a man fallen among thieves (partial reprise)

Today's Gospel reminded me of the following poem by e.e. cummings. He captures so very well, what being a good samaritan involves for us sometimes, and more, simply being a Christian for the least of the least amongst us.

a man who had fallen among thieves

a man who had fallen among thieves

lay by the roadside on his back

dressed in fifteenthrate ideas

wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less

emancipated evening

had in return for consciousness

endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal

citizens did graze at pause

then fired by hypercivic zeal

sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook

of pinkest vomit out of eyes

which noticed nobody he looked

as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest

its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt

while the mute trouserfly confessed

a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke

i put him all into my arms

and staggered banged with terror through

a million billion trillion stars

ee cummings

10.July.2016.

One piece of today's Gospel struck me strongly this morning during Liturgy, namely, the fact that no one can answer the question we each might raise to Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" but we ourselves. The answer is not a given but instead a task and challenge Jesus leaves us with and empowers us to make true. The idea of neighbor is not a simple matter of physical address or ethnicity or naturally occurring commonality but instead an unfulfilled promise and apostolic commission associated with the coming of the Kingdom of God in fullness. What Jesus makes clear in today's gospel lection is the fact that we are each called to allow those who are aliens, those who are strangers (even if they live next door or in the same family) to become "neighbors". And more than allow, we are to make neighbors of those who are alien. This is the mission of every Christian.

As I wrote here a few years ago: [[ Yes, the Law allowed for intervening in life and death situations, but it also leaves a lot of room for casuistry: note the scholar of the Law's final question to Jesus: "who is my neighbor?" Jesus' own ethic leaves no room for such casuistry: the one who loves even the least as God loves has discovered who is the real neighbor, and has acted as one himself. There is nothing more important than this love, no piety which is more demanding. This is a love that law cannot legislate and is dependent upon a freedom law does not give or (sometimes) even allow. It is an extravagant love that calls for no compromises beyond the canny shrewdness of the Samaritan's generosity.]] The Samaritan makes of the injured man a neighbor in treating him as he does; in doing so he transforms reality. And so we are called to do! We are called to make neighbors of aliens and strangers, not because they are like us or live near us or even because they share the same creeds or codes or cult as we do, but instead because we love them as Christ does and as the Samaritan in today's gospel lection does so surprisingly and brilliantly.

"Who is my neighbor?" we ask, trying to wiggle out of the uncompromising truth and demand of God's commission to us.  "Whom have you made to be your neighbor?" Jesus might answer. "Whom have you loved in this way? Whose alienness have you transformed with a generous and attentive love? Whom have you made room for in your own life, your own heart, your own routine as the Samaritan did today? There is your neighbor and there too is the Kingdom of God among you."

Is Faith opposed to Charity?

[[Dear Sister Laurel, I shall be thankful if you can clarify the following. Does dogmatic faith in any way promote Christian charity? Reading Luke's parable of the good Samaritan I get a feeling that Jesus was primarily concerned with charity and less with faith. 

In the parable we find two persons who are given credentials of faith-- one is a priest and the other a Levite. Both however are personifications of inhuman callousness and exclusiveness.The Samaritan on the other hand has neither faith nor dogma(Jesus does not even mention whether he is a believer or not).Samaritan however has a human element and conscience that is responsive to the sufferings of others. I am inclined to believe that the more one thinks of faith , the more exclusive one becomes. Moreover the more emphasis church gives to dogmatic faith, the more it thinks of organisational cohesiveness, organisational uniformity,preservation of hierarchy and less about Jesus Christ who always thought of the human element.From what I have read about church history ,I feel that whenever the Church was concerned with dogma and faith there were instances of excesses at times lapsing into drastic inhuman measures like forced conversions ,inquisition and burning at the stakes.

So the question is , don't you think that the terms faith and charity pull in opposite directions making a Christian feel rather uncomfortable - faith pulls towards exclusiveness, rigidity,blind loyalty to the dogma and organisation hampering concern for individuals; and charity pulls towards inclusiveness ,concern for the feelings of others and universal philanthropy that transcends organisations and beliefs. I had asked a few questions in the past and received very convincing replies from you. Hence this question.]]

