I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a way to process the events of this past week. Like it was for many people in our country, the shooting at "Mother Emmanuel" Church in Charleston, SC has me rattled. We are seeing the sins of our society laid bare before us: our propensity to hate, our tendency to violence, our unresolved discomfort with issues of race, and a whole host of other flaws and vices that we tend to brush under the rug as quickly as we can.
The more I think about this and other related things, the more I think it all goes back to something very fundamental: our basic moral and ethical makeup. All too often the response I see from people to events of racial violence is to blame the victim. "Someone in that church should have had a gun." "That kid deserved to be shot because he had some minor criminal incident in his past." And so forth.
This is reflective, I believe, of one of two major approaches to morality that we've adopted. One is punitive. It's the morality of "Thou shalt not" and if thou does, beware the consequences. This is an inward morality, a self-focused morality that centers on avoiding vice for one's own sake. I don't murder because if I do I'll go to jail. I don't lie because it'll go worse for me if I get caught. It's better for me if I abstain from these behaviors.
It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably the dominant model of morality that most of us have adopted. We look at a lot of life in terms of reward and punishment. If I do good, I'll be rewarded. If I do bad, I'll be punished, whether by circumstance or by the powers of those in authority over me.
Most of us would attribute this way of thinking to our Christian faith, but somewhat ironically, this is not the model of morality that most of the Scriptures endorses. The vast majority of the Bible instead endorses an outward morality, one that is focused on the other rather than ourselves. Jesus himself said that "all the law and the prophets hang" upon two commandments, neither of which contain the words (in any language) of "thou shalt not": Love God and love your neighbor. (Matthew 22:36-40)
The Scripture reading for this week from Deuteronomy is an excellent example of this outward morality. These instructions, written to an ancient agrarian society, tell the farmers of those times to never harvest the whole of the their fields, but to leave something behind for those in need. This sort of thinking is commonplace in the Scriptures. I feed the hungry because they need food. I tend to the sick because they need help. It is better for them if I do these things. Do you see the difference?
Now what does this mean for our current moment in history, with our nation at a crossroads when it comes to race and violence? I don't know the answer to that, but I can't imagine that if we were take seriously our Lord's call to an outward moral focus, that things would remain "business as usual" for long. Do we truly want a better society with greater justice and peace for all people? If so, this is the road to that: Caring for others as much if not more than ourselves, remembering well the care and love that our God places upon them.
Our neighbors need us and we are being called to be there for them in their times of need. To me, that's what it means to live a Christian life. It's not about me. It's about them and what I can do for their sake? That's a question for all of us, in this and in every time.
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