Tag kindness

Human Values vs. Legal Values

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Mark 2:23-3:6

How do you deal with people when their obsessive focus on something good leads them to use that good thing in a way that is manipulative or domineering?  How do you get through to people whose attention to the details of something good and beautiful leads them to treat people in a way that is harsh or even cruel?

There was a letter that appeared in Amy Dickinson’s advice column the other day that really brought that question home to me.  The letter writer was concerned because one particular house in their neighborhood had become an eyesore because of deferred maintenance.  

“Dear Amy,” they wrote. “I live in an affluent neighborhood of expensive although older homes. The vast majority of homes are well maintained and manicured. Many have had major remodels. 

However, there are a couple of homes that are in serious need of a facelift! One home in particular is a complete eyesore. 

Although it is worth more than a couple million dollars, the lawn is dead, paint doesn’t match and/or is faded in places, wood facia is rotting, along with other significant cosmetic problems.  There do not seem to be any code violations. I am not aware of the owners’ financial situation, but they’ve been there long enough that there should be significant equity to refinance and get money for repairs — or sell and move to a less expensive home.  Other neighbors have left notes, to no avail.  Any suggestions on how to get this family to fix up their house, or even move?”

The letter was signed, “Frustrated Neighbor,” and Amy’s response to this Frustrated Neighbor was pure gold:

“Dear Frustrated,” she wrote.  “It is so generous of you to provide such a detailed list of repairs to be made to this property! You’ve obviously inspected the house quite closely. 

“What a neighborhood! People leaving notes and developing repair punch lists and investment advice — and not one finding out who these neighbors are and asking if they need a hand. 

“I suggest you approach this by putting human values ahead of property values. Changing your orientation and approach should improve the neighborhood.”

Putting human values ahead of property values.  Or legal values.   Or economic values.  That’s exactly what Jesus was doing when he began his nonviolent campaign to confront the traditions and  institutions and the political and religious authorities and laws that were squeezing the life out of the people of Galilee.

In today’s Gospel reading from Mark, we see two episodes where Jesus is confronted by self-appointed guardians of Sabbath piety, men—and they were all men—whose  strict interpretation of Sabbath codes was impairing the quality of life for the very people whose quality of life they were supposed to be safeguarding.  Their pious concern for every jot and tittle of the very good gift of God’s law in Torah had led them to treat God’s people with harsh inflexibility.

The first confrontation comes when Jesus and his disciples “made their way” through the grain fields on the Sabbath.  As they forged a pathway through the field, the disciples were plucking and eating heads of grain.  This didn’t sit well with the Pharisees who were observing them.  “Look,” they said, “why are your disciples doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath.”  

The Law of Moses permitted poor people in Israel, or travelers, or aliens to glean enough grain for a meal from the crops in a landowner’s fields. Deuteronomy and Leviticus both make it clear that you were allowed to pluck grain by hand in a neighbor’s field or pick some grapes from your neighbor’s vines as long as you didn’t use a tool to cut the stalks or collect your gleanings in a basket.  The open question, though, was can you do this on the Sabbath?  

The Torah did not specifically say one way or the other, so the Pharisees, who were always inclined to err on the side of strictness, had concluded that, while it might be okay to do a little personal harvesting on the other six days of the week, it was definitely not okay on the Sabbath.  This, of course, could leave poor people in a real bind.  If you can’t use a basket to collect enough for tomorrow and you can’t come back to the field on the Sabbath, you’re pretty much stuck with going hungry on the day of rest.

Jesus, of course, took the opposite view.  Hunger doesn’t know or care what day it is.  Hunger doesn’t know or care about Sabbath laws.  Human values override religious legal values.

Jesus tried to get the Pharisees to discuss this issue by referring to an incident from the life of King David.[1]  “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food,” he asked them,  “how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions?”  When the Pharisees responded with stony silence he added, “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath.”  The point Jesus was trying to make is that some human needs take precedence over other human needs.  The need for food takes priority over the need for rest or Sabbath observance.  

Since Mark’s account immediately moves to the next confrontation, we are left to assume that the Pharisees simply were not open to debating this issue with Jesus.

“Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand.  They were watching him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him.”    

