The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other commands there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor [Romans 13:9-10a, NIV].
About a dozen years ago, during a long period of time in which I taught the “Sola Scriptura” adult Sunday school class at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church, we had an occasion to discuss one of the best-known of Jesus’ parables — that of the “Good Samaritan” — found only in Luke’s Gospel [Luke 10:25-37]. We took time to discuss an important contextual detail surrounding the parable: Jesus offers the parable in response to a trick question posed to him by an “expert in the Law” — a question that is sometimes ignored. The question: “Who is my neighbor?”
The “expert” understood that, as a son of Abraham, he was required to love his neighbor; it says so right there in the Torah or Pentateuch [see Leviticus 19:18]. “But Jesus,” the expert thought, “Let’s be realistic, surely there has to be some sort of reasonable limit on who we define as “a neighbor,” right?
It was about that time during our class discussion that a close friend and member of the class spoke up. I won’t divulge his identity, except to allow that he is a prominent Durham dentist known for his allegiance to the “light blue” university, that he has extraordinary intellect, not to mention quick wit, and that he’s married to a great gal named “Debbie.” He said, “Tom, so, as I understand things, Jesus is trying to get us to see “neighbor” as an expansive term, rather than a contracting one, right?”
I said something like, “Yes, exactly.”
His comeback: “Do you think the term “neighbor” is sufficiently broad so as to encompass someone who went to Wake Forest?”
I responded, “I don’t know that one could go that far.”
All jokes aside, segments of the Church have struggled for 2,000 years with the question offered by the expert in the Law: “Who is my neighbor?” It’s a core question raised by the apostle Paul in the Epistle reading appointed for this Sunday [Romans 13:8-14, the 14th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A].
The Church has struggled even more with our Lord’s answer. For 2,000 years now, Jesus has been telling us that the point at which each of us wants to limit the definition of neighbor, we have marched off in a different direction than the one in which He is heading. Like the expert in the Law, sometimes the Church — and sometimes each of us individually — seeks to limit the definition in order that we can limit the extension of our love. Jesus responds that there are no limits. Paul advises that “love is the fulfillment of the law” [Romans 13:10b]. Yet still, sometimes collectively, sometimes individually, we seek to separate “us” from “them.”
For example, during the Crusades, the Church reasoned that Muslims, of course, could not be neighbors. And so, in 1209, at the time of the assault on Béziers (a town and commune in Southern France that earlier had been overrun by the Muslims), abbot Arnaud Amalric, military commander of the Crusade in its initial phase, is said to have written Pope Innocent III, indicating that it was often difficult to tell the Catholics from the Muslims. The Pope is said to have responded, Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.[Kill them all. For the Lord knows those that are His own].
During the 1930s, the dominant German Christian Movement found it expedient to define “neighbor” in such a fashion that it excluded Jews, Gypsies, and others. The Movement saw Hitler not only as Reich “Führer,” but “Führer” of the Protestant church as well. Thanks be to God; some dissenters put their lives on the line by proclaiming, inter alia, that “Jesus Christ is the only Lord of all aspects of personal life. There should be no other authority” [Barmen Declaration, Thesis 2].
The Ku Klux Klan has had three ugly manifestations in America since the end of the Civil War. During each of those manifestations, many within the Klan would have been present for weekly worship in Protestant congregations, particularly throughout parts of the South. All too often, the clergy and leadership in those churches turned a blind eye to the Klan’s activities. As the late Dr. H. Shelton Smith, then a Duke Divinity School professor wrote in his highly-acclaimed, In His Image, But … [Duke University Press, 1972], it was one thing to proclaim that all humanity was created in God’s image. It was quite another to live that creed. People of color, could they really be neighbors?
More recently, the same question has surfaced in some congregations with regard to the chaos within America’s immigration system. Public policy arguments aside, the church is called upon to respond anew to the question first posed by the expert in the Law: “Who is my neighbor?” At least within Christ’s Church, shouldn’t the burden be upon those who want to apply a restrictive, rather than an expansive, definition of neighbor?
Jesus seems always and everywhere to remind us that the neighborhood’s net is larger than our collective imaginations, not smaller. One might have a legitimate debate about how love for the immigrant — both legal and illegal — should be manifested. But, I certainly hear our Lord telling us that we are to love both groups. And more: To quote the apostle Paul, “Love does no harm to a neighbor” [Romans 13:10a]. I applaud the Church (and its leadership) in having the courage and faith to extend Christ’s message of love for neighbor to the immigrant.
I do wish the leadership of the mainline Protestant churches (by “mainline,” I mostly mean the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and the Episcopal Church) had the same faith and courage to extend Christ’s understanding of “neighbor” to the unborn. Regrettably, in the eyes of the mainline denominations, the unborn child is not our neighbor. To echo Paul, “Love does no harm to a neighbor.”
How, for example, can mainline churches teach and preach a doctrine that says the weak, the helpless, and the most vulnerable among us should be undergirded and protected, and then take a position that the weakest, the most helpless, the most vulnerable should be aborted if that is the desire of others?
As I have written elsewhere at length, the level of irony present within the pronouncements of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is simply breathtaking. It assigns nine separate categories of so-called “problem pregnancies,” identifying the minimum circumstances — it allows that there obviously could be more — within which the unborn can be dispatched at the woman’s desire (having consulted with her physician, who will be paid for the procedure, of course).
The irony is that Mary’s pregnancy with our Lord, Elizabeth’s with John the Baptizer, Sarah’s with Isaac, Hannah’s with Samuel, to name just a few, would have all been considered “problem pregnancies” by mainline Presbyterians. When Elizabeth looked at Mary, the child within her did not react to “a problem;” the one who would later be John the Baptizer leaped with joy within his mother’s womb. Where would the Jewish and Christian Faiths be without problem pregnancies?
How is it that the mainline churches can, with a straight face, teach and preach that all of humanity is sacred, intertwined and interdependent, that the Body of Christ is diminished when any part of that Body is harmed, and then turn and ignore the fact that the most perfect example of that sort of sacred inter-dependence is the unborn child, en ventre sa mere? It can only do this if it says the unborn is not our neighbor. When it comes to immigration, mainline churches appropriately implore us, as Christians, to speak Truth to Power. The same denominations ignore the fact that to an unborn child, mainline Protestants represent coercive power.
As I noted above regarding the issue of immigration, within Christ’s Church, shouldn’t the burden of persuasion be upon those who want to apply a restrictive, rather than an expansive, definition of neighbor? Why shouldn’t that same rule be applied to the unborn? With regard to the powerless, the voiceless, the frail, and the dependent, are we not to regard them as our neighbors? Doesn’t our Lord require us to love them as we already love ourselves?
Be First to Comment