Being Nice is Not Enough
The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Here’s the Bible readings for this Sunday.
There's a common belief, both among some Christians, other religious, and nonreligious alike, that following God as it were is just about keeping a set of arbitrary rules and making sure we’re polite in society. This ranges in a spectrum, on one end you have the fundamentalists who seek to force this moral law onto everyone through their governments, you can see this in several Muslim countries and I’m sure some would say the same about Christians in the West, the other end of the spectrum is this sort of positive vibes religion where morality is relative aside from being polite to everyone.
Jesus, however, creates a standard that exists outside this spectrum.
“Who is my neighbor”, asks the Torah scholar.
Jesus could have just said, “Well make sure you’re nice to the Samaritans as well”, and we would have understood that, as most do with what Jesus actually said, to mean be nice to those we don’t like, or if you really want to tunnel vision into the ethnic background of the narrative you can come away from this story claiming Jesus said, “don’t be racist.”
But Jesus didn’t say “be nice”, that sort of statement is reserved for billion-dollar corporations trying to get retweets from their commercials or first-year residential assistants, not the King of the Universe. Our modern understanding of “being nice” is just about having a polite disposition. Fake a smile, hold a door for about five seconds, and if we’re being really nice we might let someone ahead of us on the freeway. However, the King requires more from us.
“He approached the victim”
“Poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them”
“He lifted him up on his own animal”
“Took him to an inn, and cared for him”
Compare what Jesus said to our modern understanding of “being nice.” What the Samaritan did could be labeled as “being nice”, but when people say “be nice” they don’t mean what Christ means. Christ commands us to reach out to the vulnerable and to care for them.
Keeping moral values is important but it is not the sum of Christianity. Christian morality is the basement of the house of virtues we should be building. Consider the soldier, his commander doesn’t have him running and doing push-ups so he looks good in a shmedium t-shirt. Likewise, Christians shouldn’t just “be moral” so we look good in front of others; rather, just like the soldier who builds his strength so he can help others when they’re in need, keeping God’s moral law builds our strength not only to resist temptation but to help others who are in need as well.
It’s not enough to not get divorced because it's a sin against God and then stop there. But we are called to build and grow our marriage so that our kids have stability and security, so our communities can rely on us and when other marriages are vulnerable they look to us for guidance and support.
Keeping the moral law is good, but just doing that keeps us away from people in need. “Being nice” is not bad, but it can be a superficial disposition that we don’t sincerely invest in and yet come with the delusion that we actually did something. Christ is clear on what it means to be a neighbor to someone, and he’s even clearer on how we should respond.
Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”