Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's 1952 grotesque comic tale of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee; a young man who has come to the city of Taulkinham bringing with him an enormous resentment of Christianity and the clergy. He is in an open state of rebellion against the rigidity of his itinerant preacher grandfather and his strict mother. So when one of the first people he encounters is the blind street preacher Asa Hawks and Motes finds himself both attracted and repelled by Hawks' bewitching fifteen year old daughter Lily Sabbath, he reacts by establishing his own street ministry. He founds the "Church without Christ": He says, Listen you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar. As you can guess the church is singularly unsuccessful, although he does attract a couple of other crackpots: Enoch Emery a young man who works at the zoo and longs for a kind word from anybody; and Onnie Jay Holy, yet another rival preacher who believes Motes when he says he's found a "new jesus." While at first this cast of bizarre characters, ranging from merely repugnant to truly evil, and the scenes of physical, moral and spiritual degradation through which they pass all seem to be just a little too much, the reader is carried along by O'Connor's sure hand for dark comedy. The book is very funny. But as the story draws to a close, O'Connor's true mission is revealed; Motes loses his fight against faith and he achieves a kind of grace. All the human beings in the novel are fallen, but redeemed through God’s kindness, grace. Human efforts, and compassion are not required, and are even irrelevant. At the end, grace is achieved, and Motes finds his spiritual home. Flannery O'Connor has something serious and important to say about the modern human condition and the emptiness of a life without faith. Two quotes from her are what make me love her, and illustrate what motivates her writing; the first is: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” The other is “You shall know the truth and the truth will make you odd.”
In large part the people I meet - are particularly prone, it seems, to an assumption that spirituality - and Christianity in particular is primarily about feeling a certain way about God, about other people, and about one's self. In this Sunday's texts we see that if faith is only about how one feels, then it is a lie. In the first-century Mediterranean world, "love" was not a vague warm feeling toward someone, but a pattern of action -- attachment to a person backed up with behavior. When Jesus, quotes Deuteronomy 6:5, saying, "love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind," he's spelling out what is implied in calling God "Lord, or Ruler, or Sovereign," when God is God, that position is filled; no others need apply, as all our energies are fully devoted to God's service.
So when Jesus cites Leviticus 19:18 saying, "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" -- a commandment which Jesus says is of equal importance with the first commandent – I am the Lord your God. There is no hint in the Bible of the modern psychological emphasis on the need for self-esteem and or the idea that one must love oneself before loving others. Self-esteem is a fine thing, to be sure, and many of us have benefited a great deal from the insights of modern psychology, but these interior emotional states just weren't a focus in first-century Mediterranean cultures and followers of Jesus.
The common misinterpretation of this text, has actually been spoken over and over again by our President George W. Bush, who insists (in about 30 places that are in print) on quoting this passage incorrectly “Love your neighbor like you’d like to be loved yourself.” To be perfectly honest, I think someone caught the mistake in 2004, because it hasn’t been in his speeches since then. But this is not a text about loving like you’d like to be loved. The earliest Christian commentary on this text is James chapter 2. When Jesus said "love your neighbor as yourself," he was essentially saying, "treat all those around you as you would your own flesh and blood" -- that is, as sisters and brothers in one family, deserving of equal honor and special care. This passage in James treats "faith" and "love" almost as synonyms; while we tend to read both as interior mental or emotional states, in first-century Mediterranean cultures true faith and true love are both matters of affiliation backed up with consistent action, of treating people with respect and obligation, rather than merely professing loyalty with words.
In other words, the kinds of facts we see laid out here show just how far we have to go in loving our neighbors as our own family. We have, by our action and our inaction, built a world in which the deck is stacked against the poor, and serving God with our heart, soul, and mind means that we are called to bring everything we've got -- our voice and our political power as well as our financial resources -- to bear in living out God's mission of reconciliation and redemption for all the world. Our sins, things done and left undone, have built a world in which coming from a family or a region trapped in extreme poverty means a death sentence issued before birth, a world built around the kind of favoritism that the Letter of James condemns.
I wish loving your neighbor simply meant inviting the ones you like over for a cocktail, and not calling the police on the ones you don’t like, but this commandment is so much more. Christ is both calling and empowering us to do what it takes to eliminate extreme poverty in this generation. That means not only sending direct aid to feed people in places like Africa and Haiti, and the hurricane ravaged parts of our own country. But also working to end U.S. policies that stop making trade fair, creating economic and educational opportunities for people around the world and here in our urban and rural ghettos.
For that reason, our text for this Sunday from the Hebrew bible seems especially well-chosen:
God said, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans. If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them. If you take your neighbor’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down; for it may be your neighbor’s only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep? And if your neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compassionate.”
These days especially, the temptation seems especially strong to churches and their members to reduce the Gospel to one point, and for some it's the more specific the better -- the better for use as a very specific litmus test, I suppose. In this Sunday's gospel, Jesus is given a wide-open invitation to do the same, and he declines. Asked what one commandment is most important, he gives two -- and not just any two. The two commandments he gives demand nothing less than heart, soul, and mind -- in other words, every part of a person capable of valuing something -- and that those capacities be devoted to God and to every neighbor, the last the least and the lost.
I want to make two points here: many people look to their religion to find out to whom they are not obligated, which people under which circumstances are out of the reach of God's love. Who are those people for you? My list starts with people who are sexist, homophobic, racist, child molesters, and bullies. I do not want to be obligated to any of these but I am, because these are my neighbors. In other words, we, all of us, may as well take the energy we devote to coming up with a clever question to exempt us and give it to the call of love that is before us. The book of Exodus is spot-on in presenting this as a matter of national security; there is no better way to undermine the agenda of terrorist groups who would drum up hate against us and make widows and orphans of our families than to love our enemies, overcoming evil with good. And in citing the two greatest commandments, Jesus has shown us also that this is a matter of spiritual fidelity as well, that in serving our neighbors around the world as we would our own flesh and blood, our lives stand as testimony to the one God who made us all.
And as sure as I know that this is the command, I am also sure that by my own efforts get anywhere close to living this obligation fully. And that is why I believe in Jesus Christ. And that is why I believe the law is given to us, so that we can see our need for the salvation given first to us, as a free gift, in Christ Jesus.
Living a thankful life, a joyous life, a saved life, is our response to God. After that, as Flannery O’Connor says: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” and “You shall know the truth and the truth will make you odd.” Amen.