The Religious Atheist
“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” John 14:15 NASB
Commandments – We want to follow the teaching of the Messiah. We want to be called good and faithful servants. But that means we need to know what he wants, and that means we need to know what his commandments are. Now, we could make a list (there are over 1000 commandments in the apostolic writings) and try to follow each one, or we could recognize what is really at play here in this discussion with the disciples and apply a general principle. When Yeshua speaks about the commandments, he clearly has the Torah in mind. He made that clear enough in this comment about the eternal character of the Torah. But what does he mean when he attaches the pronoun “my”? In what way are the commandments his?
If you’re a Trinitarian, you will quickly note that since Yeshua is God in the flesh, He (with a capital H) is referring to the divine law given to Moses by YHVH (the Father). So, the commandments, that is, the Torah of Moses, are His because He first spoke them to Moses. But this has a serious implication. It means that the Torah of Moses is the same as the commandments referred to by the Son, and therefore we are held accountable to them if we claim to love Jesus. Few Christian Trinitarians want to go in this direction, first, because it seems too Jewish, and second, because Jesus (supposedly) set us free from the Law. Here Replacement Theology gets in the way of exegesis. The result is a very uneasy peace between what Jesus taught as the Son of God and how we really live.
But what if you’re not a Trinitarian? What if Yeshua is your Jewish Messiah, your ultimate rabbi, your source for understanding the Torah of Moses? Then you will have a different exegesis of this verse. If you paid any attention to the way Yeshua actually interprets the Torah of Moses, you discovered that there is a kind of flexibility in his application. Yeshua allows for circumstances to soften the rigid lines of Torah. We might say, as Gordon Tucker notes:
“Hebrew lifenim mishurat hadin, literally, ‘inside the line of the law.’ The image is intended to convey a flexibility in which the rigid, objective boundaries defined by Halakhah are softened and sometimes altered, so as to promote a value that may not be subject to objective definition. The term is used primarily in relationships among human beings, to teach the necessity, on occasion, of allowing another person more of a claim on oneself that legally defined boundaries would permit.”[1]
Heschel cites R. Huna: “Whoever engages exclusively in the study of Torah is like an atheist.”[2]
Tucker adds: “The strength of the English formulation captures the sense of the Hebrew that such a person recognizes no divine authority. The reason is, apparently, that such a person approaches Torah as an intellectual exercise rather than as a mandate for how to live.”[3]
Now, perhaps, we have a clue about what Yeshua meant. Torah is the rigid architecture of God’s plan for living. But all those steel beams need the soft touch of an interior designer before they are habitable. So sometimes they must be moved a bit, altered just enough to allow for a superior view, a behavioral insight that meets a particular situation. “My” commandments are not another set of competing rules. They are a way of understanding how the rigid structure of Moses’ Torah is applied in the world of men. They are application and extension.
This, of course, has radical implications. First, it means that Torah is helplessly antiquated if it stands as the steel structure alone. No one can live in a steel frame. It must be adapted to life today. And secondly, it means that the claim that the “Law” has been set aside is suicidal because that means living in a building without any rigidity, a sandcastle waiting for the tide. Finally, if Yeshua really meant that those who love him will act according to the softened framework of Torah as he did, then everyone who claims to follow Yeshua (“Jesus”) will live by this version of Moses’ Law. That “law,” interpreted by the Messiah, is the standard of holiness. It is not set aside. Once again, it’s what you do that matters most.
Topical Index: Torah, commandments, John 14:15
[1] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (ed. and trans. by Gordon Tucker, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2007), p. 2, fn. 6.
[2] Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, p. 3.
[3] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, p. 3, fn. 15.
