Image: Jorge Cocco

In his recent WAVES Festival address in San Diego – WAVES being an acronym for Well-being, Art, Vision, Entrepreneurship, and Science- David Brooks offered a commentary on current America, referring to the country having taken two recent hits. He described the Zelensky meeting in the Oval Office as a searing memory. What I saw that day was a group of people who occupied the Oval Office seeking power – just pure power – the power to bully. The Oval Office event reminded Brooks of George Orwell’s 1984, in which one of Orwell’s characters describes his lust for power being fulfilled not as a demand for obedience, but in the capacity to make other people suffer. It seems clear that Brooks’ number one hit on the nation concerns the Administration’s driving impulse – to achieve absolute power confirmed by its capacity to inflict suffering and embrace cruelty as a primary instrument of routine government.

In his address, Brooks suggests that American society moves through repetitive historical cycles – his point being that no matter how bad things currently seem, we’ve been here at least once before in the amazingly short 250-year history of the American experience. While identifying several socio-political elements in the repeating historical cycle, as his second hit on the nation he identifies the dramatic shift in the politics of immigration.

He notes that the idea of America is that we welcome all sorts of people here, and we celebrate diversity and pluralism. America is a crossroads nation where people come and bring their talents, and they have the opportunity to grow and contribute to the creation of a national sense of confidence. He noted that the current political climate is the result of a cataclysmic loss of [national] confidence and some sort of spiritual assault.

In Luke 10, the lawyer initiates a conversation with Jesus about the inheritance of eternal life. We detect a quality of self-serving in his approach. Fixing him with a shrewd and assessing gaze, Jesus flushes out the man’s real concerns. It’s not his capacity to love God that’s on the lawyer’s mind, but the thorny requirement to love his neighbor as himself. He blurts out – Who is my neighbor? As is his custom, Jesus does not try to explain. Instead, he tells him a story.

As I often remind us, the construction and telling of stories provides the only lens through which we can view and make some sense of our experience and place in the world. In his address to the WAVE Festival, Brooks is reminding us that we have always had competing stories through which to discover and articulate our experience as a nation. In any period, the rise and fall of particular stories color our view of ourselves as a nation. This is so clearly demonstrated in the cyclic pattern of our attitudes to the concept of neighbor. Is a neighbor someone like us or not like us, someone to be welcomed, if only out of a sense of self-interest, or feared? Each answer will determine national immigration policy.

Brooks identifies national confidence as a key ingredient of whether we embrace an inclusive or exclusive story of neighbor. He quotes John Bowlby the great British psychoanalyst and originator of attachment theory who wrote that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base – all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. Brooks argues that recent history has robbed Americans individually and collectively of a sense of living life from a secure base. Fear and insecurity have come to characterize the current state of national confidence. Since the financial collapse in 2008, ordinary Americans have experienced one blow after another to our confidence. Our insecurity, now both everyday as well as existential feeds a pathological suspicion of our neighbor. Like the lawyer confronting Jesus, we are currently experiencing a deep anxiety concerning personal and collective obligations towards our neighbor, the biblical stranger in our midst.

We find ourselves in periods when our national confidence allows us to welcome immigrants as an untapped resource contributing to our shared prosperity through high-value knowledge and skills or filling the multitude of jobs we no longer wish to or lack sufficient people to perform. There are other periods, such as the one we are currently slogging our weary way through, when, sapped by loss of personal and national confidence, we fall prey to the story casting immigrants as threats to our very way of life. From history, even our short 250-year national history, we can chart which of those competing stories has the power to liberate and which to imprison – to take us forward or cast us back. I suppose the light at the end of the tunnel is the knowledge that we have been here before, and we eventually come through periods of fear and insecurity to embrace a brighter story of ourselves.

Because we are somewhat biblically educated Episcopalians, we are aware of some of the historical cultural tensions and clashes of identity in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. For a start, we remember that Jews and Samaritans hated each other – a hatred rooted in the tragedy and pain of a shared history. Between Jew and Samaritan existed a hatred and fear of a ferocity equaled by the current Israeli Palestinian mutual fear and loathing.  Good Samaritan for Jesus’ hearers was a shocking and provocative oxymoron – a rhetorical figure of speech in which deeply incongruous and contradictory terms are combined. Such is Jesus’ way. 

At the heart of the lawyer’s conversation with Jesus lies his need to have Jesus limit his obligation to love his neighbor as himself. His need was rooted in his fear of too much being asked of him – in other words, he lacked the self-confidence to receive the commandment. Jesus recognizes this, and so at the end of his provocative story, he asks who in the story was the neighbor to the robbed and beaten man? Without thinking, the lawyer blurts out, the one who showed him mercy.

The obligation to show mercy suddenly jumps out of the parable and hits the lawyer fair and square in the face. Mercy emerges as the heart of what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The concept of love is always ambiguous. We can quibble over the extent or limit of what it means to show love for our neighbor. But the command to show mercy allows for no such ambiguity. Perhaps this is why, in the current political climate, mercy has become the most provocative and incendiary of all the expectations of the kingdom.