Interesting question. Thanks for sending it on to me. You use the term "dogmatic faith" by which I think you mean faith in doctrine or dogma and you contrast that with charity. You then conclude that Jesus was about charity but not faith when in fact I think you mean Jesus fostered love and was unconcerned with dogma or doctrine. You also link concern with doctrine or dogma with inhuman abuses (which you call faith) and note that charity seems to pull in the opposite direction. My problem here is that the way you are using the term "faith" is neither Biblical nor theologically rich enough; it is far too narrow a notion to call "faith" and might better be called belief. (Thus, though this is both necessarily and unfortunately a bit too simplistic, you might consider that we believe in content --- which doctrines and dogmas are ---  while we have faith in persons or living realities like God, or friends.)

It seems to me that narrowing the term in the way you have so that it refers only to adherence to or concern with doctrine is precisely the problem you want to avoid, and precisely the reason there have been problems in the history of faith like those you mention. Instead you need to recover a broader, richer, and more Scriptural sense of the term faith --- a sense which includes appropriate honoring of content (which we call doctrine and dogma) while not making that the be all and end all of the reality of faith. (Doctrine and dogma have a place in mature faith, but dogmatism and all that goes with that does not!)

The most fundamental meaning of the term faith is a responsive (or obedient) trust. (cf Rom 10:11, Phil 1:29, Gal 2:16) To have faith means to entrust oneself to another. Once one has done that a number of things will happen. If the person (or God) is worthy of that trust we will find that we become more fully human, that we grow in our capacity to love others without condition, that we become holier people (another way of saying the previous two things), etc. We become persons of confidence, courage and hope, marked by that person's affect on us in light of our having entrusted ourselves to them. Remember all the times in the Gospels that we hear Jesus saying to someone who trusted him, "Go, your faith has made you whole, " or something similar. Thus, far from being antithetical to charity, faith leads directly TO charity. It empowers love as the other person's love moves us beyond ourselves and out to others (or back to community which illness, etc may have deprived us of). In other words faith creates the capacity for community; it does not, when genuine, lead to exclusivism. Similarly it leads to the capacity for compassion precisely because when faith is well-founded it leads to the situation of being loved and loving; compassion is never exclusionary.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan those who fail in compassion are not seen as men of genuine faith --- though they hold fast to the letter of the law; the Good Samaritan, who falls outside the Law and is despised by men of the law, is one who fulfills the law more fully than either of the others. He is a man who trusts God and acts out of that trust. He is capable of real compassion and freedom to do other (and more) than the letter of the law calls for because of his relationship with God (I argue this is implicit in the parable). In some ways authentic faith means putting people before principles and that is what we hear in this parable. It is a classic law vs gospel text.

Finally, faith (and here I mean faith in God, faith in its most proper sense) will have other dimensions including the doctrinal because faith has a content. (If I trust and love God I am going to believe certain things about God.) It is a complex reality which rightly affects and involves every part of the human being (heart, mind, will, etc) at the same time in what Tillich calls "a centered act" of the whole person. It is for that reason we have seen problems in the history of the Church whenever one dimension of this reality is cut off from or given a mistaken priority over other dimensions --- something which is inappropriate both to faith itself and to the one called to have faith. Still, the bottom line, it seems to me, is that we are called to have faith IN God as well as believing all kinds of things ABOUT God. This faith (responsive trust) IN God is more foundational than beliefs ABOUT God --- even when the doctrinal part of things comes first in our experience. (That is, we are usually taught things ABOUT God before we are introduced to the idea of entrusting ourselves TO this God and  this is often done in order to induce us to or otherwise justify such trust --- but entrusting ourselves is more foundational for a life of authentic humanity or faith.

I hope this is helpful.

Followup questions on story, fundamentalism vs atheism, etc

[[Dear Sister, thank you for your posts on story. I have heard Genesis called mythical before, but I was unclear why scholars thought that was a good thing and not a harmful one. I especially never heard before that taking such stories literally could actually be the most harmful thing we can do. It was interesting to hear you put creationists and atheists in the same box here. So here are my questions. Do all stories in the Bible work in the same way? Are you saying that creationists and atheists misread the Bible in the same way? Are these two really more related than not? What is it they are both missing with regard to the stories in the Bible?]]

