“Hear, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your being and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:4,5)

This statement, the Shema, is arguably at the heart of the Old Testament and, according to Christopher Wright, “is the foundation stone of all else…the only adequate basis for outlining the demanding social program outlined in the chapters that follow.”[1] The book of Deuteronomy is essentially the constitution[2] for the people of God entering into the land and according to Longman and Dillard, describes the “ideal Israel.”[3]  Deuteronomy lays out the pattern of life for the people of Israel, centred around YHWH and built around righteous living and a system of justice.  The vulnerable are at the centre of this constitution, their rights are clearly laid out and “egalitarian justice is demanded.”[4]

According to Bible scholar Tim Mackie, the Hebrew word for righteous, (sedeq) literally translates as doing right to others (especially the vulnerable) and the word for justice (mishpat) should be rendered as fairness to the vulnerable. He states that the two words are used together on more than fifty occasions throughout the Old Testament, reinforcing the idea that the people of a Righteous and Just God are to be a society built around doing right to others and a system of fairness to the vulnerable.

If the Jewish Scriptures taught the people how to build a community around the concept of the Shema, how does this then relate to the New Testament and our life as disciples following Christ?  Jesus, when asked about the “greatest law”, cites the Shema (Matt 22:34-40)[5] and makes clear that everything else hangs on this love of YHWH and neighbour.  While the people of God in the New Testament must look different from that of the Old, on many levels (race, geographical borders, Christ, not temple-centric etc.) we are still to be centred around the same mandate – to love Jesus and to love our neighbour.

To first century Jew, listening to Jesus’ words, the concept of neighbour was simple.  Your neighbours were the people that you met. The idea that your life choices and decisions could impact people on the other side of the planet would have been absurd.  To us, living in the 21^st century, we must re-evaluate the concept of who is our neighbour.

Very few (hopefully none) of us would ever set out to deliberately harm a 9-year-old Bangladeshi girl, as it is easy to accept the premise that this child is my neighbour and if I were to ever come across her, I would seek to treat her as I would have her treat me (Matt 7:12).  However, if I buy clothing from a clothes shop selling fashionable brands, which have been imported by a reputable importer who sourced them from a buyer, who negotiated a very reasonable price to purchase them from a factory in Dhaka, this picture changes. If the factory mainly employs children (because they are cheap and have no rights) and imposes a regime of 14-hour days in cramped, badly lit conditions where the children are beaten if they fall asleep and are regularly seriously injured in the course of the work, then this Bangladeshi girl who works in the factory is not only my neighbour, but my choices have specifically caused her harm. My lifestyle has meant I have not treated her as I would have her treat me. For a follower of Jesus, to ignore this is to ignore the very heart of all that our faith centres around – loving Jesus and our neighbour.

This is true of money[6], purchasing choices and environmental choices, which, as I mentioned earlier always affect those in poverty.  Mark Driscoll said, at Catalyst in 2013, that, “I know who made the environment and he’s coming back and going to burn it all up. So, yes, I drive an SUV.”[7] Sadly, he is not alone in this view.  Without even beginning to address the unbiblical, “Platonised” eschatology[8] of this statement, one should immediately question how a follower of Jesus could hold such a counter-Christlike view. Even if we were to treat the environment as an abstract concept, how can we ignore the impact on the poorest of the poor? How can that possibly be argued as loving our neighbour as ourselves, which we purport to be central to discipleship?

If our God is just and righteous, calling us to be a people seeking to be transformed into his likeness; if loving Him and loving one other are core to accomplishing this, and the foundation of all his precepts; then it is my view that ethical choices in lifestyle and consumption are intrinsically Christian. I would argue that this issue is central to the Kingdom of God and the idea of Jubilee outlined in Jesus’ Nazareth manifesto.[9] If we would call ourselves Christian, we cannot ignore this, and we must seek to address the current injustice of the situation, in whatever way we are able, starting with our own choices.

[1] Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Nottingham: IVP, 2004), 187.

[2] J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy (Leicester: Apollos, 2002), 34.

[3] Tremper Longman III & Raymond B. Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament (second edition) (Nottingham: IVP, 2007), 114.

[4] William J. Dumbrell, The Faith of Israel (second edition) (Grand Rapids: Apollos, 1988), 61.

[5] He states this in conjunction with Leviticus 19:18; “love your neighbour as yourself.” John asserts that it is impossible to love YHWH and not love our neighbour (1 John 4:20), stating that to claim this makes you a liar. In which case, the Shema could stand alone as the Greatest Commandment, as it encompasses everything stated within Leviticus 19:18.

[6] When our church sought to set up pensions for the staff we discovered that most pension funds will invest in a particular High Street retailer in the UK, who had made a big deal about removing pornography from its shelves.  The reason that it remained so popular with pension funds was that it was highly profitable, because it was the largest wholesale distributer of pornography in the UK. Without care, we can easily end up have our financial security dependant on the success of things with which we fundamentally disagree.

[7] Hemant Mehta, “The Friendly Atheist,” Patheos, 4 May 2013, <http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/04/pastor-mark-driscoll-christians-dont-need-to-care-about-the-environment-because-jesus-is-coming-back-for-us/> (14 March 2018).

[8] Tom Wright, The Day the Revolution Began (SPCK, 2016), 147.  Specifically the idea of it is all going to burn and our souls will to heaven.

[9] Luke 4:18,19.