You Say Tomato…

If asked to choose one word to describe Jesus of Nazareth, I would answer moral. I will quickly admonish readers not to springboard to words such as “righteous”, “pious”, or “ethical”. While our culture has homogenized “moral” and “ethical” into synonyms, to do so is actually incorrect. My own understanding of the distinction between the two is this: “ethics” deal with conventions and agreements—written or unwritten—between and among humans; “morality”, on the other hand, addresses the conventions and agreements—again, written or unwritten—between the creature and its Creator. I would argue that such a distinction is consistent with, say, Kohlberg’s research on moral development. Certainly there are many instances in which morality and ethicality intersect and share the same values and characteristics and are not mutually exclusive. But if push comes to shove in such an understanding, morality trumps ethicality every time. Therefore, the relationship between legality and ethicality is much more synonymous than between morality and ethicality. We live in an age where the distinction between the terms is very fluid (incorrectly so, in my opinion) and so we mistakenly speak of morality when we really mean ethicality, and vice versa. Because of the divine communion that apparently existed between Jesus and God, I can say with a relative degree of confidence that this moral relationship was his primary consideration, much to the frustration of the legalistic culture of his time that so closely parallels our own. I don’t think that we can truly understand Jesus as the Christ and the revelation of his life until we realize that morality was Jesus’ primary and fundamental concern. Read your New Testament gospels and see if you don’t agree that Jesus pretty much said to let ethics and laws take care of themselves, which they will do when morality becomes the pervasive worldview.