Some stories in the Bible are more historical (and that is true in the later chapters of Genesis as well), but yes, they challenge us in SOME of the same ways I outlined in the earlier posts. Especially they challenge us to identify in one way and another with the characters and problems involved and make decisions on where we will stand as a result in our own world; they can stand temporarily as a space where we can explore ourselves, etc, but generally they do not ask for the same kind of suspension of disbelief I described before. However, two kinds of Scriptural stories especially work in the way I outlined: myths, and parables (especially Jesus' parables which are completely unique to him in the history of literature).

Both are especially good at providing a space where we can enter in and leave our own world behind (so to speak) for the time being, but only so we can return with our own hearts and minds changed in some way and engage that world differently as a result. One of the ways you will see that Jesus' parables differ from myth per se is that they draw us in, disorient us, and then, demand that we make a choice which reorients us, either to the world as we ordinarily understand it, or toward the Kingdom of God. They are more active or directed in this dynamic than myth per se; further, because they are less fantastic than myth they demand not so much a suspension of disbelief as a renunciation of belief. I will not repeat more of what I have written in the past about parables, but I would suggest if you have not read them, you check out the pieces on Thematic Aperception Tests and Parables, or, the Parable of the Good Samaritan for a more detailed explanation of the way Jesus' parables in particular work. They are tagged, so you can find them in the list of labels at the right hand side of the blog.

Yes, I am saying that creationists and some atheists (there are different kinds) do tend to read the myths of Genesis' primordial history in the same way. Both take these stories literally, and make them ridiculous in the process. The creationists read the stories as explanations not only of a sovereign creator God, but as descriptions of the way he creates. They rule out evolution (micro and macro), ongoing creation, a world which is moving towards perfection or fulfillment rather than (merely) falling away from it, etc. As a result they make faith look like an anti-intellectual act of people afraid of truth instead of a deeply intelligent act worthy of humanity and the profound mysteriousness of the cosmos. They do something similar with God, who is invariably treated as A BEING rather than as the ground and source of all being and meaning. Atheists do the same, but they do so in order to justify a lack or even refusal of faith, the transcendent, and the like. They do so in order to denigrate believers and belief, but also to castigate the parodies of God naive believers so often put forward --- itself a much more legitimate enterprise than is sometimes recognized. So yes, despite apparent differences, these two groups of people often have more in common than they have differences.

What both of these groups of people miss is the fact that stories are sophisticated even sacramental vehicles for encountering truth, and this is especially true of myth or the mythical elements in stories. Both groups treat literal truth as contrary to profound truth which needs to be conveyed with myth and the bending and shaping of the literal. Both forget how story functions in our lives. They treat these things as childish, something to be outgrown, rather than understanding how entering into stories allows for growth in transcendence. (Watch a child being read to and imagine the explosions of transcendence going on in her mind and heart as she places herself in the story and internalizes what she hears!)

They do this in different ways: the creationist, for instance, absolutizes elements in the narrative as literal or historical in the modern sense and loses contact with the depth dimension of the story. Thus when faced with scientific data regarding evolution, the age of the world, etc, they must deny these things; when told by other believers the stories of creation function as myth, their faith is threatened unnecessarily and they cannot see the deeper truths embodied as only story can do. The atheists on the other hand opt for the data of science as far superior to what can be conveyed in story and if told the account is mythical, dismiss it as nonsense or fiction on ALL levels. Both underestimate truth (its scope and mystery) and the God who grounds and is the source of all truth, but they do this especially by forgetting how story functions, and how human beings are by nature story-telling beings not because they are unsophisticated or primitive, but precisely because they are sophisticated and capable of transcendence and communion.

Introduction to Galatians: A look at the Pauline Lections for this week and the next

This week and part of next we are reading Galatians and I have to say it is one of my favorite letters, not simply because it is Paul at his most passionate and biting, but because it is here we see one of the greatest bits of evidence that the Church came only over time to understand the Gospel and its implications; further, because it gives us a sense that church documents do not have to be studies in compromise when the truth is at stake I find it tremendously refreshing.