The way Mark’s gospel describes it, this looks like a setup for entrapment, but Jesus sees right through the Pharisees’ scheme and decides to put them on the spot. “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath?” he asks them.  “To save a life or to kill?”  Jesus turns the issue into a clear binary decision.  The implication in his question is that there really is no moral middle ground between compassion and legalism.  If you fail to do good when you have the chance then you are doing harm.  If you do not act to save a life in peril when you have the chance, then you are complicit in the killing.  

The Pharisees responded to Jesus once again with silence.  Jesus, we are told, “looked around at them with anger.  He was grieved at their hardness of heart.” 

With all that tension simmering in the air, Jesus healed the man’s withered hand. And the Pharisees?  “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”

The Pharisees in these incidents are like a homeowners association who are so concerned about maintaining the curb appeal of the houses in their neighborhood that they completely ignore the lives of the people who live in those houses.  When they see a house that is not in compliance with their standards, rather than seeking to understand the situation or even provide assistance, they add to the burdens and difficulties of their neighbors with their notices of noncompliance and their threats of fees and legal action.

Standards are good.  Laws are necessary.  But people are more important.

In chapter 12 of Mark’s gospel a scribe asks Jesus, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied by combining a quote from Deuteronomy with a quote from Leviticus. “The first is,” he said, “is ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

In reflecting on this Greatest Commandment, Father Richard Rohr said, “Imagine how different the world would be if we just obeyed that one commandment—to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. It would be the most mighty political, social upheaval imaginable. The world would be radically different if human beings really treated other people as they would like to be treated. We can take this as a simple rule of thumb: What would I want from that person right now? What would be helpful for me to receive? Well, there’s our commandment. There’s our obligation to do to others!  

“It’s so simple that we can see why we put all our attention on the Ten Commandments, or the hundreds of other regulations culture and religion place on us. It’s much easier to worry about things that keep us ‘pure,’ so to speak, but are of little consequence.  

“After all is said and done, it comes down to loving God and loving our neighbor—and that implies loving ourselves. If I said this without quoting Jesus, I could be accused of oversimplifying or ignoring some of the important commandments, but thank God Jesus said it first. He taught that it’s all about love, and in the end, that’s all we’re all going to be judged for. Did we love? Did we love life? Did we love ourselves? Did we love God and did we love our neighbor? Concentrating on that takes just about our whole lifetime and we won’t have much time left over to worry about what other people are doing or not doing. Our job is to love God, love ourselves, and love our neighbor.”[2]

The Pharisees love God and they love Torah, God’s law—that’s a good thing—and in their own way they love their neighbor because they believe that their neighbor will benefit if everybody rigorously obeys Torah.

Jesus loves God and also loves Torah, but Jesus interprets the law differently because he understands that, to paraphrase what he said about the Sabbath, the law was intended to serve people; people don’t exist to serve the law.

The way Jesus interprets Torah is consistent with the way the prophets understood the law.  The prophet Micah summed it up very succinctly when he wrote, “God has told you, O Mortal, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

To love kindness.  The Hebrew word that Micah uses here is chesed.  It means kindness.  Or steadfast lovingkindness. Or, sometimes, mercy.

In rabbinic tradition, the world is said to stand on three things:  Torah, divine service, and chesed—acts of kindness.  Chesed, kindness, is considered “boundless” because a person can never do too much of it.  It is behavior that goes above and beyond the letter of the law, a one-sided giving that brings goodness to the neighbor.

Chesed, kindness, strengthens mutual relationships.  It reinforces the bonds of our implied covenant with each other, our social contract.  Chesed, kindness, is one of the attributes of God.  At the end of Psalm 23 the psalmist is speaking of God’s steadfast lovingkindness when he says “Surely goodness and chesed, kindness, will pursue me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Kindness acknowledges that we are of the same kind.  We have the same needs.  We have the same fears.  We face the same pitfalls.  We have the same hopes.  We are of a kind.  Kindness acknowledges that what is good for you is good for me, or to put it another way, I will be kind to you and trust that you will be kind to me because we are all in this together.

What kind of world might we see if we made chesed, kindness, the central pillar our politics our economics and our laws?  That’s the question Jesus wants us to consider as he moves through our world announcing that the Kingdom of God, the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, is within reach.  It can be our reality on earth as it is in heaven.

Standards are good.  Laws are necessary.  But people are more important.  

[1] 1 Samuel 21

[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr,“613 Commandments Reduced to Two,” homily, November 3, 2012. 

Familiarity Blindness

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Luke 10:25-37

Note: This sermon was preached in 2 parts which are combined here.

