Who is My Neighbour?

The Global And Personal Challenge

Richard Carter, Edited by Richard Carter, Sam Wells

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780281078417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Following Britain's decision to leave the European Union, and with increasing division, xenophobia, and confusion over future national and international relationships, this thought- and action-provoking book considers the crucial question, Who is my Neighbour?What does the Christian injunction to `love your neighbour as yourself' actually mean in practice today?Contributions by renowned theologians and practitioners reflect on this subject in relation to issues of poverty, ecology, immigration, fear and discrimination, and the recent political upheavals both in Europe and the USA.

1
The ethics of global relationships

Rowan Williams

‘Who is my neighbour?’ said the lawyer to Jesus. Why didn’t Jesus give him a clearer answer? Why didn’t he simply say ‘everybody’, and leave it at that? The story of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus tells in response to that question, is a story not just about who we’re supposed to love – it’s a story about how we become lovable; it’s a story about how we move from the passive to the active; it’s a story about how we recognize our life as bound up with the act and being of a stranger. In other words, it’s a story that operates at several levels, and leaves us with a huge amount to think over.

Who is my neighbour? Jesus turns the question back, eventually, and asks the lawyer, ‘Who was a neighbour to the man who fell among the thieves?’ The neighbour, in other words, is not somebody sitting over there passively waiting for me to be good to them. The neighbour is me already involved in the life of another, already moving towards someone else, not passive, but active. So part of Jesus’ answer to the lawyer’s question is that we are invited to define ourselves as neighbours. The lawyer would like to think of a world where you knew who neighbours were and who neighbours weren’t; ideally, a world where you could be reasonably sure that when you loved a certain number of people as much as you could, that would be all right, and the rest could look after themselves. By moving all of this into the realm of action and choice, Jesus in effect says to us, ‘It’s not a matter of deciding who out there deserves to be loved by you; it’s a question of your decision to be a neighbour – your decision to be someone who offers life to the “other”.’

The Samaritan in the story is a neighbour because he saves life. Can we then decide to be neighbours by deciding to save life? This surely is one of the important questions that the Good Samaritan story puts back to us in the name of Jesus, moving us, as I said, into an active rather than a passive mode. We have to decide something; we are not told how to catalogue the list of people we are obliged to love, but invited to make a basic change which turns our lives into life-giving realities.

The Samaritan is a neighbour because the man on the Jericho road owes him his life. And we are most deeply neighbours to one another, and to and in our world, when there are others who owe us life; and we recognize them as neighbours because we know we owe them life. So to love a neighbour is to love the person who can save your life. And of course the extra catch in the story of the Good Samaritan is that since you never quite know who that is, and since it’s likely to be the most improbable person around, your openness to neighbourliness has to be a profound, all-encompassing, all-embracing affair.

This apparently simple story about the Good Samaritan leaves us, as do all of Jesus’ great parables, with a question about who we are, where we put ourselves in the story; and, like all Jesus’ great parables, it leaves us with an uneasy sense that we could be any of the characters in the story, or indeed all of them at various points. That’s to say, we are the people who find admirable and sometimes religious excuses for not doing what we ought; we are the people who are left helpless at the side of the road by a violent and meaningless world; and we are, at least potentially, the people who decide to give life.

So ‘the ethics of global relationships’ – a resonantly abstract title, worthy of a Cambridge academic – is not about how to construct a system of universal morality. It’s first and foremost recognizing a summons to be life-givers, to be to others the surprising strangers who bring them alive; and one of the implications of that is that we must expect to be brought alive by surprising strangers. As Jesus’ story also suggests, a great deal of our habitual life ignores this. We imagine that life is simply something we’ve got, and which ideally we’re not obliged to share. We shall be able to find many reasons for retaining our suspicion of the stranger. We may even, like the priest and the Levite in the story, find a way of treating the obvious neighbour – the fellow Jew by the side of the road – as a stranger.

Part of the force of the parable is that in Jesus’ time the three classifications of God’s people were priests, Levites and Israelites; there they all are in the story, and the priest and the Levite don’t want to recognize the Israelite whom they treat as a stranger – perhaps a polluting dead body, perhaps some embarrassing presence who will be a drag on them, their purity and their security. In the light of this, we are reminded that global relationship is no bland matter: not a question of universal benevolence, not a question of saying the whole world is my friend. It is anchored in a very particular encounter; it may be a discovery of our obligation to a familiar ‘neighbourly’ figure that we have got into the habit of ignoring, or a discovery of the immediacy and familiarity of someone who has nothing apparently in common with us. In either case, global relationship means the willingness to be a surprising stranger and to be surprised by strangers, and in that, to let neighbourliness come alive.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the years leading up to the Second World War, was beginning to work on Christian ethics, and we still have the drafts that he prepared for a major book on the subject before he was imprisoned by the Nazi regime and finally executed. Bonhoeffer’s work on ethics is an attempt to turn on its head quite a lot of the ways in which Christians are used to doing ethics; and he does it by saying that Christian ethics is essentially about standing where Jesus stands and taking responsibility with him for representing the world. That’s where ethics begins: in the decision to speak on behalf of, to stand in for, and stand with any and every human situation.

