My Resistance to the Golden Rule
A glass of water will do. I have a question and a suspicion; neither has yet earned the title of conclusion. Let us see where the evidence leads, including the parts that may make me put down my favourite explanation.
We sometimes expect a foundational moral principle to be as dependable as a law of physics. Drop an apple, and gravity brings it to the ground, just as Newton’s law of universal gravitation describes. We want a moral rule to offer comparable certainty amid the complications of human relationships. The Golden Rule seems to oblige: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31; see also Matthew 7:12).
It sounds clean. Reassuring, even. Consult your own desires, extend them outward, and there you have it: goodness sorted. Its appeal is understandable. We know how we wish to be treated, what causes us pain, and what makes us feel valued. The rule is easy to remember, and it gives us a sense of control. Understanding another person takes time; knowing what I would want seems considerably more convenient. An attractive ethical shortcut.
No wonder I find myself sipping from the cup of hesitancy, bordering on rebellion. I still want to treat people with care. My resistance rises from the question tucked inside the rule: how far can I use my own desire to judge what is good for someone else?
What comforts me may distress you. The help I would welcome may be intrusive or harmful to someone whose circumstances I have barely understood. Knowing what I want does not necessarily tell me what you need. The shortcut lets us move from our own experience to another person’s situation without pausing to examine the distance between them. We may assume that our understanding of safety, dignity, or care applies equally to everyone. Our intentions can be sincere while our actions cause harm. When we use the Golden Rule as a sufficient measure of love, we risk making ourselves the standard by which another person should be treated.
When Good Intentions Cause Harm
A flood rises, and a monkey scrambles up a tree to higher ground. Looking down, he sees his friend, the fish, swimming in the rushing water. He reaches down, pulls the fish out, and carries him into the branches. What the monkey understands as rescue places the fish in danger.1 The monkey acts from concern. He knows what safety means for himself: escape from the water and a secure place above it. His mistake is to assume that the fish needs the same thing. His fear becomes the measure of his friend’s danger, and his own refuge becomes the place where he takes the fish.
The harm begins with that assumption. The monkey’s intention to help does not give him an understanding of the creature he wants to save. He cares for the fish through what he knows about being a monkey. A story in the Zhuangzi gives this mistake a more elaborate setting. A seabird lands outside the capital of Lu, and the marquis welcomes it into the ancestral temple. He orders court music and provides a banquet of ox, sheep, and pig.
He offers the bird the treatment he would consider an honour. The bird receives these gifts with distress. It eats no meat, drinks no wine, and dies after three days. Confucius identifies the error: the marquis tried to nourish the bird with what nourished himself.2 His understanding of hospitality left little room for the needs of his guest.
We can make a similar mistake in our relationships. Someone who enjoys being the centre of attention may arrange an overwhelming surprise party for a partner who dislikes crowds. A person who values practical solutions may offer a detailed action plan when a friend needs time to speak and be heard. A generous person may hand money to someone who only needed directions. In each case, the giver’s preferences determine the form of care.
Applied without listening, the Golden Rule can leave the recipient trapped in the giver’s understanding of generosity. The giver sees a thoughtful gesture. The recipient experiences its effects and may feel obliged to express gratitude for something that causes discomfort. The marquis’s generosity was extensive. It still failed to feed the bird.
Help can also harm through its timing. Mencius tells of a farmer from the state of Song who worries that his grain is growing too slowly. Hoping to help, he pulls at every shoot. He returns home exhausted and tells his family how hard he has worked to encourage the grain’s growth. His son runs to the field and finds the shoots withered. The farmer wants growth, but he cannot accept the time it requires. His effort damages the process he hopes to encourage. Mencius also criticises neglect, yet he judges this interference worse because it injures what it seeks to help.3
The story gives us a way to examine our impatience with another person’s recovery or uncertainty. A friend’s grief may continue longer than we expect. Someone facing a career change may remain undecided while we become increasingly eager for an answer. We send repeated messages, push for decisions, or urge the person to move on. Our concern may be sincere, though our urgency can also reflect our difficulty with waiting.
We pull on their roots. The farmer’s mistake asks us to consider whose pace our help serves, and whether we can remain attentive while another person takes the time they need.
Jesus and the Law
These stories raise a question about the Golden Rule itself. If using our own desires to determine another person’s needs can cause harm, how should we understand the rule within Jesus’ teaching? Answering that question requires us to return to its setting in the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus declares that he has come to fulfil the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 5:17). He then gives a series of sayings structured around the words, “You have heard that it was said … But I say to you” (Matthew 5:21–22). He addresses murder and anger, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation, and love of enemies. These sayings create an interpretive tension: how does his claim to fulfil the Law relate to the authority with which he interprets and sometimes appears to revise its application?
Albright and Mann suggest that fulfilling the Law can involve clarifying its meaning or bringing it to completion.4 Basser and Cohen understand Jesus as teaching a stricter way of life under familiar scriptural headings.5 These readings resist an easy conclusion that Jesus simply discards what came before him. They also raise a further question: how can a command be observed in ways that evade its demands?
