"Loving your Neighbor" Isn't Just Being Nice, Part 1
Jesus's calls to care for the poor are more than just nice words
The life of a Christian, according to Christ, follows two simple principles: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind", and "Love your neighbor as yourself."
The first of these, we understand, is something to be made big, to be understood as all-encompassing. We love God in prayer. We love God in worship, communion, fasting, and evangelism. We strive to love God in every thought, every action, every moment of every day, and when we fail we confess and repent and fall in love all over again with the God who's forgiven us.
But the second, far too often, we make small.
We reduce its scope, subconsciously replacing "our neighbor" with "our friends" or "people near us" where Jesus included enemies and hated foreigners. We carve out exceptions for unhoused or addicted or otherwise "dangerous" neighbors. We exclude "political" questions, and foreign policy questions, and economic and "law and order" questions from love's exacting standard, and we insist that we "love" our neighbor's eternal soul even as we neglect their physical needs.
And so one of the most radical, most deeply demanding, most beautifully transformational commands in the entire bible is reduced to an uncontroversial Sunday School lesson about how it's good to be nice to your friends.
I think it's worth spending some time reflecting on the love we owe our neighbors, a teaching Jesus repeatedly implies is necessary for salvation. Jesus makes no effort to precisely define every contour of Christian love, but rather pushes at the boundaries in ways that reshape his disciples' deeply human understanding into more uncharted, necessarily faith-driven territory. In this series of posts I want to focus on three such currents that seem to be central to Jesus' teaching:
Loving my neighbor means radical opposition to unjust systems
Loving my neighbor means radical generosity with my time and money
Loving my neighbor means radical social inclusion
(Sidenote: I feel a little bit weird telling you how to read something that I'm writing, but I also am well-acquainted with the feeling of reading things on the internet, feeling validated in either my agreement or my disagreement, and moving on with my life. And so I would really like to ask, as I look for ways I can grow along the "love for neighbor" axis, that you would look for ways that you can grow, too!)
This post: Loving my neighbor means radical opposition to unjust systems
One of the central themes of Jesus' teaching is that "the last shall be first, and the first last." In other words, the false and broken ways our world elevates some over others will someday be undone, or even reversed. God's love, Jesus tells us, does not merely extend to the poor and the powerless: it centers them, and it burns against the systems that marginalize them to begin with.
This motif can be quite comforting, particularly in the promises it makes:
Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.
Luke 6:21-22
What complicates the story is that the world's injustice didn't come from nowhere. It isn't merely the natural state of affairs: there are more empty houses in the US than homeless people, yet our neighbors remain unhoused. Oil companies have known about the climate emergency already killing some of our most vulnterable neighbors for decades, and have been intentionally manipulating public opinion to hide it. Much of contemporary black poverty can be traced to the specific, racist policies of redlining and contract buying (not to mention Jim Crow and slavery). This is a sinful state of affairs and, in big ways and small, people chose to make it that way.
And so the comfort promised to those who are knocked down is counterbalanced by the grief promised to those who are lifted up:
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
Luke 6:24-26
God's love, then, reveals the truth of who we are in two ways: it lifts up those who the world condemns, and it knocks those of us who benefit off our pedestals. (In real life, of course, this isn't quite so binary -- plenty of people are privileged in one way and put down in another, and God can empower us in some ways while challenging us in others.)
As Christians, therefore, the love of our neighbor involves both of these things. We show love to our neighbors who the world has beaten down through friendship and kind words, but we also show love by doing our part to dismantle the systems that beat them down in the first place.
This doesn't have to mean standing up to people in power, although it can. More often, it involves standing up to ourselves. One of the most well-replicated results in modern social science is the fact that people naturally make real and significant judgments based on things like race and gender, without even realizing they're doing it. Women and people of color get fewer callbacks for job interviews, even when they submit the same resumes. In online classes, female professors receive better student evaluations when they pretend to be men. Police are more likely to use force (deadly or otherwise) on black suspects than similarly-situated white suspects, and this seems to still be true if you exclude explicitly racist officers. When we assume this doesn't apply to us, or choose to ignore it, we are lying to ourselves in a way that hurts people made in the image of God. This is a sin, and we need to repent.
