Distilled down to its essence the teaching of Jesus orbits around one simple principle--Love your neighbor as yourself. As I have mentioned repeatedly in this blog, the only way Jesus said anyone would ever be able to tell if we were actually following him was if we had love one for another. He straight up said he was only giving us one commandment--love one another. Saint Paul, in what seems to me a breakthrough moment of clarity told the Corinthians, "No love, no nothing" (1 Corinthians 13).
One may have advanced degrees in theology and church history and be able to recite various creeds and dogmas that human beings just like us hammered out over many centuries and fail to notice the utter simplicity of Jesus' core message. For some reason religionists have a need to quibble and complicate. How else can one explain the existence among Christians of thousands of denominations and independent groups all claiming to have some unique insight into God's thoughts and intentions? And, on a broader scale the same could be said of the tone of relationship between the competing religions. Truth claims honed and refined by "thinkers" and power brokers (religionists) from various regional and cultural contexts all claiming they speak for God have resulted in entire continents of people polarized against others who see things differently.
Marc Ian Barasch in his book FIELD NOTES ON THE COMPASSIONATE LIFE/A SEARCH FOR THE SOUL OF KINDNESS, Rodale, 2005; p. 120, offers this bit of wit:
"...A good organizational consultant would counsel the world's major faiths to reexamine their original mission statements: The core business of Jesus, Inc. or Allah Ltd. or Moses Corp. or Buddha LLC is surely not to sell tickets to heaven or peddle get-out-of-hell-free cards, but to distribute every kernel of wisdom from their ancient storehouses that might help us love each other.
We are slowly emerging from millenia of holy know-it-alls beaning each other with their Infallible Books, passing judgment with their Divine Laws, and trying to enforce competing copyrights on Ultimate Truth..."
One can only hope. For God's sake let's put our best efforts into keeping it lovingly simple and neighborly. We can start by foregoing the utterly arrogant assumption that some of us are wiser, better informed, more in possession of the truth and closer to God than those other people.