Have you ever experienced familiarity blindness?   A lot of us develop familiarity blindness with one thing or another—that condition where you know something so well that you actually stop seeing it.  The upshot of it is that the next time you do take a hard look at that familiar whatever it is, you see all kinds of things that you hadn’t noticed before.  

In my office at home I have a black and white photograph, a portrait of my grandparents—my mother’s mom and dad.  That picture was taken the year I was born, so I’ve been seeing it my entire life.  My grandmother, the woman in that picture, died nine days after my first birthday, so a lot of my impression of her came from that photograph.  As a kid, I always thought she must have been kind of stern and austere—that was how the picture struck me.  But the other day, I took a moment to look at it again from a slightly different angle, and I realized that she is  actually smiling ever so slightly, and her eyes look very loving, gentle and understanding.  Now that I was really looking at her picture, I also realized that there was something strikingly familiar about her eyes, and then it suddenly dawned on me that I was seeing my mother’s eyes in this picture of her mother.  That smile, those gentle eyes had always been there in the photograph, but I hadn’t seen them because of familiarity blindness.

I think it’s fair to say that many of us have a kind of familiarity blindness with the parables of Jesus in general and this one in particular, and I shared with you last week how Dr. Amy-Jill Levine’s amazing book, Short Stories by Jesus, helped me see this familiar story in a new way.

We talked last week about the lawyer who tries to trap Jesus into saying something that can be used against him.  We talked about his trick question about inheriting eternal life and how Jesus turned the tables with a trick question of his own but amplified it with an even more important question when he asked, “What is written in the Law?  How do you read it?” 

That first question, “what is written in the Law,” was a red herring.  Torah, the Law, doesn’t say anything at all about eternal life.  The Law of Moses isn’t interested in life after death but it is vitally concerned with how we live here and now.  The really important question is the second one Jesus asks the lawyer: How do you read it?   That question is just as important for us today as it was then.  Maybe even more so.

The lawyer responded to Jesus by quoting a mashup of the Shema from Deuteronomy and the Golden Commandment from Leviticus: “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.”  “That’s correct,” said Jesus, “Do that and you will live.”

The bottom line is love.  Love God, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Do that and you will live.  Love is the key to an abundant life.

It sounds simple.  The problem, though, is that this commandment to love is all inclusive, and there are some people we really don’t want to love.

I think the lawyer in this story is honest enough to realize that about himself.  He knows there are some people—you know, “those people”—that he will never love, and he suspects that this is true for everyone standing there listening to Jesus.  Luke says he wanted to justify himself.  He wanted to make himself look right in the eyes of all those listening.  But he also wanted to maybe find a loophole.  Surely Jesus can’t mean that he has to love everybody, because, you know, there are some people—those people—who have clearly demonstrated that they are not on our side.  Are we supposed to love them?  

So he asks another question:  “And who is my neighbor?”

In the context of law, the question about who is a neighbor has legal merit.  After all, good fences make good neighbors.  But in the context of love it’s irrelevant.  

So Jesus redirects with a story.

A man travelling on the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho is violently assaulted by robbers.  They don’t just rob him, they strip him and beat him so badly that he’s half dead.  So there he is half dead at the side of the road.  A priest happens by and does nothing to help the poor victim who is lying there bleeding.  He passes by on the other side of the road.  He gives the wounded man a wide berth.  Next a Levite comes by.  He also passes by on the other side of the road and does nothing to help the wounded stranger.

At this point, those listening to Jesus tell this story are shocked and the lawyer has to be wondering where this is going.  For them, it’s unthinkable that a priest and a Levite would pass by without helping.  The Law is very clear on this.  They are required them to help!  That would be their duty and it would take precedence over any other duty or obligation.  Even if the wounded man turned out to be dead, they had a responsibility to care for his body.  

The people listening to Jesus would have been shocked.  But they are about to be utterly scandalized.  Because the hero of the story turns out to be a Samaritan.  

It’s hard for us to imagine how much the Jews hated the Samaritans.  And vice versa.  There antagonism between these two peoples went back centuries and was all the more intense because they were so closely related.  

We traditionally call this parable the story of the Good Samaritan, but in the minds of those who were listening to Jesus, the words “good” and “Samaritan” would never go together.  It was an oxymoron.  Samaritans were the enemy.   The people listening to Jesus as he tells this story might have thought, “If I were the man in the ditch, I would rather die than admit that I was saved by a Samaritan.”  In their minds, Samaritans were something less than fully human.  

