And Who Is My Neighbor? Holiness, Compassion, and Marching

Credit:  Andrew Tonn, El Paso, Texas

'“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?””  [Luke 10:25-29; NRSV]

Jesus was a Jew.  A righteous Jew, in fact, and a scholar.  As such he often challenged the prevailing views of the patriarchal and hierarchical Judaism of his time, especially surrounding the ritualistic practices regarding the temple as he found it in Jerusalem.

Marcus Borg has pointed out that the two words that are key to understanding what was most central to Jesus are Spirit (experiencing God as a real and intimate reality) and compassion.  “For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God.” [Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, 46]  “As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” [Mark 6:34]  Borg describes this kind of compassion as “feeling the feelings of someone else in a visceral way . . . . feeling the suffering of somebody else and being moved by that suffering to do something.” [47]

Judaism, as with Christianity today, had two competing social visions: one built around holiness: “be holy as God is holy,” and the other around compassion: “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  First century Judaism emphasized the former, Jesus the latter, and therein lies most of the conflict between him and the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders.  Furthermore, compassion was not seen by Jesus as only an individualistic, moral quality. “For Jesus, compassion was  . . . the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political.” [49]

The primary way this holiness emphasis manifested itself in Judaism was through the purity system: what was deemed clean vs. unclean.  Today when we hear that distinction we probably think of it in relationship to food: what is kosher and what is not.  But what Jesus was primarily concerned about was the social dimensions, which labeled so many people as unclean and thus not allowed into the temple and not welcomed into the synagogue community.  This was dramatic, because the spirituality of Judaism is built not so much on individual morality as on participation in the community, seen as chosen and loved by God.

So, who was unclean?  There are several categories: ethnicity and religion, such being a Samaritan or a Gentile; illness or disability, such as being a leper or unable to walk, hear, see; profession, such as being a tax collector or shepherd; economic status, such as being poor or in debt. [See Borg, 50 ff]

Credit:  Andrew Tonn, Women's Cooperative, Juarez, Mexico

And then there was gender.  To be a woman did not automatically make you unclean.  However, women were clearly second-class socially when it came to inheriting property, divorcing, etc., and were “unclean” whenever menstruating or in childbirth.

If you read through the many times Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees, it is usually because he is challenging the purity system.

He eats with sinners and the poor, heals the diseased, calls a tax collector to be one of his twelve, closest disciples, interacts with Samaritans, and welcomes women into his movement.  As Borg summarizes it, “Jesus deliberately replaced the core value of purity with compassion.  Compassion, not holiness, is the dominant quality of God, and is therefore to be the ethos of the community that mirrors God.” [53-54]

The early church also struggled with this issue, but it tried to follow Jesus quite literally in embracing the outcast, allowing women into leadership roles, and attempting to win over those different through love rather than power.  St. Paul, once a Pharisee himself, eventually embraced this understanding of Jesus, as we see in his description of the Corinthian church, describing it as being made up of people who were not wise, not powerful, not of noble birth.  Instead, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” [I Corinthians 1:26-28]

When my wife, daughter, and I participated in the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, I was surprised by what a joyous event it was, the love I felt in the crowds, how inspired I was, and the way in which it instilled hope in me.  As I reflected on this, I realized that one of the reasons is because I was part of an inclusive rather than an exclusive community, with people acting in the way Jesus taught us to act: trying to understand, embrace, and support, rather than judge, condemn, and ostracize.  There we were: gay and straight; white, black and brown; Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Christian; most walking but others in wheelchairs or being carried; every imaginable profession; and women of every age and culture.

Yesterday my son, who works on immigration and border issues for the ACLU in New Mexico, was in New York City for meetings, and was able to participate in the immigration march, and he felt the same kind of empowerment and hope the rest of my family experienced in DC.

Whenever we decide who is welcome, and who is not, based on religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, social and economic status, or profession, we are laboring once again under the purity system.

Immediately after Jesus’ exchange with the attorney quoted above, he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.  A man is heading to Jerusalem and is beaten, stripped, robbed and left half dead beside the road.  The first two people to pass by were a priest and a Levite, both clean according to the purity system.  They both see the man who has been beaten, but do not stop to help him.  Then comes a Samaritan, unclean according to the purity system.  He is the one who feels compassion (“moved with pity”).  He stops, binds up the man, takes him to lodging, and pays for his care.  Jesus ends the parable: ‘“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  He [the lawyer] said, “The one who showed him mercy.”  Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”’  [Luke 10:36-37].

Holy Ground Moment: Meeting John Lewis

When Mary and I decided to take our Civil Rights Tour in 2012, we, of course, began with our focus on the writings and work of Martin Luther King, Jr.  In the course of our studies and travel we became aware of the significant work done by many others:  Andrew Young, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Medger Evers, James Meredith, Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Forman, Hosea Williams, Bayard Rustin, C. T. Vivian, James Lawson, Fred Gray, James Bevel, and Diane Nash, among others.  But another name that kept coming up, over and over again, was someone younger than all of these leaders:  John Lewis, born in 1940.

