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Note: this week the Revised Common Lectionary offers a choice of two pathways: a set of readings for All Saints’ Day/All Souls’ Day, and a set of readings reflecting an ordinary Sunday. I’m offering reflections on both of these. Below are my reflections on the regular reading; here is a link to my reflections on All Saints’ Day from earlier this week.
A form of the below reflections were originally offered as a morning “Bible Lecture” at the Pacific Southwest Region of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)’s regional meeting on October 19th, 2024. The key text for that event was Matthew 23:39, which is a parallel text to the gospel reading in the lectionary for this Sunday from Mark 12. What follows is an edited version of those comments, with quite a bit added. I’m grateful for the invitation to speak with the PSWR!
Whenever we interpret scripture, whenever we begin to read the Bible, there are at least two contexts that we need to consider. There might be more than two contexts, but I think there are at least two contexts that we should keep in mind. The first context is the context of the world out of which the passage of scripture arose. This can include things like ancient customs, ancient languages, the kinds of economic and social and political realities that existed in those days, and the motivations and the choices of the people who wrote the passage down. We need to think about the ancient world from which the biblical text came. And the second context is just as important. The second context is our own world, our own customs and languages, our own lived realities and our own systems of belief and practice. Every text comes from somewhere and every reader comes from somewhere; none of us are robots and none of us are disembodied spirits. We all interpret from our own perspectives and our own places and our sets of experiences. So I want to spend some time thinking about both of those contexts, as we read the gospel text from the lectionary this week: the ancient context of the Gospel of Mark (and the parallel texts from Matthew and Luke), and our own context in 21st century North America.
When we read this passage in Mark 12:28-34, there are some important things to remember about that ancient context. The most important ancient context for this passage about loving our neighbors, I think, is that this verse represents the words of a Jewish person quoting Jewish scripture to other Jewish people. Jesus doesn’t say these words about loving our neighbor out of the blue. He says them as a response to a question. And it’s not a response to just any question from just any questioner, but Jesus is giving a response to a question about the Jewish law asked by an expert in the Jewish law. It's a conversation between two people who take their tradition and their commitments very seriously. That should matter to us, because it points to a whole world of thought and custom and theology that lies behind the words Jesus says in this passage. When Jesus says, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” it’s not an abstract philosophical principle. Jesus is not just making up some good advice right there on the spot. Jesus is quoting Torah in his response, and Jesus is tapping into centuries of Jewish thought and Jewish religious instruction about what we owe to each other, about how we are supposed to live together in this world. By the time Jesus says these words in Mark 12, Jesus and all the other people around him already stand in a long tradition of Jewish reflection on neighbors and neighborliness.
The word that Matthew uses here, the one that we translate as “neighbor,” is plēsion. A plēsion can mean someone who is nearby, someone who is in close physical proximity to you, in the way that we normally mean “neighbor.” But, and this is important, plēsion also means simply any fellow human being. A plēsion, a neighbor in this passage, might be the person sitting beside you or the person who lives down the street, but a plēsion is also simply everyone in the world who is not you. It’s an expansive category. That’s who your neighbor is, and that is who Jesus is telling us to love. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he’s telling us to love everyone. This is a hard teaching.
But the Greek word only gets us so far, because while the Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek, Jesus himself and everyone else in this passage all spoke Aramaic, which was a language related to Hebrew and spoken by most Jews (Judeans) after the Babylonian exile. And as we have seen, the words that Jesus is saying here are actually a quotation from the Hebrew Bible. His words are a quotation from Leviticus 19:18, which says, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So what word did Leviticus use there for neighbor, in Hebrew, in the passage Jesus was quoting, and what did that word mean?
The Hebrew word in Leviticus is rea. That Greek word plēsion can mean someone who is nearby or it can mean any human being in the world, but rea has some more specific meanings and connotations that I think Jesus had in mind when he quoted Leviticus in this story in Mark. A rea in Hebrew is a friend or a companion—someone who is close to you. But a few verses later, Leviticus 19:34 helps to clarify exactly what this command means, using another Hebrew word, ger. This word helps to clear up what Jesus was getting at in Mark 12. Leviticus 19:34 reads, “The alien who resides with you, the ger who resides with you, shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, you shall love the ger’im as yourself, for you,” and this is important, “for you were aliens (ger’im) in the land of Egypt.” So as Jesus is offering the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, he is quoting a text that tells us to love both our friends and foreigners alike.
