The application of Jesus' teaching to his social world is seen in the fact that his movement was the peace party within Palestine. Just as Jesus spoke of the imitatio dei as compassion, he also spoke of loving our enemies: "You have heard it said, love your neighbor," but I say to you, love your enemies." (TUB 150:8.2)

  "Love your neighbor" comes from the holiness code of the Torah and was understood within contemporary Judaism to mean, "Love your fellow member of the covenant," that is, "love your fellow Israelite." In this context, the opposite of neighbor is "non-Israelite," and so loving one's enemy must mean: "Love the non-Israelite enemy," including the gentile (Roman) occupiers.

   As the peace party in Palestine, the Jesus movement thus rejected the path of violent resistance to Rome. And the early church for the first three hundred years of its existence was pacifist.

   The Jesus movement visibly and radically shattered the norms of the Jewish social world. Strikingly, the imitatio dei as "compassion" transcended the cultural distinction between Jew and Roman, righteous and outcast, men and women, rich and poor. The source of this radical relativizing of cultural distinctions is found in the charismatic grounding of the movement. Because Jesus saw God as gracious and embracing, the "children of God" could and did embrace those whom the politics of holiness excluded. The relationship to God was primary, not whether one was outcast, female, poor, or enemy. The experience of the Spirit disclosed the relativity--in a sense, the artificiality and arbitrariness--of cultural distinctions. The intense experience of the Spirit generated a new way of seeing and being which stood in sharp contrast to the boundaries and rivalries that were created by culture.

Spiritualization of central elements: In yet one other way the Jesus movement differed from the conventional wisdom of the Jewish social world. Specifically, Jesus denied that purity was a matter of externals, concerning pots or pans or hands, or whether one ate food that was untithed. True purity was internal. What mattered was an internal transformation, "purity of heart," which was possible even for those whom the social world placed beyond the pale. Similarly, the notion of righteousness was internalized.
   In The Urantia Book we have, Jesus said: "I declare it is not that which enters the body by the mouth or gains access to the mind through the eyes and ears, that defiles the man. Man is only defiled by that evil which may originate within the heart, and which finds expression in the words and deeds of such unholy persons. Do you not know it is from the heart that there come forth evil thoughts, wicked projects of murder, theft, and adulteries, together with jealousy, pride, anger, revenge, railings, and false witness? And it is just such things that defile men, and not that they eat bread with ceremonially unclean hands…."

   The Pharisaic commissioners of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin were now almost convinced that Jesus must be apprehended on a charge of blasphemy or on one of flouting the sacred law of the Jews; wherefore their efforts to involve him in the discussion of, and possible attack upon, some of the traditions of the elders, or so-called oral laws of the nation. No matter how scarce water might be, these traditionally enslaved Jews would never fail to go through with the required ceremonial washing of the hands before every meal. It was their belief that "it is better to die than to transgress the commandments of the elders…All of this can the better be understood when it is recalled that these Jews looked upon eating with unwashed hands in the same light as commerce with a harlot, and both were equally punishable by excommunication. (TUB 153:3)