Who is Your Neighbor? Part II
Part I in this two part series can be found here.
But doesn’t Christ sort of do away with all these particular loves and duties? Remember the story from the Gospels: Jesus is preaching when a man comes into the room to tell Him that His mother and brethren have arrived and wish to speak with Him. Jesus does not go out to meet them but replies: “For whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
If anyone could be Jesus’s brother or sister or mother, how important could His actual family be? And if Jesus denies his family, doesn’t he undo the duty to honor one’s parents or to love one’s neighbor?
St. Jerome’s commentary in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Cantena Aurea helps us better understand these verses. He explains that the man who interrupts Christ’s teaching does so with pernicious intent: “He that delivers this message, seems to me not to do it casually and without meaning, but as setting a snare for Him.”[1]
He wants to catch Christ preferring “flesh and blood to spiritual work.” He wants Christ to choose His family over His ministry.
In other words, the messenger pits the commandment to love one’s neighbor against the first great commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
But the Son of God is not caught in the trap. He does not stop teaching. In doing so, however, Jesus does not dishonor His mother or family. As St. Jerome writes, “[T]he Lord refused to go out, not because He disowned His mother and His brethren, but that He might confound him that had laid his snare for Him.”
“Nor does He,” St. Jerome continues, “overthrow the duty of filial submission, which is conveyed in the command, Honour thy father and thy mother, but shews that He owes more to the mysteries and relationship of His Father, than of His mother.” Jesus undoes the snare by fulfilling both duties perfectly, though each in its proper order.
He does not, St. Jerome asserts, “disown His mother so as to be thought to be born of a phantasm.” He is born of a real woman—not by the spirit of woman, any abstract notion of motherhood, Mother Earth, or any other false fertility goddess.
Indeed, Jesus is both the Son of God and the Son of Man. He is like us in all things but sin. And like us, He is born of a woman, a particular woman, Mary of Nazareth. He does not, St. Jerome asserts, “disown His mother so as to be thought to be born of a phantasm.” He is born of a real woman—not by the spirit of woman, any abstract notion of motherhood, Mother Earth, or any other false fertility goddess.
This is what some philosophers and theologians call “the scandal of particularity.” The scandal is concerned with how the Son of God could truly be the Son of Man—with all the particularities of being a man.
Jesus lives in a particular town. Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
He belongs to a particular family. Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary?
He has particular friends and even particular loves. One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him.
So what exactly is the scandal? In sum, the scandal questions how the God of Love could be so exclusive. How could He know and love some men in such unique ways? What about the rest of us?[2]
This is the scandal which drives Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit to a desperate life of pleasure seeking and despair in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”[3] Distraught because he cannot be certain that Jesus raised the dead, since Christ lived in another time and place, the Misfit yells at the Grandmother:
“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.”
By the accidents of a broken down car in Georgia and the Providence of God, the Grandmother has been brought into closer connection with the Misfit, whom she knows to be a thief and murderer. Yet, at this moment, she undoes the Misfit’s trap and perhaps eventually his faithlessness by loving him as her neighbor:
His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest.
It seems that the solution to the scandal of particularity is also the particular—real people, real neighbors, real Christians. After all, St. Paul tells us that we are Christ’s body, His hands and His feet. Jesus has called each of us to bring the Love of God to those persons within our reach.
In our desire to follow the second of the two great commandments, let us be like the grandmother who loves even the ugliest, even him whose face is twisted yet close to our own. Though someone else’s neighbor may be more beautiful, maybe even a good man, he is not the one whom God has placed in our paths.
So perhaps we should change the question. Perhaps we should all ask, Am I someone’s neighbor? Our answer might help us know whether we, too, are Christ’s brother or sister.
[1] St. Jerome’s commentary on Matthew 12:46-50 in St. Thomas Aquinas, Cantena Aurea: https://www.ecatholic2000.com/catena/untitled-19.shtml#_Toc384506919
[2] C.S. Lewis talks about the scandal in Miracles, chapter 14:
“To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a ‘chosen people.’ Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. […] There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.”
[3] “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in Flannery O’Connor’s own voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQT7y4L5aKU
