Wow. With a Jesus like yours, who so warmly encourages so many things that are human nature to start with, what do we need a God or commandments for at all? Where in all that you are talking about it some call to rise above our baser selves? Respectfully, I find the direction of this thread to be bleak and dispiriting.
I do, however, agree with you that Jesus' call to charity is for personal action, not socialism. But I also feel that he is calling for us to use Love in our solutions to our problems and I do not, in the text, find him coupling Love with punishment.
Respectfully I don't understand your point at all. What good are the commandments if they can never be enforced? They're just noise and scribbles on a rock.
Being slow to anger is NOT human nature and it certainly IS a call for us to rise above our baser selves. God is slow to anger as was and is Jesus, but both do get angry and neither entirely rules out violence as a solution. We know this from their behavior in the Old Testament, John 2, and Revelation. "Wrath of God" is not just an empty threat. If we are saying it is never necessary, then we are saying we are somehow better than God.
I think Jesus just makes the crucial point that anger and violence is not necessary anywhere near as often as human nature leads us to believe. But I seriously doubt he wants us to cut back 100% on violence, just 99.9% with the 0.1% very carefully thought through in advance whenever possible. We are not to be ruled by our temper, emotions, pride, greed, ego, etc., all of which the 99.9% represents. So don't make me out to be some bloodthirsty yahoo -- I get physically ill when I see a fight in the street. But I'm just not a pacifist.
Speaking of which, if we are to take the Quaker view of 100% pacifism (and I'm not saying this is your view because I don't know) where all violence is always wrong regardless of the context, then that leads to parents standing idly by and pleading with a rapist as he tortures and sodomizes their child instead of doing whatever is necessary to stop him. It means we cannot and should not have a police force or a military. It means we should have done nothing to stop Hitler and that we should do nothing to stop Al Qaeda, Saddam, and Iran. It means that a woman should not resist a rapist. It means we cannot stop anyone we see in the act of committing a crime. It means we cannot defend our homes and families from violent intruders. It means teachers and parents can't even defend our children from bullies or pedophiles when they are caught in the act. It means we are to be mindless ostriches.
I do, however, agree with you that Jesus' call to charity is for personal action, not socialism.
Yes, agreed.
But I also feel that he is calling for us to use Love in our solutions to our problems and I do not, in the text, find him coupling Love with punishment.
Again, see Revelation. Jesus very much loves his enemies, more than any man or woman could, but in the end he very much does punish them far beyond the capacity of any man or woman. Already has in some cases -- he took out the Roman Empire ("Babylon the Great") and it was not done gently.