‘Choose life’ (Deuteronomy 30.19) means life for others as well as for our self.
Context
- Witnessing the house arrest in Italy of Carola Rackete, Captain of Sea Watch 3 who attempted to land imperilled migrants in Lampedusa while, back in Libya, many migrants were killed in the bombing of a detention centre, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by immeasurable need and afraid of Jesus’ ignition of the word ‘neighbour’.
- While Britain acts out her ugly jealousy asking what Europe takes off us, there’s been no room in the three years of dreary argument to ask what we can give to Europe and what kind of neighbour Britain is called to be. Brexit Party MEPs show what kind of neighbours they want to be by turning their backs on a young orchestra playing Beethoven.
- 160,000 largely white middle-class people, the majority of whom believe in the death penalty, are deciding whom they trust to be our next Prime Minister. We may wonder by what criteria they are measuring. We perhaps ought to pray for neighbours in other demographics who have no voice.
- An ambassador critiques his host nation and, in response, their President vomits insults through social media. What an un-neighbourly and undignified scramble for control of the narrative.
- It’s with trepidation we ask, ‘who is our neighbour?’ knowing Jesus will ask us to help, but worrying about where on earth it will stop. Sam Wells describes the ‘profound, visceral and primal reaction to the word “neighbour”’ which ‘becomes a cipher for ‘impossible demand.’ (Incarnational Mission, Canterbury Press, 2018, p.120 – he reflects on ‘The Optician of Lampedusa’ in a helpful chapter on ‘being with neighbours’). And yet the more that resentment and fear seem to govern our relationships, the more we know Jesus is right. His parable contains a brutal beating. He is not naïve. He is making us look hard at human need, but also into our own soul to face our selfishness and also to admit our unquenchable compassion.
Reflection
Towering, frowning, fierce, yet open hands held out with huge pathos, the Knife Angel shimmers with the ‘kindness and severity of God.’ (Romans 11.22). As you stand beneath it, taking in the terrifying beauty of its shape, your eye then catches the detail: flecks of coloured handles amid the elemental rust. Whose fingers clutched those handles, and why? Whose flesh did the metal pierce? Its 100,000 knives were retrieved from the streets by 43 police forces, so you shudder as you focus on individual blades, each one telling a story of fear. How on earth did we reach a point where carrying that meat cleaver, or that brutally curved blade, seemed like a good idea? And how many more are out there?
We have had incidents of blades being drawn outside our Youth Project recently, so our young people made a trip to see the Angel, created by Alfie Bradley, when it stood in Birmingham. One member of our congregation has lost a grandson, a senseless stabbing destroying not one but several lives. All of our church communities will sadly have some experience of this. How far from neighbourliness can we go? At least Alfie has made something eerily beautiful to draw us back together.
This week Eva Kor died. She survived, not only Auschwitz, but the (can it get any worse? Yes, it can) experiments of Dr Mengele. That he experimented proves he recognised the humanity of the people he and the murderous Nazi systems attempted to objectify. Eva Kor chose to overwhelm the memory and experience of evil by being a neighbour. In an extraordinary act of reconciliation, in 1995 she went back to Auschwitz with her family, and with a surviving guard and his family. She wrote and spoke about forgiveness without ever downplaying or excusing evil and, carefully, without ever requiring anyone else to forgive. She witnessed powerfully, though, to the liberation she experienced and the agency she felt as she transformed from victimhood to dignity. Being a neighbour does indeed help us truly to live (Luke 10.28) – please note, there are daunting descriptions of her experience contained in the linked article.
Forgiveness is not the theme of the parable Jesus told, but neighbourliness as a choice is. The lawyer tests Jesus (the same word as Satan testing him in the wilderness) with a question. Jesus’ question in return ‘What do you read?’ firmly underlines the lawyer’s responsibility as privileged, educated, literate man. The crowd couldn’t read. We don’t know if all the disciples could, but the simple answer about loving God and your neighbour as yourself is a line probably everyone would know. It is very simple. As Moses said, it’s not beyond the seas or requiring vast academic intelligence. It is already in your heart. Anyone can grasp it. To his credit, the lawyer didn’t over complicate things.
