"WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?"
David Robb
August 25, 2002
"Who is my neighbor?" That is the question famously posed to Jesus by an unnamed lawyer who had painted himself into the corner by attempting to test this upstart and self-appointed rabbi from Galilee. Last Sunday we explored the opening sequence of this encounter. It begins with what I called the religious question: "Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus does not respond directly with an answer, but with another question? "What is the law? What is written?" He knows that the lawyer knows exactly what to say, and on cue he replies:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all you mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus responds: "So what is the problem? What about any of this do you not understand? Do this, and you will live." Not, "Do this and you will live forever." Jesus brings the focus of the original question back to the present: Do this and you will live, here and now, in the fullness of time. Do this and you will live abundantly the life that has been granted you as a gift. Do this and you will live as if each moment counted, as if each moment contained within it the Eternal Now.
But now the lawyer is embarrassed, and rather than admit this, in typical lawyerly fashion, he presses on. He asks (as the text shrewdly comments "seeking to justify him-self"), "and just who is my neighbor?" If the original question can be called the religious question, then perhaps this is the ethical question. But if the real motive is "to justify himself," we may conclude that he is not so much looking for enlightenment as he is looking for a way to catch this teacher in a contradiction. Yet this time his question does elicit a response from Jesus, albeit in an indirect way. His response takes the form of a parabolic story, one that few of us have failed to hear at one time or another, the story that we have come to know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
I suspect Jesus knew quite well that the second part of the commandment—the part that goes "and you shall love your neighbor as yourself" is really not that difficult to grasp. In fact, as one of my mentors pointed out many years ago, it is the one Biblical commandment each of us keeps faithfully. We do after all love our neighbors just about as badly as we tend to love ourselves. No, I believe Jesus takes some pains to respond, not because he believes this lawyer is yet asking a profound question, but because he recognizes there is a profound question just beneath the surface of the one he is posing.
Notice that the lawyer is asking a lawyer-like kind of question, which is to say an adversarial kind of question. "Tell me, rabbi, just who my neighbor is so that I will always know that I in strict adherence with the law." His question is a question about definitions, and, once again it focuses not on what he is to be, but upon what he is to do:
"Who qualifies as ‘neighbor’ according to the Torah? How do I limit the field to fit this definition? Who is in? Who is out? Whom can I exclude and still satisfy the letter of the law and my own conscience?" It is a sign of patience that Jesus does not just dismiss this man and his questions out of hand.
But neither does Jesus reply to the questions in the spirit in which they have been posed. No, in both cases he seems to sense that beneath the surface of the question at hand is a question of more depth and longing, an existential question, not merely a legal-istic question. His response is indirect, not because he is being evasive or superficially clever, but to lead his antagonist to a recognition of the question that lies beneath the question. I suppose he might have engaged the man directly and won an argument. But I think he also recognizes that you can always win an argument but lose a following. It is, by the way, one of the remarkable aspects of Jesus’ ability as a teacher. He uses story as a way to encourage all of us to reframe our questions, and in this way lead us to often-surprising recognitions and sometimes unpredictable answers.
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So I invite you come with me and reenter this famous story, to listen again as if for the first time, to try to imagine some of the assumptions his original hearers might have brought to it, to explore it with an open mind, as if we did not already know what the point of the story is. We will take our time, as I intend to continue this exploration next week as well. But as we do so let us keep in mind, we will not get very far along the way if we begin with the assumption that this parable is something akin to a fable such as Aesop used to tell. It is not a clever little story with a pithy moral that will summarize the lesson. Jesus skill as a storyteller and as an imaginative religious teacher is much more subtle than that.
Take, for example, the two characters identified as a priest and a Levite. Those of us familiar with the story know that they are the ones who are used to set up the contrast in the parable. They are the ones who pass by the stranger who has been beset by robbers and thieves and lies helpless and dying by the side of the road. And to this day they have become virtual archetypes for human callousness in the face of human suffering—exemplars of moral insensitivity and the absence of compassion. But as I tried to enter the story anew I sought to imagine how Jesus original hearers might have understood these characters. Are they merely crude examples of human callousness? Or do they represent something more subtle, something more like us, and therefore something more understandable? Not so much a lack of compassion as a lack of discernment? Not so much a failure of nerve as a failure of imagination?
Before we leap to judgment, let us reflect that Jesus’ original hearers would likely have been more tolerant than we. In the first place they would have known immediately about the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, for it was notorious as a very dangerous stretch.
If you traveled, especially late in the day or early evening, you stood a pretty good chance of being mugged. So if you had to travel, better to do it in a group. And if you had to travel alone, better not to let any grass grow beneath your feet. Jesus knew what every one of his hearers would have assumed: fear on the road to Jericho was a natural, even a necessary companion. So the first thing anyone in his right mind might have assumed on encountering a body by the side of the Jericho road at dusk was, either this is a corpse, or it is a decoy planted by a gang of thieves. From this point of view, do the priest and Levite act without compassion, or just from a position of understandable prudence?
Secondly, these men are both holy men charged with sacred responsibilities in the Temple at Jerusalem. If it is plausible to assume that the body on the ground might indeed be a corpse, new factors enter into the picture. For in the Jewish law observed at the time a corpse is unclean, and to touch a corpse would render those who did so unclean for a specific length of time. But for those who handled the sacred vessels in the Temple, the consequences were more severe. Had these men handled what turned out to be a corpse they would have been banned from Temple service for the rest of their lives. Jesus knew this, and he knew that his hearers knew this. That is why it does not seem probable that he just sets these two characters up to be obvious villains in a routine melodrama.
