The Slow Work: Some First Principles for Consideration

Christianity asserts that God is love, and that this assertion reflects a first principle for understanding everything.  In order to make sense of this sentence, we have to have an understanding of what we mean when we say "love," (we also need an understanding of what we mean when we say "God," but let's start with "love").  Here, I would assert that love is fundamentally an action.  Yes, it is associated with feelings or sentiments, but those feelings and sentiments are not really the heart of this concept, I would say.  Love requires one to do something with regard to the one that is loved.  Thus, God is doing something.  But, what is God doing?  Let's hold that question for a moment.

The most famous of the parables of the Gospels is probably the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).  Someone (in the NRSV translation I use, "a lawyer") asks Jesus "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"  Jesus directs the lawyer to the law of Moses, and the lawyer paraphrases the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4-5--"Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might"--as well as Leviticus 19:18--"You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord."  Jesus endorses this synthesis and distillation of the Law of Moses, but the lawyer (as lawyers do) "wanting to justify himself" (Luke 10:29), asks Jesus to clarify who is a "neighbor" for purposes of the distillation.  In other words, who exactly do I have to love?  At which point Jesus tells the story of a man who is in distress by the side of the road, who gets passed by two religious leaders before being aided by the Samaritan, a member of what in modern Christian parlance we would call a "heretical" Jewish sect.

Now, the somewhat surface reading of this parable is that Jesus is trying to tell us that everyone is our neighbor, no matter whether they are part of our "in group" or not.  That's true, I think, but that reading would make more sense if it was the Samaritan who was the injured party.  Then, it would be a pretty straight-forward account of how we have obligations to people even if they are opposed to us (like a Samaritan would be to faithful Jews).  But the actual story is that the Samaritan is the one who takes action to assist the wounded man.  I wonder if the lesson here is that being a neighbor, and thus someone that we love, is something we do.  Being a neighbor means getting involved in the lives of others, bearing their burdens and sharing their sufferings, but also doing what we can to alleviate those sufferings.  

Because, I don't think it is actually possible to love everyone, and that's because I don't think it is possible to love the abstraction of a person.  There are billions of people in the world that I will never meet, never be able to form a connection with, to never become their "neighbor."  This is an inherent limitation of our finitude, and one that I think we need to recognize and accept.  If we don't accept this, the tendency is to divorce the idea of love from any sort of concrete actions, making love into a sentiment.  And, in my experience, once love becomes a sentiment, you are well down the road of evacuating it of any meaning whatsoever.  Thinking non-specifically positive thoughts about everyone in general is not really worth much of anything, and doesn't really get anyone anywhere.  Love is not love unless it is concrete and intrapersonal.

This, then, gives us some context for what we might mean when we say "God is love."  While we are limited to loving only those we come into contact with, God is not so limited.  God thus loves, in a concrete way, everyone, in a way in which we cannot do.  Moreover, because we do not say "God loves," but rather "God is love," the act of loving everyone (and, I would argue, everything) is not some voluntaristic choice that God makes, but is rather encoded in the very nature of God.  God cannot but love all that is created.

This, in turn, raises a problem.  If God loves everyone, and love means getting involved in the lives of people to alleviate their sufferings, why is it that people still suffer?  After all, shouldn't God be able to fix all of these problems?  My answer to this is a simple one--I don't know.  Lots of ink has been spilled on this throughout history, and I have not yet found an explanation that full satisfies.  All I can say is that I believe--or, more accurately, I trust--that God is in fact loving people in a concrete way and working to alleviate their pains and sufferings.  As Jesus says in John's Gospel (John 5:17) "My Father is still working, and I also am working."  I don't fully understand the nature of that work, but I believe it is happening, and thus I, too, must be working with regard to the people that I am neighbors to.

Another question--if I can't really love people I don't know, is it the case I have no obligations to them at all?  No.  I may not love them, but I know that God loves them.  And if I love God, I am obligated to make best efforts not to make any of their lives harder or worse.  Otherwise, I am thwarting God's efforts and God's purposes, which is not loving God.  Plus, all of us are connected in a web of relationships, relationships which should be ones of love.  I think it is the case that my obligations to people who are one degree of separation from me are very different from those that are twenty degrees, but the obligations at twenty degrees are not nothing, and as the Kevin Bacon game teaches us everyone is ultimately connected if you look thoroughly enough.  So, we absolutely have universal ethical obligations to people.  I just think it is a mistake to think of them in terms of "loving" everyone.

One last point about the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  I don't think it is an accident that Jesus talks about "neighbor-ness" through the lens of a crisis brought about by violent act inflicted on someone.  Whatever the ontological origin, darkness and evil are realities in our world.  I think that Christianity often has tried to explain away or minimize this reality.  Or, perhaps worse, Christianity has tried to frame darkness exclusively in terms of a fallen human nature, which makes everything bad that happens our fault.  I don't deny the reality of darkness within each one of us.  And I think it is important to assert that there is a reality beyond the darkness we experience, less we all collectively fall into despair.  But I think Christianity as a whole needs to spend more time accepting the reality of darkness and suffering and loss, both to sit with it and to focus ourselves on working to alleviate it, and less time trying to explain it away or minimize its impact.  I for one am increasingly uncomfortable with Christian framings of death that try to argue that the Resurrection has "defeated death," such that we should no longer view it as something to be feared.  No, death is still real, and it sucks, and I think some Christian rhetoric--especially in the current environment--comes perilously close to gaslighting people.  

But that is a likely-heretical tangent for another day.  My core point is that the heart of this whole project, it seems to me, is about reaching out to the people that are around is, getting "stuck in" to their lives in a tangible way, and bearing their burdens and trying to alleviate their sufferings.  In doing so, we are doing on a small scale what God is doing on a universal scale.  It may not be any more complicated than that.