Spiritual Sunday
This past week, I attended a special Bible study session on the Good Samaritan parable where Sewanee’s Rev. Amy Lamborn emphasized just how radical God’s second great commandment is. Jesus tells the story in such a way, she pointed out, that call out his audiences prejudices. At a time when we are turning our back on our neighbors to the south–and to the neighbors who have different views than ourselves–it is critical that we apply the lesson to ourselves
Also, if we are to be tough-minded about it, we must grapple with Ivan Karamazov’s assertion that some neighbors simply cannot be loved. As he sees it, Jesus is irrelevant.
In Luke 10:25-37, Jesus turns the tables on a scholar who is testing him. At issue is how to live a godly life. If you want to touch the divine, Jesus gets the man to admit, you must regard the Samaritan as your neighbor:
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
Given how the Israelites regarded the Samaritans, the half-dead man would have assumed that the gentleman was there to finish him off. It’s as though he has been approached by, say, an ISIS member or something comparable. That’s how deep the enmity went.
Jesus, in other words, is telling us that our neighbor includes our mortal enemy. We must assume that these people have within them the capacity to save our lives and aid in our recovery. The divine spark can exist where we least expect to find it.
This past Thursday I wondered whether sadism drives Donald Trump and many of his followers. So is Jesus calling upon us to love sadists? Because Ivan Karamazov thinks so, he says that Jesus demands too much of Christians. When we encounter the child abusers he luridly describes, can we do anything other than write them out of humanity? How about the following example, which the Russian censor demanded that Dostoevsky excise from his novel?
This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans!
While this is beyond even the most savage of Trump supporters, their willingness to endorse separating immigrant children from their parents and locking them in cages without basic amenities is more a difference in degree than in kind. Here’s some of what Clara Long from Human Rights Watch witnessed when she visited a border detention center:
The three-year old before me had matted hair, a hacking cough, muddy pants, and eyes that fluttered closed with fatigue. His only caretaker for the last three weeks in a United States Border Patrol chain-link cage and then a cell…his 11-year old brother….
This week, I’ve been working as part of a team of lawyers and doctors monitoring conditions in border facilities, including in Clint. What we found has left me devastated.
Children should spend no more than a few hours in short-term border jails and US-law limits their detention under typical circumstances to 72 hours, but many of the children we interviewed at Clint had been there for three or four weeks. The Border Patrol claims that high numbers of border arrivals are causing these delays as they wait for space to open up in the somewhat more child-friendly detention centers and shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement at US Health and Human Services. Based on our interviews, officials seem to be making no effort to release children to caregivers – and many have parents in the US – rather than holding them for weeks in overcrowded cells sleeping on concrete floors. Nearly all of the children I spoke with had been held without any communication from desperate parents.
Meanwhile, a public health emergency is brewing. While we were denied access to speak with children quarantined in special cells for those with flu at Clint, several infants held in South Texas facilities were admitted recently to a hospital, after the intervention of doctors and lawyers. Children at Clint told us they don’t have regular access to showers or clean clothes, with some saying they hadn’t been allowed to bathe over periods of weeks and don’t have regular access to soap. The US government argued in court on Tuesday that its obligation to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions does not require it to provide kids with hygiene items such as soap or toothbrushes.
Let’s acknowledge first that these immigrants are out neighbors and must be loved accordingly. But to complicate matters, those who carry out or tolerate such actions are also our neighbors, and the Christian challenge is to acknowledge their full humanity as well. This does not mean giving them a pass—they must still be condemned for their opinions and their behavior—but if I am to fully step into the divinity that Jesus saw within me, I must look for the potential goodness within them.
Jesus loved even those who crucified him, separating their souls from their actions. Ivan says he sets a ridiculously high bar and that he himself will disobey God’s second commandment. If loving one’s neighbor is the requirement for being a Christian, then he will return God’s ticket–at least when it comes to abused children–and “remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation”:
[T]oo high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”
As I mentioned in Thursday’s post, Ivan eventually goes mad whereas his brother Alyosha, while shaken, responds to his diatribe with a kiss. I want to side with Alyosha and with Jesus, but Ivan’s and Trump’s examples of child abuse show just how hard that is.
Jesus understands the difficulty. Unlike Ivan, however, I am inspired rather than discouraged that Jesus saw us capable of love, even in the face of mind-bending evil. He saw more in us than we could ever imagine.
One other thought: Ivan cites another act of cruelty and society’s rationalization for it in a way that allows me to encapsulate today’s point. On the one hand, his savage indignation at people who find excuses for abominable behavior, which he voices through lacerating sarcasm, is relatable. Many social activists feel this way about such people. But figures like Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King proved more effective than Ivan at addressing social ills because, rather than remaining trapped in his outrage, they drew on a higher love.
Here’s his outburst:
A well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own child with a birch-rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it. The papa was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. ‘It stings more,’ said he, and so he began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact there are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps, ‘Daddy! daddy!’ By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought into court. A counsel is engaged. The Russian people have long called a barrister ‘a conscience for hire.’ The counsel protests in his client’s defense. ‘It’s such a simple thing,’ he says, ‘an everyday domestic event. A father corrects his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into court.’ The jury, convinced by him, give a favorable verdict. The public roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn’t there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honor! Charming pictures.