So how did things get to be that way between the Jews and the Samaritans?  Well, centuries before Jesus, in the time of Jacob, Samaria was called Shechem, and it was a Prince of Shechem who raped Jacob’s daughter, Dinah.  In the time of the Judges, the false judge Abimelech, who murdered all his rivals, came from Shechem.  For a time, Shechem became part of the united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon, but after Solomon died, the Northern Kindom of Israel—which had been Shechem—broke away and a kind of low-grade civil war broke out that continued for generations.  When the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom which was now called both Israel and Ephraim, they brought in people from other conquered kingdoms to resettle and then renamed the land Samaria after the capital city.  That’s also when the people of Judah began to refer to Samaritans with a kind of racial slur,  calling them “the people with 5 fathers.”  But the thing that the people of Judah found absolutely unforgiveable forever and ever amen, was that when they returned to Jerusalem after their time of captivity in Babylon, Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, joined forces with other people in the region and attacked them to try to stop them from  rebuilding the city wall and the temple.

For their part, the Samaritans called themselves the Shamerim, meaning “guardians” or “observers” of the Law.  They had built their own temple on Mt. Gerizim and they had their own version of Torah, which they insisted was the “true” version.  They believed that only Torah—their Torah, of course—contained the word of God and they did not include the writings and the prophets among the books they regarded as holy.

For Jews, Samaritans were the ultimate “other.”  For Jesus to cast the Samaritan as the benevolent hero was almost beyond belief.  It would be like an ultra-orthodox Jew being saved by a Hamas Palestinian.  To bring it closer to home, it would be like someone wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt being saved by someone wearing the Confederate stars and bars and a red MAGA baseball cap.  

Who would it be for you?  Who is that ultimate “other” who, in your mind, only just barely qualifies as a real person?  Who is it who, in your mind, seems to be so radically different from you that there’s really no point in even talking to them?  Or maybe there’s someone who sees you that way.  How would you feel if it was one of those people who pulled you out of the ditch?

The lawyer had asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”  Jesus reframed his question.  Jesus wants us to understand that the question is not “who” merits my love or even “from whom” should I expect love.  As Amy-Jill Levine wrote, “The issue for Jesus is not the ‘who,’ but the ‘what,’ not the identity but the action.”  Love—loving God, loving your neighbor, loving yourself—is revealed in action.  Love does not exist in the abstract; it must be enacted.

The Priest and the Levite did not act in love even though their law and duty commanded that they should.  In his sermon on this parable shortly before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. had an explanation for why they did not help:  “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me.  It’s possible these men were afraid… And so the first question that the priest and the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ … But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question:  ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

The Samaritan gave first aid to the man at the side of the road.  He put him on his donkey and took him to the nearest inn where he could receive more help.  He paid the innkeeper two days wages to take care of the wounded man and then gave him a promise that amounted to a blank check.  “Take care of him,” he said, “and when I come back, I will repay you whatever you spend.”

“Which of these three,” Jesus asked the lawyer, “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  The lawyer couldn’t even bring himself to say, ‘the Samaritan.’  I imagine there was a long pause before the lawyer finally said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

Mercy.  It’s an important detail here at the end of the parable,  a well-chosen word.  In both Greek and Hebrew, the word we translate as mercy can also mean “kindness.”  It is also a covenant word in Hebrew.  It signifies a shared bond of common humanity in the eyes of and under the Law of God.  It is an acknowledgement that we “are of the same kind.”  The Samaritan showed mercy.  Kindness, a word that takes us back to the prophet Micah:  “God has told you, O Mortal, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness…mercy…kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

“Go and do likewise,” said Jesus to the lawyer.  And to us. 

In our country today, we find ourselves living in a culture scarred by cycles of division, antagonism, conflict, and even violence.  In this parable, Jesus is telling us that these spirals of perpetual antagonism can be broken with kindness.  The question that Jesus wants us to wrestle with is this: Can we learn to treat even our enemies, the “Samaritans” in our lives, in ways that acknowledge their humanity?  Can we dare to see them in ways that acknowledge their potential to do good?  Can we can bind the wounds of those “others” and dare to imagine that they would do the same for us?    

When we encounter each other on the road full of bandits and other dangers, will we be blinded to each other by our familiar stereotypes, or will we step outside of the roles we’ve cast for each other to show kindness and be the good neighbor?