The command to love one’s neighbour offers a particular example. Leviticus 19:18 commands love of neighbour, but it does not add permission to hate an enemy.6 In Matthew 5:43–44, Jesus challenges that boundary by commanding love of enemies. The distinction matters. A command to love can become manageable when we reserve the right to decide who falls outside its reach. Jesus calls his hearers to love beyond that boundary.
Let us return to the Golden Rule. In Matthew 7:12 Jesus calls the rule “the Law and the Prophets,”7 returning to the phrase he uses when speaking of fulfilling them in Matthew 5:17. The rule stands within his teaching about what life under God’s reign requires. Jesus gives that life a daily prayer: “May your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). To pray these words is to ask that God’s will shape our conduct now. That brings my concern about the Golden Rule into sharper focus: whose will am I serving when I decide what is good for you?
Paul’s image of representation sharpens the same question. He describes himself and his fellow workers as ‘ambassadors for Christ’ (2 Corinthians 5:20). His subject is reconciliation: God making an appeal through those entrusted with its message. An ambassador represents someone else.
There is a useful check on my enthusiasm. I cannot simply give my preferences a divine title and call them God’s will. If I draw on Paul’s image here, representing Christ requires faithfulness to the One I represent and attention to the people before me. The Golden Rule belongs within that responsibility. My own experience can help me begin; it cannot settle the matter on God’s behalf.
The Golden Rule and the Limits of Reciprocity
Even so, I resist treating the Golden Rule as a complete guide to Christian love. The saying appears in several religious and philosophical traditions, in positive and negative forms.8 Its wisdom is real. Its familiar, stand-alone form can still leave my own preferences as the measure. Joseph Fitzmyer names the same difficulty in his commentary on Luke: “Love of self cannot be the norm alone, and that seems to be implied in the rule.”9
Jesus’ teaching gives the rule a wider setting. In Luke, the Golden Rule sits among commands to love enemies, do good to those who hate us, give without expecting repayment, and be merciful as God is merciful. The next verse questions the love that only returns what it receives: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:32).10 Fitzmyer’s summary is exact: Jesus “may quote the rule but counsels a conduct that transcends mere reciprocity.” Matthew places the rule after Jesus speaks of the Father giving good gifts to those who ask. The Greek of Matthew 7:12 includes the connective oun, “therefore,” and the word matters. The command follows a picture of God’s generosity.11
Read alone, the rule asks me to imagine what I would like. Jesus calls his disciples into a life shaped by God’s generosity, even toward those who do not return it. The Golden Rule is active: “do to others.” Yet the Sermon keeps widening the circle of those to whom love is owed. It reaches beyond familiar reciprocity toward enemy-love.
Another story in the Zhuangzi examines the desire to repay kindness. Hundun, ruler of the centre, often welcomes Shu and Hu, rulers of the southern and northern seas. He treats them generously, and they decide to return his kindness.
They notice that Hundun has no face: none of the seven openings, the eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth, through which people see, hear, breathe, and eat. Assuming this absence is a deficiency, they decide to remedy it. They bore one opening each day. On the seventh day, Hundun dies.12 Their gratitude leads them to impose their own form upon their host. Because they have these openings, they assume Hundun must need them too. They never question whether the life before them requires the improvement they have chosen.
Returning kindness can sustain a relationship. This story exposes the danger of deciding what repayment should look like entirely from our own experience. Shu and Hu respond to Hundun’s hospitality by making him resemble themselves. Their thanks is sincere, and their gift is fatal.
Christ as the Measure of Love
This leaves a practical question. If my own experience is an insufficient measure, how do I discern what love requires? John’s Gospel directs attention to Christ: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). My experience still matters, but it must remain open to correction by the love Jesus embodies.
That command belongs with Jesus’ invitation to remain in him as branches remain in the vine. Raymond E. Brown draws attention to the dependence within this image: the branch receives its life from the vine, as the disciple receives life from Jesus.13 The love commanded grows from that relationship. Jesus gives himself as its pattern and speaks of the cost of laying down one’s life.
The vine can easily become a soft image, a picture of spiritual closeness that asks nothing of hands or knees. John gives it a harder setting. Jesus speaks these words on the night he is handed over. Earlier that evening he takes off his outer robe, ties a towel around himself, pours water into a basin, and washes his disciples’ feet (John 13:4–5). He kneels where the dust of the road has gathered. He washes the feet of the one who will betray him (John 13:2, 11). Then he says, “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15). The love that flows from the vine first appears with water and dirty feet.
The washing points toward the cross. When Jesus says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13), he is describing what he will do within a day. Brown observes that the love in “as I have loved you” includes the laying down of his life. Jesus did not die in a figure of speech. He was flogged and crucified, and he died (John 19:1, 18, 30). The fruit he asks his disciples to bear (John 15:8) has the same shape: love that costs the one who gives it and meets the actual need of the one who receives it.
