My Neighbor, My Enemy

I’ve been struggling (remember, Christian word for failure) with rage this week, not over politics and the state of the world, not over some kind of global injustice, not even about the genocide of people around the world, but over our poor wretched Puppy, Posie.

Poor Posie. First of all, we have humiliated him by giving him a froufrou name. Second of all, we have required him to transfer his loo affections to the great outdoors. Third, we haven’t allowed him to bark and growl at children (and who among us doesn’t want to do that) and finally, we have kept him tethered, except for well regulated play, to one person or another all day and night. Just now, having had a chance to be outside in the frigid dawn, he is sleeping under the blanket with his nose buried into my ample bosom, hopefully dreaming of holiness and righteousness for all his days. Gosh he’s cute when he’s asleep.

The thing is, we want him to just be good without the work of making him so. We don’t really want to devote our lives to imposing consistency and order on his every thought and action. He is not very different from a young child who, for sanity’s sake, it is easier to just let be. Maybe the child will be fine. I’m just going to let the child be. But when you just let the child go where he likes, or do what she wants, you end up with a variety of different sadnesses.

A child who isn’t held under the fire of consistency–having to immediately obey, having to forgive and seek forgiveness, having to tell the truth, having to speak respectfully and kindly, having to swallow down even a just argument to answer in the proper tone–ultimately, that child isn’t a happy child. The child for whom this hard work isn’t undertaken ends up feeling rage and causing rage in others. It is painstaking, the rearing of the child. It means constantly setting aside your own plans and desires to be there and do what needs to be done. You would rather lie back and read a book, but meanwhile, little Eglantine is practicing deceit and the puppy needs the loo. If you don’t leap up to attend to the matter, you are acting in hatred towards both of them, no matter what you feel about it.

This is swirling all around in my tired mind because the sermon this last Sunday was all about having to love my neighbor, and who is my neighbor? I don’t want to know who my neighbor is. I want my neighbor, all six of them, to leave me alone so I can stare out the window. Loving my neighbor means constantly setting aside myself so that they can lead orderly, disciplined lives and grow up to be happy, kind, interesting people.

This being so, the basis of this neighborly love has to be forgiveness. It’s pretty easy for me to tilt slightly off course and frame up the picture around myself. Here I am, I’m the center, and all these people, and this puppy, are real bothersome to me. I want, Nay! Need to do some very important things. I want, which is practically the same thing as requiring, certain elements in my day to make everything ok. And all these other people are ruining it. If only they would leave me alone so that I can get going on the things I not only want to do, but should do to achieve peace and happiness.

When I go there, into that frame, I have sinned against my neighbor. But I have made it look to myself as if my neighbor is sinning against me. I am owed a certain something, and they didn’t deliver it, and so now I am justified in whatever I want to do. When actually, I wasn’t owed, I am not justified, and my true task is to go over there and be on their terms and do what is required for their happiness.

So, the forgiveness has to be given, even when it isn’t really owed. It’s not like little Eglantine sinned against me, in her deceit. She sinned against God. But she made me mad because I had to deal with it. So I had to forgive her for ruining my lunch prep. And Matt wasn’t out to get me, when he had to go to work for hundreds of hours yesterday, and we didn’t get to say hello or goodbye. He didn’t sin against me. But I forgave him anyway, because I had appropriated to myself irritation that he had such a long day. And Elphine isn’t trying to destroy my happiness, by having a long chapter test, for which I have to sit next to her and hold her metaphorical hand. Not literal, obviously, as she needs it to write with. I have like six thousand things I’d rather do. So I forgave her.

And finally, having seen that no offense was really caused, and that it is my selfishness that is the problem, I have to be willing to forgive myself for being imperfect and for sinning. Certainly it is up to God to forgive me. But I also have to let myself off the hook and just go on, and not sit and die on the hill of not being Jesus. That part is actually the hardest. I want to be perfect, dammit. I don’t want to need to be saved. I don’t ever want to be in the pit. I don’t ever want other people to be in the place of having to forgive me.

That’s why the cross is really so hard. It’s not the ‘God so loved the world’ part. Everyone believes that God does, or at least should, love them. It’s the ‘gave his only Son to die’ that is so offensive. It’s the kind of love, the love that lays down his life, the fact that you needed that kind of love. You didn’t need the mug of tea and a kindly chat love, you needed the love that leapt up and died, because you hadn’t just done something foolish, you were dying in sin. It’s not God being neighborly, it’s you being the enemy of God, and him deciding to forgive your actual offense, and dying to make that possible.

Who is my neighbor? Well, the one I have decided is really my enemy. The one against whom I have taken offense. The one who has violated my plans and will. That one is my neighbor.