Lewis was born in Pike County, Alabama (50 miles south of Montgomery), one of 10 children of sharecroppers, Willie Mae and Eddie Lewis.  He wanted to go to college at Troy State University, but they were not accepting black students.  He had observed the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and wrote him about his predicament.  King paid for a bus ticket for Lewis to come up to see him in Montgomery, and convinced him instead to attend American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, from which he graduated, and then, later, Fisk University, also in Nashville.

It was here in Nashville that Lewis first learned about the power of active non-violence by attending workshops held in the basement of Clark Memorial United Methodist Church by the Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith. There he became a dedicated adherent to the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence, which he still practices today.

 

John Lewis is at lunch counter sit-in in Nashville, head turned to the side.

Lewis was first involved in putting this philosophy into action in the Nashville Sit-ins, which he helped organize with Diane Nash and others in February of 1960, when Lewis was only 20 years old.  (For more on the Sin-ins, see blog post of 9/12/12).

Lewis and fellow Freedom Rider, James Zwerg, after being beaten in Montgomery

The next spring, in 1961, he was part of the Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans.  Lewis was the first rider to be assaulted, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, beaten as he attempted to enter a “whites only” rest room.  Later on in the ride, in Montgomery, Lewis was beaten into unconsciousness as he was getting off the bus.

 

In 1963 Lewis was the youngest person to speak at the March on Washington, and he stood by Dr. King as he gave what many consider to be the greatest oratorical event of the 20^th century, the “I Have a Dream” speech.

It was in 1963 that Lewis was elected chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).  Lewis spent the summer of 1964 helping organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer, which involved college students in helping blacks get registered to vote.  This work would lead Lewis eventually to Selma, where, on Sunday morning, March 7, 1965 (what would become known as Bloody Sunday), he and Hosea Williams would lead marchers, intent on marching all the way to Montgomery to secure voting rights in Alabama, across the Edmund Pettus bridge, where Lewis’ skull would be fractured by Alabama State Troopers.

Lewis holding picture of himself being beaten in Selma.

Finally, on the third try, marchers made the 5-day, 54 mile march to Montgomery, arriving on March 25 at the capitol steps to demand voting rights.  Later that year, on August 6, the Voting Rights Act would be signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.

John Lewis arriving in Montgomery with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

During the year after we returned from our Civil Rights Tour I taught an 8-session class on the Civil Rights Movement.  I talked so much about John Lewis that the pastor I work with gave me a portrait of him.  I then wondered if there was a way to  have Representative Lewis sign that portrait.

My opportunity came on my birthday, August 30, in 2013. The Library of Congress was hosting their annual Book Fair, and Lewis, along with Andrew Aydin, had just published the first of three graphic novels, in a trilogy called March, in which he documents his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement. He was listed as being present to sign copies of that book.

 

I stood in line and when I got to the front, I asked Congressman Lewis if he would sign not only the book, but my portrait of him, stating:  “Last year I did a tour of Civil Rights sites, and you were everywhere.  You were at the Nashville Sit-Ins, you were beaten twice on the Freedom Rides, you spoke at the March on Washington, you were beaten on the Selma bridge.  It is such an honor to finally meet you.”  Congressman Lewis signed both items, stood up, reached out his hand, and said, “It is good to meet you, brother.”

As a member of the Newseum, I have had two more opportunities to hear Congressman Lewis speak and to have the other books in the trilogy signed.  Book Two came out in 2015 when my son was in town, and so we went together.  Lewis told of the day a man from South Carolina came to his office with his son.  Inquiring why someone from South Carolina was coming to see him, the man confessed that he was one of the people who had beaten him during the Freedom Ride.  He had come with his son to ask for Lewis’ forgiveness.  They embraced, and through their tears, experienced the kind of reconciliation only confession and forgiveness can bring.

Book Three was published this past December, and this time my wife and I went to hear Lewis speak.   He talked about his experiences practicing active non-violence for over 50 years, which has included not only the beatings already mentioned, but being arrested some 40 times during the 1960’s and several more times while he has been in Congress.  No wonder Lewis has often been called the “Conscience of the U. S. Congress.”

As he signed our copy of Book Three, I was able to tell Congressman Lewis how much he has inspired me, how in my study and experience I have concluded that active non-violence is the most powerful path to meaningful change, and how grateful I am for having the chance to meet him and hear him speak, wishing him blessings in his life and work.

Each time I have met him, and experienced his humble and gentle compassion, along with his committed passion, I have felt I have been on holy ground.

Representative Lewis Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011