Calcification & Loving Thy Neighbor

Calcified

I recently listened to an interview with political scientist and UCLA professor Lynn Vavreck. In it, she described the demographic trends she’s noticed as we approach November’s presidential election. The main tendency she noted was what she termed “calcification.” The term, as Vavreck unfolded it, depicts a phenomenon akin to “polarization plus.” In other words, it’s not just that our two major political parties are far apart, or more polarized then ever — it’s also that each party is more homogeneous. And, many of the issues that divide the sectors of our political parties are personal, emotionally-held, or identity-related: immigration, abortion, religious freedom, gender, and so on. 

Vavreck’s term — calcification — has stuck with me. And I think the separation and hardening of our political parties is just one symptom of the ways in which, in the wake of the pandemic; our political, racial, and socioeconomic unrest;  our inundation in social media; the splintering of our news sources; and more, we’ve tended over the last several years to separate, isolate, and harden ourselves. 

Calcified.

I watch this happen in my neighborhood, among my friends, in my congregation. And it makes me wonder: what does it mean to faithfully follow Jesus right now? How might the Church break through the entrenched enclaves we sort ourselves and each other into?

One main facet of how we might live into that question, in my view, is by returning to that primary command of our Lord: love thy neighbor.

Good Samaritan

The parable of the Good Samaritan is, of course, among Jesus’ most famous parables, and his principal teaching on what it means to “love thy neighbor.”  Two millennia after Jesus told the story, news outlets still refer to someone who lends another some help as a “Good Samaritan.” We name hospitals after the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ story. And it’s this familiarity that inoculates us against the parables’ real punch.

But when we stand on the soil from which it comes, we can start to feel its scandal. Jesus tells the parable to a devout religious leader trying to entrap him in a “gotcha” moment. (Luke 10.25-37) He asks Jesus how one inherits Life in the Age to Come; and in some rabbinical back-and-forth, the unnamed scholar fuses Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus 19.18 in response: Love the LORD with your whole being; love your neighbor. Jesus affirms this. But then, the man presses: “And. . .who is my neighbor?”

The question beneath the question here is, “who isn’t my neighbor?”  The Jewish people of Jesus’ day had greater ethical obligations for how they were expected to treat fellow Jews as compared to non-Jews. And so, Jesus begins the story: A man was commuting from Jerusalem down to Jericho (this rocky, mountainous road was exceedingly dangerous — it was nicknamed “the bloody way”). He gets jumped, beaten up, and left naked and half dead. Now, Middle Eastern people of Jesus’ day would most commonly ascertain someone’s background by the language they spoke, their accent, or their clothing. But this guy has no clothes, and he can’t speak (he’s practically dead). In other words, the only information possible to know about him are that: 1: this is a human being, and 2: he needs help. That’s it.

Then, there’s the “hero” of the story. Because of this parable’s fame, we think of the Samaritan as the protagonist. But none of Jesus’ original hearers would have felt that way — Jews and Samaritans had been embittered, violent enemies for a thousand years by Jesus’ time. Replace “Samaritan” with whatever group or class of people, in your heart of hearts, you look down on, or are threatened by, or think are what’s wrong with the world, and you’ll begin to feel the punchline like that devout Jewish scholar would have. 

In this incendiary story, Jesus doesn’t answer original question; he reframes it: “to whom must I become a neighbor?” He refuses to place limits on who God can and can’t care for — and thus, who we’re called to care for. The Samaritan’s love is costly, comprehensive: he spends his time, money, and energy; and he risks his own safety. And so, if we follow Jesus, we “go and do likewise” with those he places us among, without exception or reservation — even if we think they’re dirty, rotten Samaritans.

Love Thy Neighbor

I love how John Calvin articulates this Gospel imperative. Calvin, himself no doctrinally squishy bleeding heart, doesn’t mince words: 

Whatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. Say, ‘He is a stranger’; but the Lord has given him a mark that ought to be familiar to you, by virtue of the fact that he forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say, ‘he is contemptible and worthless’; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image… Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of giving yourself and all your possessions… [We are not to] consider men’s evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them. (Inst. III.7.6)

I love how he puts that. We need some fresh “alluring” to love the people that, from the vantage point of whatever cultural enclave we call home, we’d see as Samaritans. 

Ancient Christians tended to see this parable as having a deeper dimension, as well.  Jesus, after all, when he told this story, was himself on a journey to Jerusalem that would become a “bloody way.” He was himself enroute to “go and do likewise” — to love a world of the wounded and undeserving, not just at the risk of his life, but at the cost of his life. That’s the sort of Love that could make us willing to care in a calcified time.