Now of course, says Bonhoeffer, this doesn’t mean that each of us carries an infinite responsibility. We’re not, as a matter of fact, God. But each one of us carries a responsibility that is going to come alive in ways we cannot predict. And one of the things that Bonhoeffer says most emphatically and clearly, in the surviving fragments of what would have been an extraordinary book on ethics, is that our greatest mistake is to try to spell out in advance who we’re responsible for – in other words, to try to answer the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ neatly and conclusively so that we don’t have to be bothered by the people we hadn’t planned for. For Bonhoeffer, universal responsibility is a matter of readiness moment by moment to stand in for and to stand with whatever human neighbour is around; and that, says Bonhoeffer, is the heart of the being and the logic of the Church. The Church does as a matter of fact, he says, take up a bit of room in the world – you can’t just be an invisible church. Sooner or later people will spot it. But the space the Church takes up in the world, he says, is the space that it holds and occupies on behalf of everybody. That’s to say, the Church is not there to defend its territory – here’s the religious bit, or the Christian bit, here’s the ethical bit; no, the Church occupies space so as to say, ‘We will guarantee this for everyone; we will keep open here the promise of a solidarity without any advance restriction.’ And it’s in this way, according to Bonhoeffer, that the Church shows what and who Jesus is. For him, the theology of global relationship began with a recognition that in Jesus Christ, God stands in for and stands with any and every human person – that’s what the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus are all about. If we are to live with him, in his neighbourhood, in his Spirit, in his power, that’s where we stand and that’s what we seek to realize.

So if Bonhoeffer is right, and if my hearing of Jesus’ parable is right, the ethics of global relationship is an ethic that has to do with creating relationship. It is about the decision, wherever we are, in whatever human situation, to make a bond, to stand with and, as Bonhoeffer says – and it’s a challenging phrase – potentially to stand in for the ‘other’; that is, to take what’s coming to them, to shoulder their burden on their behalf. It is about creating relationships that rest upon a recognition that no one of us is who he or she is alone, no one of us exists in a vacuum or as an atom, no one of us comes into being full grown, self-sufficient. Our human life is constantly receiving who we are from those around us and in turn giving our life that they may be alive.

It may sound very advanced, and spiritual, and even mystical, but it’s the basic fact of our language, our interaction, the gestures by which parent and child communicate. That’s where it all begins: we begin to be who we are because we are related. And of course, in our human lives, we’re related always and already in ways we never chose, and never planned. We are embarrassingly bound up with the life of everybody else around us. We’d much rather not be – it’d be good if we could trace our pedigree to some independent source, not infected by the embarrassing failures of the human race at large, just as we’d all like in the Church to be independent of the failures of the Church at large.

But we’re bound in already. And when we decide to be a neighbour, when we decide to embark on a style of life that gives life, we’re not in fact just doing something in a vacuum; we are recognizing and acting out the truth that is deepest in us, the fact of interdependence. When I decide to be a neighbour, and when I decide to be the one who gives life, I decide to be what I most deeply am – I recognize and enter into that deep exchange by which human beings constantly make one another human. So to speak of the ethics of creating relationship is not to speak of a decision to be good or to be nice against the odds. It’s to speak of a decision to be what we are, which carries with it a recognition that when we don’t give life, and when we do create, not neighbours, but strangers and enemies, we’re actually doing something unnatural.

It’s one of the great and important teachings of classical theology that evil is unnatural. That’s to say, we as human beings are not instinctively at home with hostility, fear and violence. And the Church has affirmed that in the teeth of most of the evidence for most of its history. As some theologians have said, it actually takes a lot of effort to be wicked. When Jesus says to St Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, ‘It hurts you to kick against the goads’ (Acts 26.14), he’s saying something very like this. It is actually a great and unnecessary investment of energy and ingenuity to create enemies and strangers rather than neighbours. It’s not what we are made for.

And while it’s certainly no part of the Church’s job to pretend that people are better and nicer than they are, it is a crucial part of the Church’s job to say that the natural, the homely, the obvious for the human race is neighbourhood, not suspicion. So that when we struggle to be neighbours and to encourage others to be neighbours, we’re not inviting human beings to go against the grain, to make some great act of defiance in the face of an unjust and hostile fate. We are saying that the deepest condition of our humanity is recognition, interaction and the exchange of life. That in turn implies that when I identify somebody else as a stranger, an enemy, I am alienating some part of myself – I am making something of myself a stranger, and an enemy; I am losing something of who I am.

So the ethics of global relationship is a matter first of all of discovering the courage to have faith in a universal and given human solidarity, an involvement with one another that is already there in virtue of God’s creative gift of life to us as a human community, not only as individuals; and then to have the courage to behave as if that were true, to love the stranger as the one who could save your life.

To love the stranger as the one who could save your life: many years ago, I was visiting an urban parish in Coventry, and after the Sunday morning service got into conversation with an elderly lady from the parish who was surrounded by a family of obviously Caribbean origin. The two little girls in this family were clinging on to the old lady’s arms and jumping up and down with great enthusiasm, and she was obviously completely devoted to them.

