There are two events recorded in
the Gospels that seem quite similar.
In one, a rich young man asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal
life. Our Lord answers, saying that he must keep the Commandments,
and that he must give up his earthly possessions to follow the
kingdom of God.
In the other
event, a scribe or lawyer seems to be trying to get our Lord to make
a statement that might be used to discredit Him—but our Lord makes
the questioner answer his own question with the only obvious
answer. To gain eternal life we must keep the Commandments and the
Commandments themselves are summarized in the twofold statement that
“We must love the Lord our God with our whole heart, and soul, and
strength, and mind; and our neighbor as ourselves.”
Now, it happens that Matthew,
Mark, and Luke all record the first of these events, and have our
Lord recounting the Commandments as “Thou shalt not kill … not
commit adultery … not steal … not bear false witness … Honor thy
father and mother and thy neighbor as thyself.” In other words, our
Lord recounts only those Commandments that govern our relationships
with other people, leaving out those that pertain to our
relationship with God. Presumably, our Lord knew that both He and
the young man in question took the need for loving and honoring God
as something given—something that everybody knew they had to do. In
any case, all three of the evangelists record that on this second
event, before speaking of the good Samaritan, our Lord spoke of the
need for loving God before (and, perhaps, in order to) love ones
neighbor.
As we see today, the Gospels place
a very high value on doing good for our neighbors in need. Yet,
there is a danger here. If we consider only the first event, and
come away with the notion that all we have to do is to keep the last
seven of the Commandments, we turn the idea of “loving our neighbor
because we love God” completely upside down.
And there seems to be an
attraction to many modern people in this backwards way of doing
things. Call it “humanism,” “secular humanism,” or even “Christian
humanism,” the idea almost always leads to a pattern of behavior
that pushes God into the background. It almost always makes mankind
the center of existence, as though man were his own creator and his
own reason for being. God may be there in the beginning, but
quickly fades into human forgetfulness, for lack of a part to play
in this "humanistic” scheme of things.
Yet, as soon as God does start to
fade away, the remaining seven Commandments also begin to undergo
modification and reinterpretation. Without God, virtues like
truthfulness, chastity, and justice lose their abstract reality.
Without God, the desire to help one's neighbor degenerates into
finding “easy solutions” to his problems. And we see these “easy
solutions” all around us, for God has been pushed into the
background in much of our own society:
Social justice no longer consists
of training people and giving them the opportunity to make it on
their own; it now consists of taking from the “rich” in a Robin Hood
sort of fashion, and making people dependent on the state. In some
countries we have the spectacle of armed priests leading bands of
revolutionaries to redistribute the wealth—so-called “liberation
theology.”
Chastity no longer consists of
honorable marriage entered into for the primary purpose of bringing
children into the world and educating them; in the humanist society
it consists of finding ways to avoid procreation, while abandoning
and even ridiculing the idea of fidelity within marriage.
Truthfulness no longer consists of
striving to know the reality of a situation as it is known in the
mind of God; for without God there is no truth, and the best we can
hope for is friendly compromise—a blurring of reality so that we all
get along.
Without God our “compassion,” if
you can call it that, looks not to man as a being with an immortal
soul and an eternal destiny. We even call it “compassion” to put
the weak and the suffering to death, to likewise destroy the unfit
and the unwanted—the “defectives” of this world. We call it
“compassion” to encourage the misbehavior of the guilty by telling
them that there is no such thing as guilt or responsibility. The
one we used to call a sinner must be free to sin, and it is the duty
of a “compassionate” society to throw money at all of the problems
caused by sin. Society, we are told, must treat the minds that are
twisted by broken homes, and absorb the costs associated with an
increasingly addicted populace, and cure the diseases that go hand
in hand with promiscuity and infidelity.
The Good Samaritan in modern
society is called upon, not so much to heal the ills of one
afflicted by robbers, but is somehow expected to cure the
self-inflicted ills of those who refuse to live a life that includes
God. Given the impossibility of an ordered and meaningful
existence without God, it is not surprising that there are so few
Good Samaritans in this world.
Just as the world makes no sense
without God, it is impossible to “love our neighbors as ourselves,”
unless first, “we love the Lord our God with our whole heart, and
our whole mind and strength and soul.” We must, because it is only
the goodness of God that makes Good Samaritans.