Paul makes clear whom Christ’s self-giving love embraces: “Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). He acknowledges how rarely someone will die even for a righteous person, then locates the proof of God’s love in Christ’s death for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:7–8). This love extends beyond the affection and loyalty we might expect between friends. It acts before its recipients have become deserving in our eyes or offered anything in return. My preferences rarely work that way. I give most readily to those I like and to those who seem to have earned it. How, then, can my own preferences adequately measure a love that gives itself for the ungodly?
Jesus adds something that makes me reach for a richer cup: “You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:14). He goes further, distinguishing friends from servants by what they know of their master’s purposes (John 15:15). Well, that gives me something to mull over at another time. This is hardly the place for additional opining. Still, we readily claim Jesus as our friend, but how familiar are we with what he requires? And are we willing to accept that friendship when it requires us to surrender our authority to determine what love should look like?
Life on the vine also includes pruning: “Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit” (John 15:2). A branch that bears fruit is still cut back. Even good love needs correcting.
Remaining in Christ does not make us experts in another person’s needs. The monkey’s concern for the fish was sincere, yet concern alone could not tell him what rescue required. Love shaped by Christ must leave room for attention, questions, and correction. It asks us to care deeply enough to examine our assumptions, including those we bring to our most generous acts.
Respecting Another Person’s Reality and Pace
Applying the Golden Rule without examining our assumptions can resemble aggressive autocorrect. We type a word, and the software replaces it with something from its own dictionary. The correction may be useful. It may also erase exactly what we intended to say. Something similar happens when we enter another person’s situation already certain of what help should look like.
A more attentive approach resembles the question, “Did you mean this?” It offers an interpretation while leaving room for correction. We can bring our experience and judgement to another person’s difficulty without assuming that we have understood it fully.
Imagine the monkey reaching toward the fish and pausing. He can keep caring and still let go of the assumption that his own experience tells him what rescue means for the fish. He would need to look beyond his own fear and recognise that the water threatening his life sustains his friend’s. That pause could begin with a simple question: “What would be helpful to you?” Asking takes little time. Accepting the answer may require more of us, especially when it challenges the help we had planned to give.
The marquis would have needed to learn what sustained a seabird and accept that his banquet could not provide it. His willingness to give was already evident. What was missing was attention to the life receiving his gifts.
The seabird and the withered grain take the question further. What kind of care can this person receive? What time does their growth or recovery require? We may arrive ready to help and discover that our first task is to listen, or that the action we consider urgent can wait. None of the helpers in these stories waits long enough to learn. Learning to pause matters in our homes, churches, workplaces, and public life.
My resistance to the Golden Rule returns me to the question of who measures love. In Matthew, Jesus places the rule within the Law and the Prophets and within the generosity of God. In John, he calls his disciples to remain in his love and to love as he has loved them. In Christ, I encounter a love that calls my assumptions into question and asks more of me than the extension of my own preferences. I remain responsible for how I act, including my willingness to learn from the person affected by my care.
Perhaps love sometimes begins with an admission we find difficult to make: I do not yet understand what you need. Will you help me understand? The fish is not saved by being made more like the monkey. The monkey must learn to see the fish.
The cup is empty. The question can stay. This is as far as I can take it for now. What evidence would help us go further, and what might make us turn around?
Notes
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue).
1. “How the Monkeys Saved the Fish,” in Once Upon a Time in Africa: Stories of Wisdom and Joy, comp. Joseph G. Healey (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 96. ↩
2. Zhuangzi, chap. 18, “Perfect Enjoyment,” in The Texts of Taoism, pt. 2, trans. James Legge, Sacred Books of the East 40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 8. ↩
3. Mencius, The Works of Mencius, trans. James Legge (1895; repr., New York: Dover, 1970), 190–91. ↩
4. W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann, Matthew, Anchor Bible 26 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 58. ↩
5. Herbert W. Basser with Marsha B. Cohen, The Gospel of Matthew and Judaic Traditions: A Relevance-Based Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 136–38. ↩
6. Albright and Mann, Matthew, 71; Basser and Cohen, Gospel of Matthew, 158; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, Anchor Bible 3A (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1654–55, 1705. ↩
7. Basser and Cohen, Gospel of Matthew, 207; Albright and Mann, Matthew, 83. See also Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a. ↩
8. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 639–40; Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, 1655. ↩
9. Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 639. ↩
10. Luke 6:27–36; Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 639–40. ↩
11. Matthew 7:11–12; Albright and Mann, Matthew, 83–84; Basser and Cohen, Gospel of Matthew, 207. ↩
12. Zhuangzi, chap. 7, “The Normal Course for Rulers and Kings,” in The Texts of Taoism, pt. 1, trans. James Legge, Sacred Books of the East 39 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 266–67. ↩
13. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI, Anchor Bible 29A (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 660–64; see John 15:4–13. ↩