What the priest and Levite represent more plausibly is the kind of moral dilemma any one of us might face if confronted with a similar situation. It is the genius of story that it draws us to understand the nature of the dilemma in something other than intellec-tual terms alone. It presents us with a concrete situation that only requires a small amount of imagination on our part to place ourselves in a comparable circumstance within our own historical setting. In this case, it is a situation that appeals, on the one hand, to our sense of compassion, on the other, to our legitimate fear for our safety and self-regard. Put that way, the actions of the two characters do not seem so one-sidedly selfish at all. And their dilemma is at least one for which most of us can discover some empathy.
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But I believe the story and the dilemma it evokes speak to an even larger dimen-sion of life than mere personal rectitude. For this is the kind of dilemma that engages us not merely as individuals, but also as peoples, as whole cultures, as civilizations. And I believe that Jesus is not just speaking to an individual lawyer, or to a handful of followers eager to hear him speak. He also addresses us with the same kind of urgency and vision he was attempting to evoke in those who were listening for the first time. Let us not forget, the lawyer was asking a question that addressed his need for absolute moral certitude: who is my neighbor? The emphasis in his question is on the who; Jesus’ reply indicates he sought to shift the emphasis to the neighbor.
Jesus chose for his story two characters who inhabit the same kind of universe as the lawyer, namely a priest and a Levite, two professional men who serve the law and ritual of the Temple, ones who inhabit a universe of rules and regulations that define for them the truth, that define for them what is allowed and what not allowed. And it is at this point that the story begins to address each one of us not only as individuals, but also as members of a society, of a corporate culture. We are all engaged in some venture to define with clarity, if not absolute certitude, who we are, what we are allowed to do, and what we are not allowed to do. And whenever this quest begins to take on the character-istics of a search for absolute certitude, I believe the story rises up as a rebuke.
I was reminded about this dimension of this story by recalling the words of Jacob Bronowski a quarter century ago. Bronowski was as close to a Renaissance man as I suppose any produced in the 20th century. He began his career as a mathematician, then turned to the physical sciences, then to the history of science. Along the way he also wrote poetry and a splendid book about the poetry of William Blake. In the mid 1970’s he wrote the script for a wonderful series of programs first produced by the BBC, and later broadcast in this country by PPS titled The Ascent of Man. It traces the thrilling development of the human spirit and imagination in its quest for truth and understanding, and the mastery of scientific principles that have produced such a capacity for benefit to the human family.
In the 11th segment of this series he describes the remarkable and ironic turn of events that took place in the 1930’s. For it was then that the physical sciences were coming to discover and to articulate the limits of human knowledge at precisely the same moment in European history that saw the emergence of cruel totalitarian political regimes whose claims to absolute certitude were in direct contradiction. While the physicists were making a breakthrough of profound consequences—Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—people were rushing to pay allegiance to political systems that claimed to be
omniscient and infallible. The consequences of the scientific breakthrough were, according to Bronowski, far-reaching and irreversible: "No event can be described with certainty; all knowledge, all information can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. That is true whether the exchange is in science, literature, religion, or politics."
At the end of this 11th segment Dr. Bronowski delivers a message I have never forgotten, and it is worth quoting in its entirety in today’s very dangerous context. At the opening of the sequence, the camera is focused in a tight close up of Bronowski’s face:
There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts—obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
[At this point the camera recedes until the viewers can see that Bronowski is standing alone in front of a pond. In the background is what looks to be the remains of an abandoned factory. He continues his address]:
It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you might be mistaken."
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, [Szilard, an atomic Physicist, had first posited the idea of a chain reaction that would release an astonishing amount of energy. He worked assiduously to engage the US govern- ment in a crash program to build an atomic weapon before Germany succeeded in creating one. Then he worked just as assiduously, and unsuccessfully, to try to convince US leaders never to use this weapon of mass destruction.] I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push button orderand the human act. [At this moment, Bronowski walks into the pond. He stoops to lift a handful of mud from the bottom, rises, and holds it out before him towards us, and speaks his final line]: We have to touch people.
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Dear friends, I do not need to remind you that we are living in a very dangerous and difficult moment in our nation’s history. Our leaders repeatedly tell us that we are engaged in "a war against terrorism." We believe, with justification, that we have been unjustly attacked. We begin to divide the world into those who are for us and those who are against us. We use apocalyptic terms to describe the latter. They are "evildoers." There is a collection of "rogue nations" who form "an axis of evil." We threaten ourselves to bring a reign of terror upon those who threaten our way of life. We arrogate to ourselves the right to define who is our neighbor and who is not. And we do all of this with a growing sense of urgency, together with a sense of absolute certitude. But I be-lieve we do all of this at great cost to ourselves, our humanity, and our moral credibility in the rest of the world.
No, I do not believe our country is engaged in a programmatic effort to exterminate a whole race of people. We are not building gas chambers and herding masses of people we do not like into concentration camps. But we are building and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction that are capable of accomplishing the same purpose. And we are dangerously close to claiming for the first time in our nation’s history a right to preemptive warfare, whether or not anyone in the rest of the world agrees with us or shares our vision and sense of certitude.
In such a moment we need to listen again and again to the message with which Jesus continues to confront us, a message that resonates with remarkable sympathy and clarity in the words of Jacob Bronowski:
"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken"
WE HAVE TO TOUCH PEOPLE