Galatians is the story of a man fighting for the truth of the Gospel, a truth he knew deeply and which came to him from his experience of the risen Christ. This experience led him to understand that Jesus was truly the Son of God and God's own messiah or anointed one. It was an understanding that so completely conflicted with his former pharisaical wisdom and position, especially his rightful persecution of the Church apparently idolizing a crucified man, that it overturned everything he held dear --- not least his own love of the Law and emphasis on the need to show one is a member of the covenant people by being circumcised. For Paul, it took real courage not to compromise and accept a Law-laced Gospel, not to insist that Gentile Christians also become Jews to be the REAL covenant people, but despite his love for the his own Tradition he came to see that indeed, God was doing something really new in Christ -- even while it was consistent with the best of the Jewish Tradition.

There are so many lessons for us today in this short book that it is one of those that make me thank God it was included in the Canon. Certainly life in the church would have been much easier without it: No condemnations of Peter's hypocrisy, no examples of letting go of long-held God-given gifts (Traditions) so that God could do something new, no sustained examples of genuine conversion and apostleship despite not being among the original twelve, no sharp indictment of law and its opposition to the freedom (and spirit-breathed responsibility) of the Christian, no examples of actually going against what Jesus himself APPARENTLY held onto as necessary for the time being (circumcision!)!! (Consider this last carefully because the NT certainly does not indicate Jesus ever exempted anyone from circumcision, nor was he himself exempted --- and yet, here we have Paul arguing that maintaining the practice is insufficiently sensitive to and even undermines the truth of the Gospel! For those who argue, "Had Jesus wanted x (or not wanted x), he would have DONE x (or not done x)," Galatians is a wonderful kick in the backside.) The resurrection did indeed turn things on their heads, and cultural truths as well as God-given tradtions fell in the process. And thanks be to God this is the case, for there would be no truly catholic church had this not been the case, merely a Jewish sect stamped with a need and capacity to do great good but also marked by a kind of separateness and righteousness open to the relative few.

Yesterday's readings were a great combination: the introduction to Galatians where Paul covers briefly (and sometimes merely implicitly) all the accusations made against him and states what is at stake in the Gospel he has preached, and the Lukan version of the parable of the good Samaritan. In the Gospel from Luke we see that two men doing their duty according to the Law avoid what looks like (and could well be) a dead man. The Law demanded they not defile themselves in this way, and further, that they take care of their temple duties. Hence, they passed by the injured man. Yes, the Law allowed for intervening in life and death situations, but it also leaves a lot of room for casuistry: note the scholar of the Law's final question to Jesus: "who is my neighbor?" Jesus' own ethic leaves no room for such casuistry: the one who loves even the least as God loves has discovered who is the real neighbor, and has acted as one himself. There is nothing more important than this love, no piety which is more demanding. This is a love that law cannot legislate and is dependent upon a freedom law does not give or (sometimes) even allow. It is an extravagant love that calls for no compromises beyond the canny shrewdness of the Samaritan's generosity. What Paul will be arguing to the Church in Galatia this week and the next is precisely this point: The Gospel gives is the freedom of Christ, a deeply responsible freedom which far exceeds the freedom of the Law. We combine it with Law at our own peril, but most significantly at the peril of the Gospel itself.

For now, let me make one point clear which was at the heart of things for Paul: if Christ has really been raised from the dead and vindicated by God, then nothing could go unchanged or without reevaluation. The Law especially and its place in the life and piety of Jews and Gentiles could not go unchallenged, for it was according to the Law that Jesus was crucified as a blasphemer and stigmatized as Godless. It was according to the Law that Paul persecuted Jewish Christians. It is either Law OR Gospel for Paul, because he knew that either Jesus is the risen Christ killed by the Law, or what was done to him was not only legal but the correct way to deal with a blasphemer. Galatians is largely the story of what happens when Paul, as the result of his experience of the Risen Christ, sees this clearly and others do not, but instead try to compromise between Law and Gospel.

I will try to post several more times this week (and next) looking at the daily lections and the challenges posed by Paul's letter to the Galatians. For now let me encourage readers to really spend some time rereading it in the next ten days. If you are looking for a readable and inexpensive but good commentary to use with it try NT (Tom) Wright's Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians. James Dunn's The Theology of the Letter to the Galatians is also quite good, and Sacra Pagina's volume on Galatians is excellent, of course. For readability though, Tom Wright's books are nearly unbeatable.