So a first step is to understand how we ourselves contribute to the systems that lift us and others up, and working to change it. This involves hard work: honestly examining parts of ourselves we might not be comfortable with, and listening to people we've been primed to ignore. When it comes to racism, a good place to start (if you're white!) is Layla F. Saad's Me and White Supremacy. Find people of color to follow on social media, and not just voices who reinforce what you already believe. (Ibram X Kendi and Andre Henry both have good things to say on Facebook, and The Jude 3 Project and Truth's Table are wonderful podcasts). Learn the history of the racial systems we've been born into (Willie Jennings' The Christian Imagination is a good source), so we can start to picture what it looks like to shed them. And (and this is the hardest part for me) it involves continuing to do this, day in and day out, even when it's hard or tiring or uncomfortable, or when it implicates our past selves in ways we don't want to admit.
It's also important to find eyes to see just how central this theme is to the Bible --- it's a key part of almost all the prophets, Jesus' ministry, Revelation, and the book of James. It's everywhere, and once we're primed to look for it we can start to better understand how central Jesus' call for justice is to a true understanding of the gospel. While home for Christmas I was reading Isaiah 9, home of the famous "unto us a son is given" and "his name shall be called Emmanuel" Christmas passages, and on literally the next page Isaiah begins to denounce, in the harshest possible language, the sorts of anti-poverty laws and doctrines we've grown accustomed to in American life:
Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.
What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your riches?
Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives or fall among the slain.
Isaiah 10:1 - 4a
This is not something "liberal", or a secular ideology trying to "infiltrate" the church, and it definitely isn't something that "good Christians can disagree on."
This is God's wrath pouring down on systems that oppress his people. This is God establishing his supremacy over any definition of "worth" that isn't rooted in Christ. This is the God who will stop at nothing to fight for his people demanding that we choose a side.
If we love our neighbors, we will fight for social justice. We will listen to our neighbors near and far, seeking to understand what they need and how our own actions have affected them, rather than to find ways to dismiss them. We will learn to quiet the defensive voices inside us in favor of seeking true reconciliation. Sometimes we'll get things wrong, and we'll repent, and we'll keep going.
Or we won't, and nothing will remain for us but to "cringe among the captives or fall among the slain."
The path to heaven is narrow.
EPILOGUE
I think it's important to clarify the target of God's rage a bit, because it's really easy to take the idea of privilege as a personal attack. The message here is not that you are a bad person if you benefit from the world's unfairness. You did not design the systems of the world, and God loves you very, very much no matter where you find yourself in them.
But the message is that the unfairness itself is wicked, and that we are sinning when we contribute to it. The message is that we need to actively listen to the people being hurt if we want to identify these sins, and the message is that we need to choose to repent rather than become defensive when we do.
The best source I've found for this is a sermon by Pastor Kaitlin Ho Givens on precisely this theme in the context of the Magnificat:
[I]f you're listening to this and are accustomed to comfort and living high on the hills and here comes the Lord, our great equalizer--- it can feel kind of scary. It can look like a bulldozer that is out to get you. And I want you to hear me: the Lord is for you and not against you.
The things of the world that prop you up are counterfeit gods that promise what they cannot give. They will not hold you in the storms. They are sinking sand. Only the Lord can save.
And so, as we sing every year at this time in the words of "O Holy Night":
Fall on your knees before Christ the King.
Friends, examine your hearts. Where are you propping yourself up? In your work? In your charisma? In your likeability? Examine your heart towards the lowly, the awkward, the poor, the unnoticed. Because if God sits in the back and we sit in the front, aloof and unbothered, something is amiss. Repent, church. Invite God to throw your pride from its throne.
The Reverend Fleming Rutledge says "Lay yourself open to God's great leveling operation." Church, would you allow the Holy Spirit to give you a right view of God that shapes a right view of yourself? Not smashed down. Not puffed up.
The Weary World Rejoices: Flip the Script (18:24 -20:20) Listen to it yourself!