Strangers, Neighbors, Friends

Muslim-Christian-Jewish Reflections on Compassion and Peace

Clark, Sarah

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498246125
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ecumenismo religioso e interreligioso

From 9/11 to Israel-Palestine to ISIS, the fear of the religious stranger is palpable. Conservative talk show hosts and liberal public intellectuals are united in blaming religion, usually Islam, for the world's instability. If religion is part of the problem, it can and should be part of the solution. Strangers, Neighbors, Friends--co-authored by a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew--aims to inform and inspire Abraham's children that God calls us to extend our love beyond family and fellow believer to the stranger.

Kelly James Clark

1

Good Samaritans

Over thirty years ago, I was driving home through a blinding blizzard on a January evening in Iowa. As I was entering the highway I noticed a man on the side of the road, crouching down, his faced turned away from the sharp wind and driving snow. The drivers of the six or so cars ahead of me had also glimpsed this desperate man and then zipped by, apparently without giving him a second thought. They were well on their way in their warm cars to their warm homes; they could not be interrupted by this man in such desperate need.

My first reaction was the same as theirs—I was tired from a long day of work and determined to get home as soon as possible. Yet here I was in my warm car and there he was—a stranger on the side of the road.

I was the youth director of a church at the time, and I was exhausted from doing God’s work. But I had recently taught the parable of the Good Samaritan so, excuses aside, I had to stop.

The parable of the Good Samaritan comes right after Jesus tells his followers the two greatest commandments, one of which is Love your neighbor as yourself.

We’ve heard this repeated so many times it has been emptied of meaning. It no longer seems radical or even shocking.

But it is.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

I understand loving myself. Self-love is perfectly natural. Easy-peasy. I can be selfish all day. No prob. In fact, I’m so good at being selfish that loving others is pretty darn hard.

Loving my children as myself—I get that, too. Sometimes I love my children even more than myself. I’m sure I’d throw myself in front of a speeding car to save any one of my children.

We are naturally and deeply constructed to love our own self and our own children in powerful and sometimes irresistible ways. So selfishness I get. Loving my own children, no problem (okay, mostly no problem). Selfishness and love of my own children are built into my nature. But loving my neighbor or a stranger is not.

So loving my neighbor as I love myself is something that I don’t get. Heck, most other people are hard enough to like, let alone to love (let alone to love as I love myself).

So I’m on the same page as the legal scholar who asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Who are these other human beings that I’m supposed to love as my very own self? I’m sure he was hoping to get Jesus to tone down God’s command by restricting such demanding love to our children and maybe to our extended “family” (other people who look and act and worship a lot like we do).

Like the legal scholar, I wanted Jesus to acknowledge and affirm limits to our severely limited love. I wanted it restricted, as is natural, to my own kith and kin. And not much beyond. My neighbors, people who are somewhat like me, aren’t so hard to love.

Jesus, however, rejects the question. “Who is my neighbor?” is a question about them, but Jesus is talking about me. He is not letting me first find out if they are like me in the way they look and act and believe and even smell, so that they are basically neighbors and not strangers. Instead, Jesus is looking me in the eye and saying that the problem isn’t them, it’s me. He’s talking to me about myself. Jesus says that I need to ask myself, “Am I neighborly?”

Being neighborly is a function of how you care for anyone who is in need. And “anyone in need” is not restricted to family members (people who look like me) or members of my various groups (people who believe as I believe). Should I find a family member or friend or stranger in need, I am to be neighborly to them. It’s about me, it’s not about them.

The model offered in the parable is simple: show neighborly mercy (and do not ask questions about their relationship to you). It’s that simple. And that hard.

It goes against every fiber of our being to extend love beyond our small circle of family, friends, and fellow believers to the stranger.

But that’s the message of Jesus who I claim to follow. And he and his message led me here, to this stranger on this highway, in a blinding storm, in the dead of winter.

So I stopped and invited the stranger into my car.

He told me that he had another 300 miles to go. When I replied that I could take him just a few more miles down the highway, he was clearly distraught and told me that he had been waiting by the side of the road for over four hours. He had just about given up hope of a ride and had considered laying down and going to sleep, his last, on the side of the road.

Fearing for his life, I invited him to stay the night at my house. On the way, he told me that he was a homeless alcoholic and drug addict who spent most of his nights on the street and that he was desperately unhappy with his life and ready to sleep until death.

You can imagine my wife’s surprise when I brought him into our home. After feeding him and making him a bed on our couch, I went upstairs to our bedroom and tried to sleep. But we could hear the stranger walking around and rummaging about (through our things?), and saw him urinating off our back porch.

This understandably upset my wife so she asked me to take him to a hotel.

When I went downstairs to ship him off to the hotel, instead of finding him stealing food, I saw him weeping while reading our Bible.

Somehow shuffling him off to a hotel didn’t seem, well, neighborly.

So we talked long into the night about his wretched life and his desire to get himself cleaned up.

The following morning I bought him a bus ticket to his destination, and then I called a church in that town. They happened to have a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program and agreed to greet the man when he arrived to offer their help. They asked nothing about him and expected nothing in return—they were neighbors to him.

This is what my Scriptures teach: I am to be merciful to every single person I meet along my journey. I cannot ask before showing mercy about their religious, ethnic, national, or socioeconomic background. I cannot restrict mercy to my family and friends or those within my circle of faith. It’s precisely to those outside of my family and friends—the stranger—where mercy is most demanded.

I cannot set limits on who my neighbor is. That’s the wrong question to ask. “How can I be neighborly?” is the right question to ask.

As a follower of Jesus, when I see someone in need, I can’t favor Christians and shun Jews and Muslims. I can’t even ask if they are Muslim, Christian, or Jew (or wherever else we are inclined to set the limits of love—color of skin, gender, sexuality, nationality, or ethnicity).

The parable of the Good Samaritan is not about them or their looks or beliefs or practices. It’s about me and my attitudes and actions.

Inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan (or guilted into action), I set aside my very real fears and invited an alcoholic, drug-addicted stranger into my home on that bitterly cold night.

I don’t recount this story to make you aware of my great virtue (which, in all honesty, is not so great). But the story offers an example of our perfectly natural and even instinctive desire to distance ourselves from others, often for very good reasons. It’s often cold, we’re often busy, and others sometimes pose a threat to our security and well-being.

But then there’s Jesus’ insistence that following him means resisting those distancing impulses. Jesus’s admonition to be neighborly takes us way out of our comfort zone—we can’t be kind only to those who are “safe,” typically, people like ourselves (for example, Christian, white, middle class). We can’t even ask if they are like us. We are simply commanded to be neighborly to everyone God brings onto our path.

Given globalization, God has increasingly brought Muslims and Jews onto our paths. Figuring out how to think Christianly about them means thinking first and foremost about how I can be neighborly.

2

Friends

Jesus may have commanded us to “love our neighbor as ourselves,” but that’s hardly our first (or even second) moral instinct. Our first “moral” instinct (one that no one needed to teach us) is: “That’s not fair!” When my brother got a bigger piece of cake or I was punished more harshly than my sister, I would indignantly denounce my parents’ moral failures and hope they would quickly right their wrongs.

This instinctive impulse to ensure that we get our fair share (and, usually, a bit more) is hardwired...