Okay, “nice” might be an oversimplification. Jesus wasn’t always nice. He overturned tables. He called people hypocrites. He said things that made religious authorities furious. So perhaps “nice” isn’t quite the word we’re looking for.
But I’m pretty sure you know what I mean.
If your religion is making you cruel, you’re doing it wrong. If your interpretation of scripture requires you to humiliate somebody, exclude somebody, frighten somebody or make somebody feel less human, something has gone wrong between the page and your heart.
And if you find yourself telling another human being that God hates who they are, definitely second guess yourself — not necessarily because we believe that there is a God who approves of every human choice, but because hatred seems so profoundly inconsistent with the God that Jesus — and many other spiritual leaders throughout the centuries —describe.
We might think of it as something of an answer key when reading scripture.
If an interpretation is not loving, merciful, hospitable, just, compassionate or oriented toward human flourishing, assume something is missing.
Someone must be reading it incorrectly. Or misunderstanding the historical context. Or forgetting it was written for a particular community facing particular circumstances that are radically different from ours.
Maybe we’re looking at an ancient person’s understanding of God rather than an eternally accurate description of what a Great Central and Loving Source might be. Or maybe we just simply can’t know.
But we must not begin with cruelty and work backward until we’ve found a theology that justifies it. Jesus certainly did not.
Jesus inherited scripture, tradition, religious law and centuries of interpretation. And yet again and again, when religious obligation collided with human need, he seemed remarkably comfortable asking which interpretation served love.
When Sabbath observance became more important than the people the Sabbath was meant to serve, Jesus reminded everyone: “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.”
When purity rules declared certain people untouchable, Jesus touched them. When respectable society identified people with whom a holy person should not associate, Jesus ate dinner with them.
When asked to identify the greatest commandment, he did not produce a complicated theological examination. Love God. Love your neighbor. Period. If an interpretation does not correspond with that, it’s either wrong or unknowable.
And when someone immediately tried to narrow the category — Yes, but who exactly counts as my neighbor? — Jesus told a story in which the compassionate outsider understood God’s purposes better than the respectable religious people who passed by.
That tells us something important about how Jesus interpreted organized religion. He wasn’t a fan.
Human beings were not created to serve religious rules. Religious wisdom was supposed to serve human beings. And love was the measuring stick.
That doesn’t mean love is always agreeable. Love confronts injustice. Love establishes boundaries. Love tells difficult truths. Jesus himself demonstrates that quite clearly. But there is a profound difference between confrontation and contempt.
Love may challenge us, it may ask us to make difficult decisions in favor of justice, but it must never dehumanize people.
This is why my blood boils when Christians quote isolated passages of scripture as though locating a sentence in the Bible ends the conversation. It doesn’t.
Quoting a verse establishes what that text says. Only. It does not automatically establish what the text means.
Interpretation still has to happen. Context matters. Genre matters. History matters. Translation matters. The audience very much matters. The assumptions of the writer have to matter. And, if people are going to call themselves followers of Jesus, surely his teachings matter more than a convenient interpretation that allows us to draw a boundary between “us” and “those people.”
The answer key is love. Not because love makes everything easy, but because Jesus himself identified love as the organizing principle: love God; love your neighbor; love one another; even love your enemies. That’s a fairly astonishing amount of emphasis.
So when someone presents an interpretation of scripture that produces greater compassion, dignity, reconciliation, hospitality, courage, justice and human flourishing, we safely lean toward it.
And when someone presents an interpretation that produces shame, contempt, exclusion, superiority, cruelty or hatred, we must become deeply suspicious of it.
Even when they can quote chapter and verse. Especially then. Because scripture is powerful. And powerful things require careful handling.
The Bible has been used both to liberate people and to enslave them. To shelter refugees and as well as reject them. It has purported to defend segregation and as well as successfully dismantle it. It has been affirmed to comfort queer children and brandished to terrify them. The same book has appeared on opposite sides of some of humanity’s greatest moral struggles.
Clearly, possession of the book is not enough. Interpretation is everything.
One of the simplest tests available to us is the one Jesus gave us himself: What kind of fruit does it produce?
If our interpretation makes us more loving, more compassionate, more courageous, more hospitable, more willing to recognize the sacred worth of people unlike ourselves, then we’re beginning to understand.
If it makes us crueler, more contemptuous, more frightened of difference, more convinced of our own superiority, perhaps we should put down the megaphone and go back to the organizing principle. Love God. Love your neighbor.
(PS they might actually be one and the same.)
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church in Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
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