Weighed in the Balance: Judging the Churches

             Deep in Christian mythology is the image (particularly in the Old Testament books of history and prophecy) of God as a judge who tests his people, abandoning them to misfortunes such as the Babylonian Captivity when they are weighed and found wanting. Psalm 33:12-15 draws this picture, though even David must have seen the chair in the sky as a figure of speech:

The Lord looks down from heaven;

    he sees all the children of man;

from where he sits enthroned he looks out

    on all the inhabitants of the earth,

he who fashions the hearts of them all

    and observes all their deeds.

This radical personification of Supreme Being serves to ground our moral responsibilities, denying bogus self-forgiveness. The trope of a Judge-God leads us out of selfish isolation. If there isn't literally an eagle-eyed jurist on a throne above the clouds, the figure has a function.

    Of course, nobody can know the mind of God, but when religious people reflect on God's will--trying to follow their imperfect sense of it--maybe the best they can do is to imagine a divine will that approximates their own highest impulses. In this spirit, I have a fantasy--not quite a belief, but a construct that approximates my sense of Christ's teachings: I have seen established Christianity tested at least three times in my lifetime and usually it has failed the test.

    The beating heart of Christianity is Jesus' answer given to a lawyer in all three synoptic gospels. The most explicit one, expanded by a parable, is in Luke 10:25-37. There, the lawyer asks, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus turns the question on the lawyer, suggesting that he already knows the answer, and he does: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself." Luke's version, unlike the other two, puts these words into the mouth of a Pharisee, suggesting that the Great Commandment is settled law, not a novel teaching of Jesus. In fact, the lawyer (like Jesus in the other two gospels) echoes Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18. That core Christian moral teaching--on which hangs on "all the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 22:40)--is in the Hebrew Bible. This explains Jesus' saying in Matthew 5:17 that he has not come to abolish "the Law or the Prophets," but "to fulfill them." 

    Even as he brushes aside purity laws such as hand washing (Luke 11:38), Jesus doubles down on divine and neighborly love, and the connection between the two kinds of love seems clear. If you transcend yourself in a loving union with the source of being, you are in union with other beings. You cannot devalue them. They are you. It's inevitable. Here love of neighbor isn't an obligation, but an inevitable outcome. If we love the eternal Good (especially with all our hearts, minds, and souls), we are freed of the destructive illusion that the objects of private desire are good and step off the treadmill of  discontent that this illusion brings. We step out of time into the eternal.

    "You have answered correctly," Jesus tells the lawyer. "Do this and you will live," but his interrogator has another question: "Who is my neighbor?" Ancient Near Eastern custom mandated hospitality to strangers, and the Hebrew prophets preached kindness to foreigners and the poor, but much of Hebrew law distinguished between Jew and Gentile, privileging the former. Jewish slaves were freed and Jewish debts forgiven after six years, but this didn't apply to Gentiles. In general, even in Jesus' time, the term neighbor implied a fellow Israelite. This was not universal, but the lawyer broached a current controversy (McKnight) so that, however Jesus answered, he would offend somebody. The lawyer was springing a trap.

    The controversy is still with us. Some Americans claiming to be Christians, thus obliged to love their neighbors as ourselves--as least in principle when conscious moral choices are posed--consider only legal residents to be neighbors under American law. At the border, they include only some people are among the "all men" who have a right to liberty. How else do we explain that a family of American citizens is welcomed at the Mexican border, while an Ecuadorian family faces arrest and separation? If Ecuadorians are, in fact, neighbors, we are called to love them as we love ourselves--to welcome and employ them as we want to be welcomed and employed. Discrimination against them violates Christian love. And, in Luke 10, Jesus offers no cover.

 Jesus answers the lawyer with one of his most famous parables, the Good Samaritan. I will adapt it into contemporary terms. An American Citizen is beaten senseless by thieves and left beside the road. A Pastor and a Lawyer, both American citizens, see the apparent corpse and keep on driving, wanting to avoid a messy situation. Later a brown Ecuadorian Illegal immigrant, driving his beat-up truck to a fruit-picking job, stops and takes the Citizen to a boarding house. (Today, he'd go to an emergency room, but we have to make allowances for history.) He bandages the Citizen and pays a Landlord to feed and care for him until he recovers, promising to return and defray any additional expenses out of his fruit-picking wages. 

     "Who," Jesus asks, "is the Citizen's neighbor." Recall, from a few verses earlier, that a neighbor was, in the lawyers own words, a person we're obliged to love as much as ourselves in order to have eternal life. Love of neighbor is the price of salvation.

    The lawyer answers that the Illegal is the Citizen's neighbor. 

    Jesus says, "Go and do likewise."

    Whatever your religion, the Nazarene is a brilliant rhetorician. The term neighbor is reciprocal. If I'm your neighbor, you're mine. By calling the Illegal the Citizen's neighbor, the lawyer agrees that the Citizen (and, by implication, he himself) must love the Ecuadorians as he loves himself. Out of simple decency, the Citizen owes the Illegal a debt of love for saving his life, but focusing on quid pro quo misses the point. Jesus tells us to love everybody, even our enemies: "If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?" Even great sinners do that (Matthew 5:45-48).

