of questions this verse raises: How do we live this verse out? What does it mean to love? What isn’t love? Who decides what is love and what isn’t love?
And what about your neighbor? Who is your neighbor? Is your neighbor only the person next door, or is it anyone you have contact with? Or is it every single human being on the face of the planet?
And what happens if one person’s definition of love and another person’s definition differ? Who is right? Who is wrong? Who decides who is right and who is wrong? Who decides if whoever decided made the right decision?
So even a verse as basic as this raises more questions than it answers.
In order to live it out and not just talk about it, someone somewhere has to make decisions about this verse. Someone has to decide what it actually looks like to put flesh and blood on this command.
And that’s because the Bible is open-ended.
It has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.
Here’s another example from the Torah (the Jewish name for the first five books of the Bible): “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.”6 The next verses command the people to do no work on this Sabbath day; they then explain the command by saying that God rested on the seventh day after creating the world in the first six days.
You can already see the questions this verse raises: Who defines work? Who defines rest? What if work to one person is rest to another? What if rest to one person is work to another? And what does it mean to make a day holy? How do you know if you’ve kept something holy? How would you know if you hadn’t?
Once again, the Bible is open-ended. It has to be interpreted.
Somebody has to decide what it means to love your neighbor, and somebody has to decide what it means to observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.
Rabbis
Now the ancient rabbis understood that the Bible is open-ended and has to be interpreted. And they understood that their role in the community was to study and meditate and discuss and pray and then make those decisions. Rabbis are like interpreters, helping people understand what God is saying to them through the text and what it means to live out the text.
Take for example the Sabbath command in Exodus. A rabbi would essentially put actions in two categories: things the rabbi permitted on the Sabbath and things the rabbi forbade on the Sabbath. The rabbi was driven by a desire to get as close as possible to what God originally intended in the command at hand. One rabbi might say that you could walk so far on the Sabbath, but if you went farther, that would be work and you would be violating the Sabbath. Another might permit you to walk farther but forbid you to do certain actions another rabbi might permit.
Different rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted. A rabbi’s set of rules and lists, which was really that rabbi’s interpretation of how to live the Torah, was called that rabbi’s yoke. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were following him because you believed that rabbi’s set of interpretations were the closest to what God intended through the scriptures. And when you followed that rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi’s yoke.
One rabbi even said his yoke was easy.7
The intent then of a rabbi having a yoke wasn’t just to interpret the words correctly; it was to live them out. In the Jewish context, action was always the goal. It still is.
Rabbis would spend hours discussing with their students what it meant to live out a certain text. If a student made a suggestion about what a certain text meant and the rabbi thought the student had totally missed the point, the rabbi would say, “You have abolished the Torah,” which meant that in the rabbi’s opinion, the student wasn’t anywhere near what God wanted. But if the student got it right, if the rabbi thought the student had grasped God’s intention in the text, the rabbi would say, “You have fulfilled the Torah.”
Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: “I have not come to abolish [the Torah] but to fulfill [it].”8 He was essentially saying, “I didn’t come to do away with the words of God; I came to show people what it looks like when the Torah is lived out perfectly, right down to the smallest punctuation marks.”
“I’m here to put flesh and blood on the words.”9
Most rabbis taught the yoke of a well respected rabbi who had come before them. So if you visited a synagogue and the local rabbi (Torah teacher) was going to teach, you might hear that this rabbi teaches in the name of Rabbi So-and-So. If you were familiar with the yoke of Rabbi So-and-So, then you would know what to expect from this rabbi.
Every once in a while, a rabbi would come along who was teaching a new yoke, a new way of interpreting the Torah. This was rare and extraordinary.
Imagine: A rabbi was claiming that he had a new way to understand the scriptures that was closer to what God intended than the way of the rabbis who had come before him. A new take on the scriptures.
The questions would immediately be raised: “How do we know this is truth? How do we know this rabbi isn’t crazy?” One of the protections for the rabbi in this case was that two other rabbis with authority would lay hands on the rabbi and essentially validate him. They would be saying, “We believe this rabbi has authority to make new interpretations.” That’s why Jesus’s baptism was so important. John the Baptist was a powerful teacher and prophet who was saying publicly that he wasn’t worthy to carry Jesus’s sandals.10
“And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’”11
A second voice affirmed Jesus’s unique calling. The voice of God.
Amazing.
A Jewish audience reading Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism would pick up right away on Jesus’s getting the affirmation of two powerful voices.12
Which leads to an interesting scene: In the book of Luke, what is the one question the religious leaders keep hounding Jesus with?
“Where did you get your authority?”
Jesus’s response? “You tell me, where did John get his?”13
Now imagine if a rabbi who had a new perspective on the Torah was coming to town. This rabbi who was making new interpretations of the Torah was said to have authority. The Hebrew word for “authority” is shmikah. This might not even happen in your lifetime. You would hike for miles to hear him.
A rabbi who taught with shmikah would say things like, “You have heard it said . . . , but I tell you. . . .”14
What he was saying is, “You have heard people interpret that verse