And this leads me to the second context that we have to think about as we interpret this passage from the Gospel of Matthew: and that is our own context as 21st century Christians living in North America. Because just like Jesus lived in a particular time and place and belonged to a particular people, so do we. Jesus did not separate himself from the world and the traditions he was a part of, and neither should we. And we live in a time and a place when the question of who our neighbor is really matters. We live in a time and a place when there’s a lot of debate over what we all owe to each other, when there’s a lot of debate over what we owe to our neighbors, what we owe to the stranger, and especially what we might owe to the foreigner.
This Sunday as congregations gather for worship in the United States, the presidential election will only be 48 hours away. Questions of immigration and foreign policy are always at the forefront of election seasons, and this year is no different. In fact, immigration might be one of the most central issues of this election cycle, especially for the campaign of Donald Trump. Trump makes much of the “crisis at the border,” by which he always means the southern border (he’s strangely not that worried about Canadians), and he blames the Biden administration (and Kamala Harris in particular) for allowing or even fostering the “crisis.” The reality is more complicated, as it usually is in politics, but I don’t think it’s complicated in a way that should make us feel any better. The reality is that—partly as a response to Trump’s accusations of border insecurity—Biden’s administration is arresting and deporting migrants at numbers much higher than Trump himself did. (I suspect the pandemic also jumbled these numbers). Before Biden, the Democratic administrations of Obama and Clinton also arrested and deported millions of people. When it comes to border policy, both major political parties are enthusiastic deporters, and neither one runs the southern border like the sieve that Trump describes. For as long as I have been alive, one of the cornerstones of American policy across parties and administrations has been a nativist kind of rhetoric about keeping and preserving America, for Americans. Even when Republicans and (especially) Democrats have appealed for the rights of immigrants, it has usually been in the context of a scolding “if they come here the right way” kind of thing. We have never, as long as I have been alive, chosen anything like the attitude toward immigrants that Jesus represents and proposes in Mark 12 and cites from Leviticus 19.
In one sense, that’s a good thing. Religion is different than politics, and the church is not the state. (And for that, we ought to give thanks). We shouldn’t expect or allow the theological commitments of any religion to determine national policy, on immigration or anything else. (Let the reader understand). But I do think there is a shocking distance between the perspective offered by Jesus in this passage from Mark 12 and the way this majority-Christian nation runs its immigration policy. For a nation that is supposed to be populated by tens of millions of Christians, in which explicitly Christian rhetoric often dominates and determines politics, our immigration policies are stunningly at odds with the words of Jesus. I have seen t-shirts adorned with the rhetorical question, “Who Would Jesus Deport?” The answer, at least based on Jesus’ own words and actions, would have to be “nobody.” Jesus mirrors his own Jewish tradition’s embrace of both friends and immigrants (sojourners, strangers, foreigners, ger’im), and calls on others to do the same. In contrast, one of America’s major political parties deports immigrants enthusiastically, and the other one demonizes them and then deports them (and insinuates that anyone who isn’t a white Christian might not be a “real” American anyway). And, it should always be pointed out, we all benefit economically from the presence of immigrants and their cheap (and easily exploited) labor. In our own context in the United States in the 21st century, we are a part of a powerful nation that creates misery for millions of people while many of us claim to follow a person who told us to welcome them. (And if having a story helps to humanize that misery, read another of the passages from the lectionary this week—the story of Ruth and Naomi in Ruth 1:1-18—and imagine those two migrants trying to navigate the southern American border, and ask what kind of ending their story might have had).
Our context matters when we interpret this verse. Our context is important as much as Jesus’ context is important when we think about how we understand the command to love our neighbor, to love our plēsion, to love our rea, to love our ger, to love the stranger or the foreigner. For those of us who live on the inside of a powerful and wealthy nation, for those of us whose tax dollars go to fund walls and border security to keep people out of that nation, I think this teaching from Jesus should be a very difficult teaching. I think this teaching ought to keep us up at night. Because no matter which candidate you support or which party you think is right, I don’t see much evidence that we as a society view the plēsion, that we view the ger, that we treat the stranger or the foreigner or the neighbor with anything like love. And if we call ourselves Christians, I am not sure how that behavior is defensible.
48 hours after church lets out this week, polls will be open all over the country, and a lot about the future will be decided. There are many issues that deserve our consideration as we vote; there are a lot of very serious things at stake in this election. But as you vote (and I do encourage you to vote), remember Mark 12 and the response Jesus gave when he was asked about God’s greatest commandments. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he said, in a nod to a chapter of Torah that calls on us to love our friends as ourselves and to treat the foreigner the same way that you would treat anyone else. Remember that, and vote accordingly.