She told me that not very long before, when the children had been even smaller, the family had moved in next door to her. She’d been profoundly suspicious of them. She came from a generation where black neighbours were thought of as threatening. The children would occasionally knock on her door, or peer through her window. She was very annoyed about this because she thought they were intruding into her private space, until one day she had an accident in the house, and was left sprawled on the floor of her front room. The children from next door, looking through the window, saw her and called an ambulance. ‘The stranger as the one who could save your life’ couldn’t be more vivid than it was in that little encounter; and I remember her saying with tears in her eyes, ‘I can’t do enough for them now.’ She had discovered her own life-giving freedom because she discovered a stranger who could save her life.

All of this is fleshed out at length and in depth in some of St Paul’s writings. That picture of ourselves being diminished by the diminishing of another, of every member of the body suffering because another suffers or rejoicing because another rejoices – that is at the very heart of the idea of the Church. Everything else about the Church depends on this. I can’t say that too emphatically. Everything about the Church depends upon this – this being involved with one another, beyond our choice and our preference, to the extent that we are less ourselves when we turn the other away, and more ourselves when we become neighbours. It’s also about something further and quite demanding, which I think could be best expressed by saying that this implies a kind of attention to where we are; a kind of close, realistic, patient and loving absorption of the specifics of where we are. Because, going back to what I was saying earlier, the point is not that we should suddenly develop generalized niceness, but that we should discover and act out what it might be to give life here, in this moment, in this relationship. And if that’s to be the case, we need to have our eyes and ears and hearts keenly attuned to where there is death in our situation – if we are to give life, we need to know what kinds of death are around, what are the needs to which we are actually responding.

We all know, I suspect with painful clarity, what it’s like to try to give someone the help they don’t need. Many people spend their entire lives doing this, and there are a certain number of institutions devoted to doing it as well; and we’re all familiar also with the old chestnut ‘I’m a great lover of humanity; it’s just the people I can’t stand’. In contrast to that, a true ethic of global relationship begins from a very keen and clear sense of the local and specific. It’s not that ‘charity begins at home’ in the rather unhelpful sense that phrase increasingly attracts to itself. It’s simply that unless we are prepared selflessly to attend to what is in front of our noses, to know the difference between real and fictional need, to know the actual three-dimensional reality of the ‘other’, then we’re not going to be of any use to anyone. And however loudly, however passionately, we speak of ‘global ethics’, we shall have missed something all-important by ignoring the immediate.

Earlier on I quoted Bonhoeffer on how universal responsibility is not a matter of trying to be responsible for everybody. It is having eyes and heart open enough to see in situation after situation where the specific need and hunger for life is; to attend lovingly in that way so we are able to give life where it’s needed, and also to receive it, where there is death within us. Now to speak of life and death in this way and to speak of neighbourliness in this context is in our own age an issue that has taken on an extra dimension. If we’re on the lookout for those areas and aspects of human life where death is at work, if we’re on the lookout for where life is truly needed, we’re bound to be looking at our environment with an eye that says, ‘What in our entire context gives or denies life?’ Which is why this entire approach to the ethics of neighbourliness requires us to look not just at our human environment, but at that wider environment that makes us alive. Increasingly scholars and thinkers have been writing about the need for us to rediscover the environment itself as a ‘neighbour’. That is to say, we live in a world whose strangeness makes us alive, and so we live in a world that we must not be hostile to, a world we must not regard as our enemy, a world we must give life to as it gives life to us.

It’s very hard to deny that, in our current cultural context, the works of death are very visible in a degraded and threatened environment, and the need is urgent for people of faith and no particular faith to recover a sense that the material environment itself is a neighbour, and to be loved in a neighbourly way. If we are resolved to be neighbours without any condition, and if we know that environmental damage and degradation takes away life from the human neighbour, we need to change our behaviours; we need once again to decide to be neighbours to our neighbourhood, our physical, material neighbourhood; we need a neighbourly vision of the material world, the animal world, the inanimate world. That’s to say that there’s no global ethics without an ethic of the globe, the actual globe we inhabit. Because the environmental neighbour is the world in which my life lives, and the world in which my use of that environment can enhance or deny life in another.

Who is my neighbour? My neighbour is the stranger who gives me life. My neighbour therefore is the stranger to whom I must give life, because my life and theirs are already bound up together. The reality of the Church is a reality rooted in the recognition of this mutual implication of life and life. The Church is supposed to be a place where this unlimited neighbourly decision can be nourished and reinforced day by day in our neighbourly practices within the community ...

Table of contents

• Who Is My Neighbour
• Contents
• A note on contributors
• Preface
• Prologue: Remember you were a stranger
• 1 The ethics of global relationships
• 2 Politics as a form of neighbour love
• 3 My neighbour, President Trump
• 4 Beyond fear and discrimination
• 5 The cost of reconciliation
• 6 Welcoming angels unawares
• 7 Loving your neighbour as yourself
• 8 My neighbour and the ecological crisis
• 9 My neighbour the refugee
• 10 Whatever happened to the common good?
• 11 A better kind of politics
• 12 My neighbour, God’s gift
• Epilogue: My neighbour in Trafalgar Square