THE GOLDEN RULE

Devotional by Dr. Wayne Peterson

Most of us learned the Golden Rule when we were children in Sunday School. In the New English Bible, Matt. 7:12 reads, "Always treat others as you would like them to treat you: that is the Law and the prophets." This simple teaching appeals to us by its reasonableness. It suggests that if we treat other people in ways that help and strengthen them, then surely most of them will treat us the same way. In Jesus teaching the motivation for this kind of action is God's way of doing good to the righteous and the unrighteous. We are to follow his example. In Luke this teaching is followed by the command to love and forgive even our enemies and the admonition that we are to expect nothing in return, and then our reward will be, he says, very great. This is followed by, "give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back." (Luke 6:38)

Not everybody agrees with this teaching. George Bernard Shaw said about it, "Don't do to another what you would like him to do to you, because his tastes may be different from yours." Well, I didn't have to read Shaw to know that the fact that I like onions, was no reason I should bring some home to give to Gladys, who hates them. Since she won't kiss me if I've been eating onions, I got the point very early in our marriage." Sigmund Freud also had trouble with this teaching. He pronounced it an "illusion," as he labeled all else about religion.

If the skeptics have pronounced this teaching foolish and devoid of meaning, Christians often do not follow it. I think of the toddler class that was studying Ephesians, chapter four. The teacher went to great lengths to impress on these growing minds the injunction of Paul, "be ye kind to one another." During the activity period, following the lesson, Jimmy, one of the toddlers, hit Mark with all the fury of an offended do-gooder. "Jimmy!" the teacher cried. Why did you hit Mark?" Jimmy replied with righteous indignation, "Because Mark wouldn't be ye kind to me." While we smile at the foibles of little children, we can think of our politicians who constantly undercut one another, or we can measure ourselves by the Golden Rule and see that we don't always stand straight and tall either. Recently a man that I know made a series of decisions that he though would advance himself, but at the price of severe trauma to his children and wife. He said in justification of his action, "I did what was right for me." A long-time acquaintance of his remarked, "He has a lot of acquaintances but no friends, because while he has been doing what he thought was "right for him," he has failed to show the responsible, loyal concern for those who would have become his loyal friends, if they had received loyalty from him.

But take a closer look at this rule. Erik Erikson says that every infant, to experience healthy emotional development, has to learn basic trust from trustworthy parents. Trust, he adds, enables the baby to enter into the mutuality of parental nurture. This mutuality Erikson calls the foundation of the Golden Rule and of all ethics. The mother smiles and the baby smiles back. The mother feeds the baby and the baby responds with pleasure. The baby cries and the mother comforts. Both of them, he says, grow stronger because of what the other one does. A main tenant of the kind of therapy that I followed when I was a family therapist is that no one finds health without giving due caring to others within his or her sphere of responsibility. If he tries to gain healing without showing this responsibility, he merely lapse into another form of illness; that is, self-centered narcissism. We gain healing by first giving health.

Saint Francis had his own way of stating this Rule, as he did in his prayer: "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood, as to understand, to be loved as to love, for it is in giving that we receive."