justified, and endless torture is especially immoral. A literal interpretation of the moral rules in the Bible is at odds with modern perceptions of the equality of men and women, and with a scientific understanding of sexual behaviour. A literal interpretation of statements that Jesus will soon return on the clouds to put an end to history is at odds with science-based knowledge that the universe will continue for billions of years yet. And a literal interpretation of the belief that only in the name of Jesus can anyone be saved is at odds with the sense that any moral being, including God if there is one, ought to have compassion and care for all humans without exception.

A literalist interpretation of the Bible is thus completely out of line with most of the knowledge and values of educated people in the twenty-first century. Of course the Bible could still be literally true and modern society could be completely wrong. But I think it is highly unlikely that virtually the whole of modern science, the rise of more evidence-based historical studies, and the cultivation of critical methods of