And who is my neighbour?
In 2014, Grace Gelder, a middle-aged English photographer, married herself. In 2015, performance artist Tracey Emin, best known for her art exhibit “messy bed”, married a rock, a stone in her garden in France; the perfect husband in terms of stability, quiet, comfort and calm. To be sure, it’s not going anywhere. There are those who have ‘married’ bridges, the Eiffel tower (and subsequently divorced), a Ferris wheel named Bruce, a warehouse, and other objects, inanimate and otherwise. Such is the nature of our commitments to various things, I suppose. Yet, rather than immediately and completely dismissing such things as narcissistic nonsense, the philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, suggests that we should consider the moment of truth in such things. To marry oneself suggests that one is not simply identical with oneself and raises the further question, ‘which self are you marrying?’
Your happy self? Your grumpy, catty self? Your anxious, nervous self? Who are you? What is your self? By extension, the same applies to these other ‘marriages’ which are about forms of attachment which reveal aspects of ourselves as well. But even more, they reveal a profound contradiction in our contemporary world. We are autonomous selves and yet utterly unclear and uncertain about ourselves. How can we love anything or anyone given such radical uncertainty about ourselves?
One might at this point opt for the classical Buddhist approach and simply deny that there is any you at all. There is no self. This is indeed a remarkable concept in relation to getting utterly free of all and every form of attraction, of desire, of possession. You are an illusion and so is the world. But the kind of boutique Western Buddhism popular in the west, is neither western nor buddhist. For, on the one hand, it affirms what Buddhism most emphatically denies, namely, the self, and, on the other hand, denies what western culture in general firmly embraces, namely, that there is a world which is in some sense knowable; in short, there is God. I am not sure that these are real options, since classical Buddhism negates the question, while faux western buddhism persists in the same confusions. What then shall we do? Well, we might consider thinking more deeply the familiar and yet unfamiliar parable of the so-called Good Samaritan in today’s Gospel. We know it but overlook its profounder meaning.
The question in the Gospel, “and who is my neighbour?” really turns on the underlying question about the self. The commandment to love God with the whole of our being and our neighbour as ourself both assume the self. But what the parable of the Good Samaritan told in response to that question shows is that the truth of ourselves can only be found in God and only through our discovery of the limitations of ourselves, our actions, and our intentions. We find ourselves in Christ who unites perfectly what is imperfect in us in all respects: ourselves, our love of God and of one another. At issue is really about how we are in Christ and how in him we learn about who we are. We don’t know ourselves simply by ourselves or in ourselves. In confronting our fallenness we are awakened to the care of God as the animating principle of our lives and being. We find ourselves in Christ.
And this has very much to do with the understanding that underlies our doing. “How do you read?” Jesus asks the lawyer about the law which leads to the disclosure of the Shema, a kind of summary of the Torah for the Jews, and what we know as the Summary of the Law. Love of God and love of neighbour are intimately and inextricably bound together and in that bond is a discovery of the self which changes altogether the nature of our relationships to one another. We love them and ourselves in God, in Christ. Our struggle is to live that truth. It means our constant attention to Christ in his Word and Sacraments so that he lives in us and we in him. Christ is the Good Samaritan whose love compels us to love out of his love.
We discover ourselves through our acknowledgment of what is other than ourselves. To marry oneself, for instance, is to make oneself an object to oneself and assumes that we are not immediately one with ourselves. To marry a rock or some other inanimate (or animate) being also shows this rupture within ourselves. What is my self?
The answer of the Gospel is that we find ourselves through our encounter with others but most importantly through our encounter with God, the ultimate Other who is the cause and principle of the knowing and the being of all things, and thus of ourselves, of ourselves as found in God. That comes about precisely through facing the contractions of our fallen humanity; in short, our sin. The parable of the Good Samaritan is not about some sort of moralistic do-goodism. We are told to “go and do thou likewise” only after learning the utter limitations of ourselves and our actions, only after learning the truth of our humanity as realized in Christ and in the concrete forms of service and sacrifice for one another. The parable is an enactment of the pageant of redemption, an embodiment of the whole Incarnate life of Christ, and only as such is it the supreme expression of Christian ethics. Only in Christ can we “go and do likewise.” In a way that is the whole point. It is about our being in Christ, something grasped by the Fathers.
Would you see the glorious and grand pageant of our redemption in this parable? Here are the themes of the Fall, the Incarnation, and the Church. Christ is the Good Samaritan who has come to where our fallen humanity lies half-dead in the wounds of sin which make us strangers to all and everyone, including ourselves. The law in the letter of ritual intent passes by in the garb of Priest and Levite. But Christ our great high priest has compassion; he comes to where we are. He sees the wounds of our unrighteousness and he binds them up. He restores us by pouring in the anointing oil of his eternal messiahship for our comfort and the strengthening wine of his divinity for our joy. He sets us upon the beast of his own body which freely bore the sins of the whole world. He takes us to the inn of his church – not just a hotel for saints but a hospital for sinners, a veritable hotel de dieu. There he continues to provide himself for us and for our salvation with the two denarii – the two coins – of the sacraments of holy Baptism and the holy Eucharist until he comes again. In every way Christ is the love of God.
Would you see the point of the parable for you in the stuff of daily life? Let the charity of Christ move in your hearts. Every day there are opportunities for kindness towards others. Our life and death are always with our neighbour. The school of divine love is common charity. It takes us out of ourselves and moves us towards one another. It is the love of God in us. Sometimes it takes things like hurricanes and storms to move us to help one another and even more to assist strangers. Things, too, like the Terry Fox run in seeking cures for cancer also point to a form of charity. Yet, the question for our age is about recognizing the true ground of charity which can only be known through the realization of the limits of human charity in itself and thus finding its truth in God; not in ourselves in our vanity and narcissism, in our contradictions and confusions; not in the phenomenon of ‘identity solipsism’ as if we are only what is in ourselves. Such are the forms of disordered love and not the love of God and neighbour.
As Augustine says, “we love him because he first loved us; and our love for others is the necessary fruit of our love for him. In Christ you have all. Do you wish to love God? You have him in Christ. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God’. Do you wish to love thy neighbour? You have him in Christ. ‘The Word was made flesh.’
In Christ we learn the love of God and the love of neighbour and thus we learn about ourselves.
And who is my neighbour?
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIII, 2019