    I may have weakened the parable by making its hero an Ecuadorian, whom all but xenophobes may see as amiable. What were Samaritans to Jesus' Judaean or Galilean audience? They were a sect of Abrahamic religion claiming to hold the original text of the Torah and follow it by worshipping YHWH on Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem. Samaritan origins are debatable, but they claim to to have kept the original, true scriptures after the Southern tribes returned from Babylon with corrupt ones. This claim, rejecting the Jerusalem temple that Jews venerated as the seat of God, made Samaritans more despised and shunned than Romans or Canaanites. They weren't just aliens, but subversives. In John 8:48, Jesus is insulted as both demon-possessed and a Samaritan. John 4:9 glosses Jesus' meeting with the woman at the well with "Jews do not associate with Samaritans," a point reinforced in verse 27 when the returning disciples are surprised to find him talking to her. According to the parable, the set of all neighbors includes people so disreputable that you don't talk to them. By offering "living water" to the Samaritan woman and proselytizing her village, Jesus gives no quarter to those who express pride in groups they belong to by segregating or lording over "inferiors." If "the last shall be first" (Matthew 20:16), to claim superiority over anybody is to damn yourself.

    This is a lofty standard, and those who fully meet it probably deserve sainthood, but the mandate is clear enough. When we are asked to choose between two clear outcomes, such as when we hear a plea for a social reform, it doesn't take sainthood to apply Christ's rule to the situation. A mind not enslaved to custom is enough. This brings me back to the figure of God as a celestial judge. Troubling as this figure may be when used like a weapon by those who pretend to know his will, the fact remains that if we imagine an all-seeing judge on high taking time out of an eternal day to notice our behaviors below and weigh them on infallible moral scales, it is a better if we imagine we haven't been found wanting. In this spirit that I imagine God has tested churches in my lifetime with a series of moral challenges, each of one rephrasing the same question: Which will you follow, the Golden Rule or old customs?

    The first great test I remember was racial segregation--a cruel, open, and systemic  violation of brotherly love in 1950s Alabama. When I was a teenager, I worked two summers as an electrician's assistant, delivery helper, and general flunkey at Hitchcock Electric. The pay was pitiful--$20 per 55-hour week--and it was a job typically filled by black "boys" twice my age. They must have been paid more, but it can't have been a lot. There was an employment ceiling all over town and nothing glass about it. At one time, my mother hired a black woman to do ironing, and she stank up the house--an odor a naive southern white might be excused for associating with race, not with what it really was: the absence of plumbing (or even a well) at the shack she lived in outside town. The outlook for anybody with a combination of dark skin and ambition was grim. I was astonished when we delivered a washing machine to a tight little modern house with sliding glass doors and a patio and I saw it belonged to a black family. I'd never seen such a thing. I celebrated it, but as an anomaly. "He works for the post office," the old electrician explained. The USPS passed the test, but most of 1950s Auburn was found wanting. 

    Then in the early 1960s, Brother Jeffers, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in town announced that, though it hadn't happened yet, if blacks did come to services, he would seat them. He just wanted people to know. A good man. He was weighed and found not wanting. His church, founded in 1838, was a brick edifice dominating a block in downtown Auburn, the biggest in town and attended by prominent citizens--by definition, all white. It was the only mainstream Baptist church around except for a mission called Lakeview that it had recently sponsored out on Dean Road. Maybe because Auburn is a university town, First Baptist was weighed and found sufficient. The deacons stood by Brother Jeffers. Still, to judge from what my parents said (I'd already gone Anglican) the announcement landed like a bomb that Sunday, and several prominent members left to join Lakeview, which was safely all-white. (Ironically, Lakeview today is a megachurch advertised as multi-ethnic, but I don't give it credit. Love doesn't shift with moral fashions.)

    One reason I was comfortable for many years as a Roman Catholic was that--though its record since the Civil War was far from perfect--it graciously answered the challenge of civil rights era even though exempt from court orders. In 1958, the American Catholic bishops decreed that "segregation cannot be reconciled with the Christian view of our fellow man" (Moore). Though Bishop Toolen of Mobile dragged his feet, Spring Hill College, a Jesuit school there, enrolled nine black students in 1954 and was for ten years the only integrated college in the state ("History"). So, the Roman Catholic Church, was weighed in the balance and passed the racist test. So far, so good. 

    But the 20th and 21st centuries saw a convoy of new movements that dared churches to abandon old customs and honor the Golden Rule. If the white male celibate American bishops are morally called to do unto African-Americans as they would have done unto themselves, then how about women and homosexuals? G. K. Chesterton called the Catholic tradition "democratic" because it doesn't deny the vote to "that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors," and for a while I took comfort in the belief that the Church would glacially melt as the votes piled up, even if it was after my lifetime. I knelt and waited. But I have gay family and friends, and the old church finally wore me out after I moved to Virginia where a bishop required priests to preach the Church's most uncharitable social traditions. I went home every Sunday muttering counter-arguments.

    I understand but find fanciful the idea that the instant chromosomes entangle and cell division begins, a new soul pops out of the void. I also understand the evils of same-relations with slaves and boys in ancient paganism when Catholic morals were in formation. But I also know that no scripture condemns same-sex life partnerships or early-term abortion. Call me an old Baptist, but that seems to matter. These issues are settled in the Church only because the Church, a social club posing as God's mouthpiece, has settled them. Outside of that, they are open to question. 

    So, while it may be acceptable for the Church to teach its old moral theology and counsel believers away from abortion and toward sacramental marriage, what I heard in the pulpit were calls to outlaw abortion and civil unions, to make nonbelievers toe the line of Catholic moral theology by force. This violates basic Christian morality, commandments that transcend social customs: the call to universal love and respect for human difference. Particularly brazen was the exclusion of women from priesthood, as if a penis were the key to the tabernacle. Male-chauvinist theocracy from the pulpit settled it for me. I saw the dear old Church as weighed and found wanting. I could no longer ignore its idolatry of custom in defiance of universal love.

Works Cited

McKnight, Scott. "Neighbor." https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/neighbor/

"History." Spring Hill College. shc.edu/about shu/history.

Moore, Andrew S. "Catholicism and the Civil Rights Movement." The Encyclopedia of Alabama. 28 June, 2013, encyclopediaofalabama.org.