Eco-justice
Commentary on the Common Lectionary for the Sundays after Epiphany, 2017
By
Dennis Ormseth
Seventh Sunday after
the Epiphany
Psalm
119:33-40
Leviticus
19:1-2, 9-18
I
Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23
Matthew
5:38-48
Our interpretation of
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount as grounding for an “Earth-honoring faith” concludes
in this comment with the development of two themes, Jesus' teaching regarding
retaliation and his commandment to love our enemies. In the relationship
between these two themes we see how strongly Jesus teaching supports such a
faith.
As we pointed out in
our comment on the readings for the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany, Larry Rasmussen shows that key to an
“Earth-honoring” faith is a repudiation
of what he describes as “the modern/eco version of perhaps the longest-lived
and most oppressive ethic of all: the
ethic of masters and slaves.” It is this
ethic, he argues, with its relationship of “subject-over-object and
mind-over-matter in a paradigm of domination that renders nature essentially a
slave to humanity, its steward and master.” (Earth-honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p.101). As we see in the verses from
the Sermon on the Mount appointed for this Sunday, with respect to relations
between humans at least, Jesus clearly rejects the “paradigm of dominiation”
within which such an ethic operates. “Do not resist an evildoer,” he commands.
To be sure, the relationship between
humans and nature is not of direct concern here; his illustrations of the
command have instead to do with a bully, a lender, and a soldier. His point in each instance is, nonetheless,
to discourage the habit of domination manifest in these relationships: a second
cheek is offered after the first is struck, a sacrifice of personal honor that
risks doubling the insult of the first, but also serves to confound the
strategy of an arrogant antagonist; if one relinquishes all one’s clothing to
someone who is reclaiming the debt of a coat, one thereby exposes the lack of
caring characteristic of a debtor economy; and one who has been forcibly
compelled to carry another’s burden voluntarily goes an extra mile,
exemplifying a relationship of willing service. Jesus thus offers a vision of
relationships, as Warren Carter puts it, that are “without exploitation, reciprocity, and
self-aggrandizement. . . One’s resources are available not only for oneself but
also for others.” Jesus, he notes, offers “examples of creative, imaginative
strategies which break the circle of violence.
The servile refuse to be humiliated; the subjugated take iniative by
acting with dignity and humanity in the midst of and against injustice and
oppression which seem permanent.” Such
actions, Walter Wink suggests, “ manifest the destablilizing, transforming
reign of God”(Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading. Maryknoll,
New York: Orbis Books, 2000, p. 153) .
Can such strategies
also be righteously and effectively asserted against those who persist in a
master/slave relationship with the Earth?
What is called for with respect to 'an Earth-honoring faith,” we want to
suggest, is the extension of Jesus' repudiation of the paradigm of domination
to cover human relationships with the earth. Taken together, Warren Carter
suggests, these examples offer a vision meant to train “the audience to imagine
the embodiment of God's empire in numerous other situations.” The sayings of
the Sermon on the Mount, he observes, “illustrate a way of life marked by a comprehensive
and consant love even in the face of opposition.” (Carter, p. 157) So once again, the Sermon directs us into
“affairs of the heart.” Can this love then overcome the practices of domination
inherent in the master/slave relationship in which we commonly bind the Earth?
This possibility has
been explored in connection with the discussion of our second theme, Jesus'
commandment to love one's enemies. “You have heard that it was said, 'You shall
love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your
Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and
sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous (Matthew 5:43). The radical
character of this teaching is illumined by comparing it to the reading from
Leviticus, our first lesson. There the
principle is clearly one of reciprocal altruism: “love your neighbor as yourself.” One’s love of self is the standard by which
love of neighbor is measured. The commended good behaviors in this instance
stretch but do not break the circle defined by that self-interested “your.”
However extended that circle might be, it nonetheless falls within the scope of
a standard list of behaviors characteristic of all living organisms, including
humans: “struggle for resources; reproductive behavior; association with, and
positive behavior toward, genetic relatives; and reciprocal behavior.”
Conditioned as they are by Darwinian natural selection, these “biological
relationships abound with cooperation, but very rarely exhibit anything going
beyond our understanding of kin and reciprocal altruism” (Patricia Williams, “The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist,” Theology
and Science 3, no. 2 [July 2005: 133-43], quoted by Christopher Southgate, The
Groaning of Creation, p. 67).
“Turn
my heart to your decrees,” we pray with the Psalmist this Sunday, “and not to
selfish gain.” And appropriately so.
Considered theologically, Christopher Southgate argues, reciprocal altruism
constitutes a “no” to God’s own self-giving love, to the love
“poured out without the cost being counted. The work of the Holy Spirit in
offering possibilities of community succeeds in giving rise to ecosystemic
complexity, but ‘fails,’ in most of the nonhuman world, in creating any
community characterized by authentic altruism, true self-giving love” (The
Groaning of Creation, pp. 67-68). Is
this “no” to God by the creatures
absolute? Can the limit be transcended?
A representative consensus of sociobiologists would probably say no, it cannot
be overcome. Darwinian natural
selection can provide for reciprocal altruism, extended in complex ways as long
as the inherent self-interest in survival of the species remains in force. The
answer is clearly yes, on the other hand, in view of Jesus’ teaching: Jesus' rejects at the outset the principle of
reciprocity; he has just repudiated the lex talionis of “An eye for an
eye and a tooth for a tooth” (5:38). His
call for non-violent responses to evil
have in common an element of extraordinary self-giving. Accordingly, the command to love one's
enemies is seen to be a command to love as God loves. Indeed, it rests on a faith in God as both
loving Father and as the creator who graces the earth with light and rain. What it means to be “children of your Father
in heaven” is to love as God loves (5:44). It is to love without expectation of reciprocity,
without self-interested conditions. And to love without qualifying
distinctions: God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall equally on the
righteous and the unrighteous. To love in this way is to love perfectly,
because that is how God loves; so “be perfect as your heavenly Father is
perfect.”
Jesus’ insistence on
such love as a human possibility is in fact what makes his teaching such secure
grounding for an Earth-honoring faith. To love the whole creation as God loves
it, is to love the other which appears, from an “all too human” point of
view, as an enemy that constantly limits
the resources of time, space and energy available for one’s survival. We can well imagine that the creation, no
less than its Creator, delights in the emergence of a creature “that can become more than itself, whose
life can be broken and poured out in love and joy after the divine image. . .
capable of sophisticated reflection on the planet, and hence potentially a
partner for God in the care of living things” (Southgate, p. 68.) Holmes Rosten, III, concurs, in pointing to
the Christ-like kenosis (self-emptying) that this love entails:
An
exciting difference between humans and nonhumans is that, while animals and
plants can defend only their own lives, with their offspring and kind, humans
can defend life with vision of greater scope.
They can sacrifice themselves for the good of humans yet unborn, or on
the other side of the globe, the entire human community. Humans can also care for the biotic
communities with which they share this planet; they can care for their
biosphere. Here we recognize a difference
crucial for understanding the human possibilities in the world. Humans can be genuine altruists; this
begins when they recognize the claims of other humans, whether or not such
claims are compatible with their own self-interest. The evolution of altruism and the possibility
of kenosis is complete only when humans can recognize the claims of nonhumans. In that sense environmental ethics is the
most altruistic form of ethics. It
really loves others. This ultimate
altruism is, or ought to be, the human genius. (“Kenosis and Nature,” in The
Work of Love; Creation as Kenosis, edited by John Polkinghorne, p. 64. Emphasis added.)
In the practice of such genuine altruism, the
human does indeed bring to the creation an “image of God”, a degree of
perfection that is divine.