This is where the lawyer’s motives, though, are revealed. His question is not about love. It’s about the opposite: self-justification. He asks who his neighbour is in order to limit his care, not extend it. ‘Who do I need to care for so that I gain eternal life?’ is not care; it is asking how little he can get away with giving. Peter had the same problem when he asked how often we should forgive. He wanted to know when he could stop. Some of the disciples understandably have trouble with forgiveness. You will have noticed that twice in recent chapters Jesus has been rejected by Samaritans. James and John asked whether they should do as Elijah did and call down fire from heaven to destroy them. Jesus rebuked them and now challenges both them and the lawyer before him by casting the Samaritan as saviour.
Jesus replaced the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ with the question ‘How can I become a neighbour to a stranger?’ He showed the lawyer and priest asking, ‘what will that man take off me?’ and the foreign traveller asking, ‘what can I do for him?’ He shows the first two asking ‘what will happen to me if I help?’ and the third, by his deeds, asking ‘what will happen to him if I don’t?’ The lawyer wants to purchase a future eternal life for himself. Jesus shows him how to live his life fully in relationship with neighbours right now.
Carola Rackete, Alfie Bradley and Eva Kor, in very different ways, show the kind of irrepressible human hope that asks the right questions, defying the dominant narrative of selfishness and despair. Similarly, Paul rejoices in the defiant love, faith and hope to be found in the small Christian Community in Colossae, and is moved by the wrestling in prayer for them by its founder Epaphras (Colossiana 4.12) who, although no longer with them, still cares how they fare. It is because they have embraced what Paul calls the ‘εὐαγγέλιον’ (euanggelion). That Greek word would be used of an Imperial announcement of military victory. Using it to proclaim Christ’s pacifist resurrection is defiant. The Empire enslaves whomsoever it wishes. Paul describes apostles as fellow ‘slaves’ serving Christ and therefore inhabiting not the dark Empire, but ‘the kingdom of [God’s] beloved Son’.
In whom shall we trust today? Trusting Christ above all, deeds of love cannot help but follow. For he has shown in his response to Samaritans, even those rejecting him (Luke 8.37 and 9.53), that he expects foreigners to be a gift, not a threat; he offers all of us relationship; he turns everyone into neighbours. Jesus shows that to reach out and help is not a one-way gesture, nor a loss. It is to experience life in all its fullness.
Prayer
Political prayers could include:
We pray for Britain, so often assuming itself to be the saviour, with the wealth to help others, and choices to make about how much to give away, but could it be that morally at the moment Britain is the beaten-up man, needing help from the wisdom and care of foreign strangers who are willing to be her neighbours?
Help Britain rediscover its vocation.
God, give all the nations humility to admit their need and accept foreign generosity.
God, give the most powerful nations wisdom and courage to admit their vulnerability.
God, give all our nations compassion and courage to reach out when neighbours are in need, that we may discover what it feels like to be fully alive.
Pastoral prayers could include:
- those who find it difficult to accept help;
- any whose racism shuts them off from help and blessing that may be on offer;
- the National Health Service in which we are thoroughly dependent on many people of diverse faiths, whose origins are overseas, and who treat us in our need, anointing us with tenderness and skill.
Questions
It should be said, Paul’s very positive and specific thanks are, in part, preparation for the very hard things he is going to say about false teaching, fascination with cosmology and excessive emphasis on rules that imperil the Gospel community (Colossians 2).
Moses’ words, if we read on, set out both life and death, prosperity and adversity. He is fierce as he makes his final speech to Israel before he dies. We sense how hard it is to let go, and how desperate he is to prepare the people for life without their great intercessor. ‘Choose life’ he pleads (v.19).
Reflect together on what your generation should say by way of encouragement as you hand on to the next, and what stern warning you would leave them with.
All-age activity / for Young people
On the ground, make an angel with something you recognise as problematic, such as plastic rubbish, or pieces of coal (recognising practicalities of hygiene and cleanliness may need thinking through), or newspaper images of weapons or drugs.
Think together about what posture and expression the angel should have and what message you would like to go with it. (The word angel means messenger. The Knife Angel for example says, ‘save a life, surrender your knife’.)
Post the image on your church website and any social media platform where you think it might reach those who need to see it.
David Warbrick is Vicar of All Saints Kings Heath in the Anglican Diocese of Birmingham where he often tries to pass by on the other side of Kings Heath High Street, but finds there is unsettling need there, too.
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