From the Irony Division of the underworld, a consortium of devils, setting aside their mutual hatred to get first-rate work done, has invented a thing called “social media,” rife with every anti-social impulse that fallen man indulges. Most of all, from what I see every day, they have encouraged people to join round-robins of calumny and spite, with everyone involved declaring himself to be superior to everyone else—not because he has done anything great but because other people are wicked.
“Lord,” said the Pharisee in the temple, “I thank you that I am not like other men, for instance like this miserable bill collector in the back. I don’t screw money out of the poor. I don’t commit adultery. I give to the United Way, I volunteer in every blood drive, I hold the right opinions about the marginalized, and I am not shy about voicing those opinions, either. You ought to have seen how I made the whole family uncomfortable yesterday! Ah, but you did see.”
But the bill collector did not even dare to lift his head. He just kept on muttering, “Lord, have mercy on me. A sinner is all I am.”
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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I beg the reader’s pardon for my tweaking the parable of Jesus (Luke 18:9-14). I have tweaked it not to be clever but to throw into relief for us here and now the problem it illustrates. The Pharisee “praying” is not really praying at all. He is making comparisons. That these are motivated by pride and self-love is not to my point here. The comparison itself is the problem.
He is aware of the bill collector in the back. He takes an odd delight in being aware of him. He shows no pity for that sinner, as you might show to someone afflicted with a virulent disease—and sins are moral and spiritual diseases, as real as cancer and potentially far more deadly. If he were to learn that the bill collector did not actually deserve his reputation as an oppressor in a disreputable trade, he would be faintly disappointed.
For the Pharisee is on stage. Even if he does not show off before other people, he shows off before God and himself. That—even without any inconsistency between what he says and what he does—is sufficient to make him a hypocrite, in the meaning of that Greek word we find so often in the New Testament. He is a playactor before an audience. Sometimes the audience is to be found in the marketplace. Sometimes it is at the dinner table. Sometimes it is to be found in your own heart, alone.
Is it possible to draw moral comparisons between yourself and other people and not be that playactor in a drama you have drawn up for your own satisfaction? Yes, I think it is possible. But what is the point? The sin that most concerns each person is the one that afflicts him, whichever it is, just as the disease that most concerns the man in the ambulance is the one that has put him there—a heart attack, a stroke, kidney failure, a bullet in the chest, whatever.
It makes no sense for the man on the dialysis machine to look askance at the man on the iron lung. It does not help either patient in the infectious disease ward to inquire about the other patient’s temperature, each hoping that the other’s is worse. People who bathe in a sewer have no cause to complain about anyone else’s bad smell—but that is what people do. We set the bar of morality low enough for us to clear it, and we take pleasure in knowing, or imagining, that our neighbors do not clear it. The sins we inveigh against are those we happen not to be tempted by; or those we commit all the time and refuse to see it.
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For the worst sin in the world is always what other people do. And we can always find ways in which our favorite sin is not as bad as someone else’s. The fornicator, comparing himself to the sodomite, says, “At least my sin is in accord with nature.” The sodomite says, “At least my sin doesn’t risk bringing an unwanted child into the world.” The avaricious man, comparing himself to the man on welfare, says, “At least my sin redounds to the common good.” The prodigal, comparing himself to the businessman, says, “At least my sin doesn’t make a god out of money.” Men complain about the manipulativeness of women; women complain about the brutishness of men.
Nine-tenths of political speech is just this sort of comparison, so that when churchmen engage in it, they give the impression that we are justified not by repentance but by hatred aimed at the approved targets and couched in self-delighting forms. We lay a lot of flattering unction to our souls.
But when Jesus says that the greatest of all the commandments is that we shall love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, he invites us into a relationship that admits of no comparison and no degrees. Indeed, it makes no sense to judge the degree of love that anyone bears toward God, since the commandment is absolute and total, and since God surpasses all our attempts to judge or evaluate.
I might say that a man who does love God with all his heart is very possibly unaware of it, at least while he is alive on earth, since such a love must be wholly taken up with the beauty, the goodness, and the glory of the Beloved. Wonder does not bring out the scales for reckoning. In such a love, he gains himself by losing himself; he becomes more himself than ever because he forgets himself, and thus forgets to don the troublesome disguises we all wear.
The other side of the commandment, that which follows from a love of God that reserves nothing for the self alone, is that we shall love our neighbor as ourself. To do that, it is neither sufficient nor necessary that we advocate one or another political program for social amelioration. Such programs must be evaluated on criteria of justice, feasibility, and practical and moral consequences. They are no substitute for love.
To love the neighbor as you love yourself must mean at least that you do not engage in invidious comparisons. The neighbor is, as it were, yourself in another form; your twin brother. As you would not delight to learn that you had contracted a foul disease, so you should not delight to learn that your neighbor had committed some wrongdoing. As you would muffle your own bad breath arising from a stomach ulcer, so you should not take delight in breathing far and wide your neighbor’s sins, whether true or imagined so. But to love your neighbor with a love that derives from your love of God is to say, without reservation, “How good it is that you exist!” It, too, is to be struck with wonder.
That is emphatically not to let kinds of actions go by as if they were not dangerous illnesses. It is not charitable to ignore a cholera epidemic. It is not wise, either, to be exercised about some other disease when everyone is dropping dead of cholera all around you, unless there are plenty of people already fighting against it and everyone understands that it is an emergency.
But to judge kinds of bad actions is like studying the symptoms, the causes, and the effects of a disease, in the individual person, in those he directly harms, and in the larger society. For all sins are communicable, and none are private. Yet even when we exercise this essential function of moral reasoning, it is safest, that is, less of a spiritual danger for us to aim the magnifying glass first on those sins we ourselves are likeliest to commit.
Of course, people do the exact reverse, and that includes not only laymen but plenty of members of the clergy. They focus on other people’s characteristic sins not to heal them but to condemn them—and to make themselves look good by comparison. To have a real ministry, for example, to people beset with homosexual temptations is like having a ministry that specializes in a particular and serious malady of the body. The gastrointestinal specialist does not cheer when patients with ulcers eat rich food. To take the sin seriously, and to treat the sinner with kindness, is to do all you can, without disgust but also without excuse, to lead him away from that sin. An ulcer does not heal itself by your pretending that it does not exist.If the Church is a field hospital, as Pope Francis suggested, then it is the last place for pretense, neglect, and irresponsibility. It is also no place for preening. Hunchbacks, cripples, lepers; the scrofulous, the edematous, the arthritic; people weak in the heart next to people weak in the brain; some who smell bad from open wounds, others who smell bad from cancer of the bowels; which of us would dare, if we really knew ourselves, to get on our high horse about other people?
