In these final painful days of our electoral season, when saintliness seems remote from the public sphere, the familiar words of what’s popularly known as the Golden Rule: “do to others as you would have them do to you” seem to take on a special urgency. Mostly because they are the words of our Lord, whose teaching I ache to hear above the cacophony. But they are also urgent—I think—because they are an ethical mandate that crosses cultures.
“Do not do to others what you would not like yourself,” insist the Confucian Analects. “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself,” records the Sunnah of the prophet Muhammed. “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary” records the Talmud, and the Buddhist Udana Varga insists “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”
We ought to be able to agree on this, no? But in an era when the presidential candidate of a major party can say that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is his favorite Bible verse, those of us who hallow religious texts might well find ourselves wondering what happened to our scriptural and ethical traditions. How did we stray so far from the teachings of Jesus?
Of course Jesus himself well understood that reciprocal good behavior was not a sure thing. You can hear it in the verb conjugations: “do to others” is an imperative. That is, it’s a command. Jesus really expected his followers, including us, to do the right thing to and for each other. “As you would have them do,” is—on the other hand—a subjunctive. By all means, imagine how you’d like others to reciprocate, but the grammar itself forewarns that they might not do it.
This teaching—at once so very familiar—jumped out at me in a new way when I noticed that subjunctive, so rarely used in modern English. And just in case it’s been a while since your last grammar class, a reminder that the subjunctive mood describes action whose outcome is uncertain. It stands in contrast to, for example, “do to others what you know they will do to you.” The latter statement—kind of like “an eye for an eye”—would be in the indicative mood, in which the person saying it is pretty confident of what will happen. The subjunctive mood, on the other hand, leaves substantial room for doubt.
All of which is to say that Jesus clearly knew that he was sending his followers into risky territory. Doing the right thing was—and is—in no way certain to generate right response. He modeled that courage in his own ministry and indeed in his very being. Sometimes good behavior only serves to exacerbate the bad, a phenomenon we saw play out in Jerusalem some two millennia ago, and we’re apparently seeing it today in every contemporary online forum.
But Jesus didn’t say “do to others the good you know they’ll do back to you,” any more than he said “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Admittedly, there is a superficial relationship between these kinds of statements and Jesus’ words as Luke recorded them. If we don’t listen closely they can seem like they’re all about symmetrical reciprocity or at least about limited retaliation.Which—I need to acknowledge—are useful values for common life. They are the ethics of good business deals and just wars, and many a civilization has flourished under their guidance. But reciprocity is not actually the ethics of Jesus—who insisted that we do the right thing without any guarantee of a good outcome. Neither is reciprocity the ethics of saints.
Consider, for example, the witness of Irena Sendler, the Polish nurse who smuggled some 2,500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation, only to be arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Or consider the 17the century French Catholic priest Jean Baptiste de la Salle—a personal favorite from the time my son attended a Christian Brothers high school—whose passion for the education of poor urban boys led him to found one of the first teacher training programs. In his memoirs he wrote “I had imagined that the care which I assumed of the schools and the masters would amount only to a marginal involvement…Indeed, if I had ever thought that the care I was taking of the schoolmasters made it my duty to live with them, I would have dropped the whole project. … God, who guides all things with wisdom and serenity… willed to commit me entirely to the development of the schools. He did this in a way… that I did not foresee in the beginning.
Irena and Jean Baptiste were both people of privilege, but they were also Christians who heard an imperative to do the right thing for others—vulnerable others—and acted without knowing or counting the personal cost. So today I find myself wondering if you look to particular saints or heroes to remind you of the importance of caring for and protecting vulnerable children. They need not be people who have Wikipedia entries; just people who cared for young people without expecting reciprocity. If so, please feel free to name them now, and—if they have passed into the realm of the saints—let’s do as the Latin Americans do and acclaim them “presente.”
(Fred Rogers, Susana Wesley, Jane Addams, Mary, mother of Jesus…)
Presente… present with us now. All Saints season is a time for us to remember that we are not alone, neither in the truth of uncertain outcomes, nor in the clarity of Jesus’ call. I know that I’m leaning on these saints to shape the work of my own task force over the next few days, and—with our brother Paul—I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give us a spirit of wisdom. But I think I need the witness of saints even more when it comes to this time in our national life, which is indeed one of great uncertainty.
It is a subjunctive season, no? Would that the path ahead for our country—where our policies have allowed far too many to become poor, hungry, sorrowful and excluded—were more clear. But the subjunctive mood is not merely a grammatical way to express uncertainty, it is also the way we express hope. Which may account for its scarcity in contemporary English usage. On the whole, I’d venture to say that we fear uncertainty and are reluctant to embrace hope.
But Jesus was clear: we are to act now according to the justice that we hope for. And what is hope but doubt that has said its prayers? Who are saints but those who have listened to the words of our Lord and let their fear be transformed into courage? In our working together, in our voting, and in the ministry of reconciliation that is desperately needed regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, there’s not any reason—no not the least—why we shouldn’t be saints too.
