Jesus said to sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you would be judged by how you treat the destitute. We are pretty confident he said this because it goes against the bias of the gospels to promote salvation through the cross/resurrection. He said to love your enemies, and he died to save his enemies. In sum, the mandate is to treat your enemies as more important than yourself, which is the opposite of traditional eudaimonia self-realization ethics that aims at personal contentment satisfaction. And the resurrection?

Traditionally in Jewish thinking, great tragedies like the destruction of the first temple were seen as God’s corrective wrath poured out on a sinful Jewish people. Many interpreted the destruction of the second temple as God’s punishment for the Jewish elite killing Jesus – or getting the Romans to do it. However, some thinkers were also perplexed when the Jews were being faithful, and tragedies still came, and so thought evil forces were in the control of the world which God would soon wipe away and usher in a new age. The destruction of the evil forces and their followers was what we would call the apocalypse, and Jesus thought it was imminent and Paul thought it was underway.

In this new kingdom, there would be neither male nor female, slave nor free, and people would neither be married nor given in marriage but would be like angels in heaven with new spiritual bodies (pneumatikos). In this context, Paul hated this world and thought it was a mistake. He said sarcastically that if the dead are not raised, we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we die. Similarly, Jesus didn’t advocate love (agape – altruism) of enemy to make the world a better place (he thought this world was passing away), but to earn righteousness in God’s eye so as to be able to enter the kingdom and practice the right attitude for being in the Kingdom.

The historical Jesus (as opposed to the Christ of faith) never taught that his death/resurrection was saving, and Paul completely turned this on its head saying if Christ is not raised your faith is futile and you are still in your sin, and if that righteousness came through good works Christ died for nothing.

Thousands of years later, Christ’s return to destroy the forces of evil and their followers is still imminent in the minds of the faithful, and the damage is still palpable. If your focus is on the next life, it is less urgent to be good stewards of this world and its people. Instead of being donkeys led by carrots trying to build up treasures in heaven, perhaps some honesty is needed that Jesus is not coming back and so we need to think of the here and now and treat this life accordingly.