Progressive reflections on the lectionary #54

Monday 17th February 2025

Luke 6: 27 - 38 The Axial Ethic

Our reading this week is a continuation of Luke’s ‘Sermon on the Plain’, and it really highlights the way that, in Luke, Jesus is the supreme teacher of ‘love’.

"Love your enemies,” insists Jesus, twice in short succession, each time adding “do good…”

As usual with a passage as rich as this one could choose to pursue a variety of angles, but I want to just pull our attention back to one line which, I think, helps to locate our own tradition and teachings into a grand sweep of ideas that have shaped the world.

“Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (6:31)

When, for a short while, I taught Criminology, I developed and taught a module entitled ‘Morality and Evil’ which really played to my strengths. I was able to go all over the place with that module, looking at theology and philosophy as well as ideas more common to the social sciences. I loved it, the students told me that they loved it too. What a time to be alive. Anyway: one of the things the students and I spent time discussing was this idea: ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you.’

It turns out to be a good topic for debate and discussion, and it turned out, too, to be a concept which was new to many of them. It was not an ethical imperative that they had previously been aware of.

This is despite the fact that this one sentence is a form of the idea that some call ‘the golden rule’ but which I have come to call ‘the axial ethic’. I call it that because it is the key idea that emerged from the time that civilisations were starting to form.

It’s a concept which finds a place in a host of philosophies and religions, cropping up time after time, including in the Hebrew tradition (“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.”) The same concept appears in ancient Greece, India, China, Iran… if there is a recorded (written) tradition that stems from ancient times, you are likely to find a version of ‘the golden rule’ there. Sometimes it is couched negatively (“do not…”) and others positively. Ultimately, if we overlook the variations, we find essentially the same rule being taught: Treat other people the way you would want to be treated.

Aside from Egypt, where civilisations developed very early and where a recorded idea similar to this axial ethic comes from even earlier than the time period from which most do, the majority of these ideas come from a particular time frame: roughly speaking, from 800 BCE - 200 BCE.

This time period is the so called ‘Axial Age’ - it is the time of Buddha and Socrates, it’s the time of the Hebrew Prophets, it’s the time of Zoroaster and the Vedas. It is, on other words, the time from which a great many of the great religious and philosophical traditions of our time emerged. The Abrahamic tradition which first became Judaism, before spawning both Christianity and Islam; the religions of the Indian subcontinent - Buddhism, Jainism, and the collection of beliefs and practises that became known as ‘Hinduism’ (“the religion of the Hindus” means the religion of the people of India).

The Axial Age was the time of the Greek philosophers of the Socratic school, and they are the people who laid the foundation for practically all the philosophy in the ‘Western’ world ever since. From this time, also, emerged the basic idea of ‘democracy’ - the way in which most of the world has since tried to organise itself, barring a few aberrations.

Simply put - you can’t overemphasise the pivotal importance of this time period in shaping not just the ancient world, but the way in which we live today.

Why did so much happen then? Because this is the time that cities were forming and building, when people across the world were learning to live together and to share life. This was the time when we started to work out how on earth we can live in harmony when we’re in close proximity, rather than fight each other and just take whatever we want.

So here again, as Jesus seeks to lay the foundations of a new, just, society in the ruins of the the old, the axial ethic is reiterated. It is not given as a piece of new wisdom, but rather as a way of calling people back to one of the foundational, axial, ideas of Judaism. An idea that had been ignored, lost, and trampled upon by the imperial invaders, their client kings and their venal collaborators. It’s not glamorous, it’s not complex, but it requires hard work and an amount of sacrifice. It’s the fundamental idea that enables people to live together well: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

Its the ethic which we keep forgetting, the one guiding principle that could underlie our thinking, our policy making, our economic decision making. It’s absurdly simple, perhaps too simple in fact, it’s problematic in a host of ways, but what it makes is a wonderful starting point whenever we face an ethical decision: “Is this how I would want to be treated?”

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