At one level it is obvious: the way we can love and serve God is by loving and serving our neighbor. Jesus gave more than a few heavy hints that this would be a good strategy--essentially the only strategy! We can't see God directly, except behind the disguise of bread and wine, so it stands to reason that we must connect with our neighbors in order to experience the dynamic exchange that is a love relationship with the Holy Trinity.
We have great trouble with this strategy, however, for the very reasons that make it a good strategy to begin with. We can "love" God in an abstract way by focusing good thoughts toward Him and maintaining a good attitude to the world around us, confirming in our minds that God loves us back. The whole thing can be quite pleasant and sanitary. Other people are seldom sanitary and often not pleasant. Relationships with real people in the real world tend to be much harder to feel good about without some strong basis in reality. This is because other people react to what we actually do more than to the ideas we have about what we have done. If we betray a friend in word or deed they may well let us know, even going so far as to end the friendship over it. God does not react in ways that are so blunt and obvious (at least not for most of us most of the time). This may be one reason that it is so hard to conceive of God as a real person, although that is the most profound truth about the essence of God: Divine Personhood. Yet this distance from the personhood of God makes it easy to fool ourselves into thinking our relationship is strong when it might not be so.
Our neighbors are concretely "there" before us in a way that God is not. In addition, we and our neighbors are equally called to be members of one body whose head is Christ. We should be aware of our neighbors in as vivid and intense a way as we wish to be aware of God. Something holds us back. Many things, actually, hold us back. First among them is a lack of humility.
To illustrate, I have a disgusting tendency, especially when tired and easily distracted, to sit in Church and judge others. I do not mean the kind of positive judgment that can make me an instrument to instruct others. I mean the BAD kind of judgment. I think long and hard and continuously about the clothes others have chosen to wear, or the amount of whispering they do, or even the kinds of homilies they give. None of these thoughts as I experience them can be construed as Christian. Although my opinion about whispering excessively in church may be well founded, there is no way in the place of the double hockey sticks I would ever say a word about it to the people doing it. My critical thought is only a tiny flame of hate and comparative pride that I must continually fan. At the same time, I convince myself that my real concern is for their wellbeing and the more perfect worship of God. I think,
"How distracted they must be doing that!" How ironic that I am so distracted in unproductively minding their business.
Love of neighbor quite often involves making judgement, but these judgments must be made in the spirit of love. Only through humility can we place to ourselves in the right order of priority: God first, neighbor second, self third. In fact, lived humility tends to drop the self out of the picture entirely so that we see only our neighbors and the God we seek in them. In this way we can begin to enjoy the life of membership in the body of Christ, giving to and receiving from our neighbors in good health and holiness.
No comments:
Post a Comment