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Part 1
Restoration and the Victim
(Luke 10:25–37)
The Good Samaritan
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.
Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’
Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go you and do likewise.”
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1
A “Magnificent Little Story” and the Task of Public Ethics
On April 4, 1967, the great American civil rights leader, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered a speech to a gathering of the organization “Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam,” at Riverside Church in New York City. Professing his wholehearted support for the aims of this organization, King recounted how, over the preceding two years, he had moved steadily to “break the betrayal of my own silences” on the war. Colleagues had questioned the wisdom of his doing so, fearing it would detract from his focus on civil rights. But coming out against the war, he explained, was not only consistent with his being a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which had been conferred in 1964, it was also consistent with his commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. “To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.”
King proceeded to denounce the dishonorableness of America’s intentions in Vietnam, and to detail the enormous suffering that three decades of war had inflicted on the people of that blighted peninsula. He called for an end to aerial bombardment, the declaration of a unilateral cease fire, the opening of negotiations with the Viet Cong, and the setting of a firm date for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. He also proposed that all young men in America should register as conscientious objectors, and encouraged ministers of religion to give up their ministerial exemptions from military service and also to enroll as conscientious objectors.
But King went further. True to his trade as a preacher and social prophet, he asserted that the war in Vietnam was but a symptom of a far deeper malady in the American spirit. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” he intoned, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.” A nation that is prepared to send its poor Negro and white boys to kill and die together in the villages of Southeast Asia, but is unable to seat them together in the same schools or to house them in the same city blocks, is a nation in spiritual decline. A society that chooses to invest its vast economic resources in the demonic destructiveness of militarism, rather than in rehabilitating the poor, is a “society gone mad on war.”
What America needed, King declared, was “a radical revolution of values,” entailing a shift from being a “thing-oriented” society to becoming a “person-oriented” society, and accompanied by a reordering of priorities so that the pursuit of peace takes precedence over the pursuit of war. Without such a moral and spiritual revolution, America would never be able to conquer “the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism.” He continued with these memorable words:
The Vietnam era is now over, and many things have changed in American society since. But Dr. King’s searing critique of American militarism, and its inextricable connection with racism and social injustice, remains as pertinent today as it did forty-five years ago (read “Afghanistan” in place of “Vietnam,” and the speech could have been delivered last week).
A Prophetic Method of Social Analysis
King’s speech is also an instructive example of a particular way of addressing the ethical dimensions of public life. It is the method of the social prophet rather than the now much more familiar method of the trained policy analyst or political strategist or media commentator. King’s speech is fundamentally an antiwar homily, not an analysis of domestic social and political policy. But he refuses to compartmentalize the nature of justice, and moves backwards and forwards between the tragedy of Vietnam and the violence and poverty of America’s urban ghettoes as two sides of the same coin. One of the things that impelled King to raise his voice against the war, he explained, was the incongruity of commending nonviolent social change to the rejected and angry young men on the streets of America’s cities while the American government modeled a way of solving its problems overseas by employing “massive doses of violence.” Little has changed in the intervening decades. King’s style of social commentary, then, is one that exposes the interconnectedness of all spheres of collective life, and that insists on the need for consistency between what the state expects of its citizens and how the state itself behaves.
A second noteworthy feature of King’s approach is that he does not begin with some speculative theory of justice, or a precast list of ethical principles, or a code of universal human rights, which is then applied to social reality in order to determine the appropriate course of action. Instead King begins, on the one hand, with a personal confession of his own complicity in the social problems he is describing, and, on the other, with an account, again grounded in personal experience, of concrete situations of poverty, violence, racism, and injustice, both at home and abroad. What social justice requires, King assumes, cannot be discerned in the abstract from the safe distance of a policy analyst or an academic theorist. It can only be found by looking at the actual, embodied suffering of the victims of oppression and injustice, and questioning the structural arrangements that perpetuate their suffering.
Certainly King repeatedly appeals to the great ethical principles of fairness, wisdom, equality, freedom, truth, humility, justice, and especially love, and he acknowledges the ambiguities that invariably surround the great issues of social life. But the primary challenge is not so much to define what these ethical principles mean in theory or in practice, as it is to listen to the poor, the weak, the victims of inequality and violence, and even to those who count as national enemies. Guidance will come primarily from heeding “the mandates of conscience and the reading of history,” and above all from the dictates of compassion, not from detached...
