“Christ’s ethical teaching consisted mainly of a series of ridiculously extreme and at times incompatible imperatives – don’t work, don’t own anything, carefully cultivate all your talents, never resist, be deliberately feckless, make a long-term investment in the eternally lasting, take the law violently into your own hands in the face of abuses of its spirit, be ruthlessly cunning, be naively innocent, return to childhood, be wiser than all your ancestors, and so on and so forth. As Chesterton further suggested, Christian ethics therefore seems to involve a redefinition of the Aristotelian mean less as a half-and-half balance between different qualities of action and as, rather, a seemingly impossible ‘both at once.’”
-John Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ
I always did like that line from Chesterton, but upon reflecting on it, it seems likely that Christ was using a hyperbolic teaching method to impress his followers an ethic which, understood in a more calm manner, would function along the lines of a golden mean. Many biblical scholars, anyway, suggest that Jesus sometimes engaged in recognizable hyperbole, which would mean that his audience would mentally adjust what he was saying when applying it. FWIW.
I think that’s our temptation, having been primed by 2500 years of Western philosophy. I was reflecting on this though and asking myself: why would someone act as extravagantly as those extremes imply? The only answer I could come up with is that this is an ethic of love, because what, other than love, would make one so extreme? Clearly this would have to be developed further, but that’s my intuition about it.