What Story Are You a Part Of?

What story are you a part of? When we find our life’s narrative in the story of God’s redemption in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we become Christians, part of the Jesus story, writes Neal F. Fisher in “Groundless absolutes?” (Christian Century, February 28, 2018). In one Jesus story, a lawyer asks, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) and Jesus responds not with a rule but with a story, Fisher tells us. The story, of course, is “The Good Samaritan,” one of the most beloved of Jesus’ parables. Presumably, the lawyer knows full well that the God, we are called on to love, has shown chesed (a Hebrew word that can be translated as “loving kindness”) over and over, not toward Jews only, but also toward “the nations” or gentiles, even the Samaritans. The Good Samaritan story is “a hard saying” for the lawyer. He is part of a story filled with ressentiment toward the Samaritans. As Don Cupitt points out in “Jesus and Philosophy” (2009 SCM Press, London), Nietzsche uses ressentiment to sum up the whole range of reactive or negative feelings, including scorn, disgust, dislike, envy, lust, disapproval, repugnance, contempt, impatience, malice, irritation, anger, rage, fury, fear, terror, hatred, boredom, indifference, recoiling, seething resentment, begrudging, outrage, indignation at, despair of, and many more. The lawyer likely has felt many of these feelings toward the Samaritans. Fisher writes that “Jews cursed Samaritans in the synagogues and prayed that they would have no part in eternal life.” And, in turn, … “Samaritans defiled the temple in Jerusalem by scattering bones in the temple area, making it impossible for the faithful to celebrate the Passover.” Each group played tit for tat, in its expressions of ressentiment. And, remember the lawyer first asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25) So maybe the lawyer feels that in heaven, we want us, but not the Samaritans. Heaven should be a gated community, keeping undesirables like Samaritans out. Thus, he can’t bring himself to say “the Samaritan” when Jesus asks him which of the three passers-by was a neighbor to the man beaten and left by the side of the road. The lawyer could only mutter, “the one who showed him mercy.” Mercy, by the way, is another translation of chesed. Jesus knows about chesed. His most authentic sayings, as determined by the Jesus Seminar, reflect a major innovation in ethics with a shift from realism to emotivism, in which the moral standard is brought down from heaven and relocated in the world of human feelings and relationships, or, in Cupitt’s words, the world of ‘the heart’. To break the culture of ressentiment, Jesus stresses the moral importance of a high level of critical self-consciousness: Get the beam out of your own eye, calculate, and then be extravagantly generous, because that is what melts the heart, and unfreezes human relationships. (Matthew 7:3-5) In the Good Samaritan story, Jesus urges us to be part of a story that illustrates positive feelings. Such feelings do not cloud or block our relation to the other person, Cupitt writes. These feelings are mostly very cool and transparent and not numerous. They include regard, attention, interest, sympathy, pity, respect, admiration, allegiance, friendship, and love. These feelings are found in tales of God’s chesed, and Israel has many such stories. For example, Phillip Jenkins, reviewing “The Exodus” by Richard Elliott Friedman (Christian Century, February 28, 2018), highlights Friedman’s point that “…only some recent memory of bitter slavery could have led ancient Israel to include in its laws such vehement assertions of the rights of aliens and such unusual limitations on the extent of chattel slavery.” Surely, the Exodus story is the foundational chesed story, expressing love of neighbors, even love of aliens. Maybe the lawyer had forgotten these chesed stories, or, more likely, he is unable to break out his ressentiment story. Today such ressentiment stories are everywhere, particularly about aliens, and we are relentlessly urged to be part of them. For example, we are asked to become part of stories about “Mexican rapists” and about people from “shithole countries.” These ressentiment stories can generate negative feelings that are often violent and a threat to social peace. To overcome such feelings, Cupitt writes that we must often be almost supernaturally “big” and generous, going beyond justice. So, be lead by the Spirit to leave ressentiment behind, to be critically self-conscious, and to become part of God’s story of big and generous chesed.