Do Unto Others

Interesting phrase. Lots of people, Christians or otherwise, know it. They could complete it with reasonable accuracy. Jesus said to treat others as you want them to treat you (Matt 7:12). The fabled "golden rule." It's interesting, then, because while so many can tell you what it says, they don't really think about what it means.

First, while we all see what it says -- "do to others ..." -- we think of it in the negative. "Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you." We'll tell our kids when they were mean, "How would you like it if someone did that to you?" This, of course, isn't far off. It is reasonable. It is consistent with Jesus's intent, but it is not consistent with His words. He puts it in the positive. It is not "avoid;" it is "do." It is a command to act rather than not to act. How would you like to be treated? Do that. It's not a prohibition; it's an injunction.

Second, it is easily problematic if we don't think it through. Anyone can tell a husband, "Do not buy your wife that Makita electric chainsaw for her birthday because you wish she'd buy it for yours." Obviously. But ... isn't that what Jesus tells you to do? "I'd like someone to buy me that Makita, so I'll do that for my wife." So it's not as simple as that as we can all plainly see. It requires thought. It isn't in the details but the attitude. "I would like people to be kind to me, so I'll be kind to them" is a good start, for instance, but what does "kind" look like ... to them? You want them to be kind to you in the way you recognize kindness, right? So what does it look like from their perspective? Kindness or love or friendship or generosity or humility or respect or ... lots and lots of good things have lots and lots of valid expressions. We would like to be treated with those good principles, so we should treat others with them, but we need to consider them in it. Consider an example. "I would like to be treated with love, so I will treat others with love." Good start! "My wife would see a new car as love, so I'll buy her a new car." Okay ... maybe. Let's go with that. "My 12-year-old would like a car, too, so I'll buy her a car." Definitely not! The expression of love to your wife is not the same as the expression of love to your child. These virtues with which we'd like to be treated are not a monolith, expressed in the same way to all people.

So it gets less concrete than we originally thought. "Do unto others" includes the obvious "don't do what you don't want done to you," but that completely misses the original intent. We are to be proactively treating others as we would like to be treated, yet, not in a woodenly literal way. This means relationship. This means love. This means knowing others and understanding what expressions of these virtues communicates them to the other person. Clearly, being this kind of good person is more complicated than we think. Good thing that "it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure" (Php 2:13).