Speech on the understanding of humanity, the significance of interaction and encounters in our societies
Bishop Björn Vikström, 8 May, 2013
The Christian vision of humanity
As human beings, we should have a native ability to be human. Humanism often includes the thought that in essence the human is good and that the resources for growth, learning and responsibility can be found in each and every one of us. The task of upbringing and education is to clear away the rocks and stones so that these internal abilities could flourish.
Even the Story of Creation in the Bible can be interpreted this way. God affirms with satisfaction that the created world is good. Very good. The creative work culminates in the creation of man: God created them in His image, male and female. Nevertheless, in the biblical stories of creation, human imperfection and limitations appear very early on. The origin of serpent remains obscure. It’s just there in paradise.
Good and beautiful world have been created before humans. World is not the result of our work, but God places us in His already existing world. The goodness does not come from us, but neither does evil. The serpent indicates that the origin of Fall is outside of us, but the story of Adam and Eve accentuates that the evil materialises in us and through our actions.
God and His opponents are fighting over humans. Humans have a tendency for both good and evil. As the image of God, we have a conscience that helps us to distinguish between good and evil. Man is unable, by his own will and volition, to free himself from the power of sin, but through God's salvation. Our conscience has to struggle with our selfishness, indifference and laziness, and it needs help of the rules, good values and inspirational role models.
It follows from this dramatic vision of humanity that humanity is not a starting point, but the target. Being a human means growing towards humanity that is more authentic. The respective step will be fulfilled when we as Christians will try follow in Jesus footsteps. Jesus set the bar impossibly high: be perfect, He urges. We will never reach that far, not as an individual and not as a church.
Although we (like Moses) will not reach the heights, but still living as Christians means participating in incarnation. God's good will became flesh in creation. This happens again and again when God sustains care for his creation. God's good will became flesh in an extraordinary way in Jesus Christ who showed us the Father's face and how God's love can become a reality both in words and in deeds. We are witnessing the same incarnation when the disciples of Jesus adopt this merciful, forgiving and encouraging life philosophy, so characteristic of Jesus.
Essentially, the religious life is to receive the message from Bible and particularly from Jesus in different situations, in different languages and in different cultures. When we receive this message, we simultaneously give it a shape and make it visible. At that time, we serve as hands, ears, eyes and an instrument of God.
By emphasising the visibility of Christian life, we make visible its limitations and its imperfection at the same time. As long as we talk only about invisible church or internal personal faith, we can we live under an illusion that the church is perfect. As soon as the church and the Christian community become visible, we will also see their weaknesses. The image of God is in all of us, but so is human imperfection.
However, this, actually, is logical. The church is the body of Christ. His body was neither beautiful nor perfect, even though he was the son of God who became a man. If we were to take seriously the prophets' predictions of evangelists' stories, we would have to say that Jesus' body was covered with wounds and bruises after the assault. It was so terrible sight that people turned their gaze away. This broken body is an image of church. Through a miracle, a different kind of body emerged from the broken body of Jesus on Easter morning, the kind that no walls or locked doors could stop any longer from travelling freely.
After the resurrections, Jesus is different. Usually, he is not recognised until he does something characteristic of Him: He shares bread, He invites the disciples to eat, etc. As soon as He is recognised, He disappears from the sight. Jesus is different. He cannot be labelled. He would also like us to have the same opportunity: everyone that is born of the Spirit is like the wind - you don't know where it comes from or where it goes. This freedom to be yourself, different yet valuable, we should allow each other.
According to the Biblical Vision of Humanity, human does have tendency to both good and evil. According to Lutheran doctrine, human is simul iustus et peccator, simultaneously righteous and sinner. This should prevent us from simplifying life in such a way that we wouldn't project evil only to other humans.
The Bible does not give its unreserved support for the acceptance of difference and otherness. Like with a number of other interpretation questions, we have to compare the different verses of Bible and to assess which of the texts should be given more weight. We can use as an example the Old Testament's vision of strangers. On the one hand, there are texts emphasising the ritual purity. In those, God commands the citizens to clear the cities of all other other nations and those who sacrifices to any other gods. The defenders of slavery, racial oppression and immigration may have found in those texts the support for their stances.
The thought of a scapegoat is in close connection with despising the otherness. When nation is facing hardship, there must someone to blame. The kings or their foreign wives, who brought strange gods to Jerusalem, often were like an eyesore to prophets. There are also other examples of the need for purification. In the course of history, the scapegoat way of thinking most often targeted minorities: Jews, disabled, sexual minorities, etc. The fear caused by otherness and difference is irrational, but, unfortunately, common even nowadays.
The Old Testament has also different, almost opposite rudimentary tone. The manner in which the widow, the orphan, and the stranger is treated by the society is used as indicators of the nation's ethical status. Common to these groups is that they did not automatically have the social security, which was a necessity for the survival in the society of that time. Hospitality is a Biblical Virtue - and it, in fact, extends to strangers.
The Bible also contains references to a number of exemplary strangers. They include, for example, the mysterious priest Melchizedek who blesses Abraham, a Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well, a fictional Parable Of The Good Samaritan, Roman officer at Jesus' cross, the Ethiopian courtier in the Acts of the Apostles, etc. These are the examples of how the action of God transcends boundaries between people.
This is also, where the whole Bible is heading. It doesn't happen all at once and it is never perfect, but step by step, the gender equality and equity transgressing all borders of the Kingdom of God are breaking through even more clearly. Its realisation is never taken for granted, but it is a task for us Christians and us humans.
About interaction and encounter
The characteristic feature in Jesus' action was that He talked to people He met. It can of course be taken for granted, but in the Jewish culture of that time, it was not necessarily like that. On the contrary, the interaction was dominated by many rules that drew boundaries between men and women, scribes and sinners, Jews and foreigners.
Jesus transgressed the borders, and he did not pursue just one-way communication. By allowing time for questions, dialogue and debate, He anchors the message and the reality of human lives.
In the past, Socrates used the discussion as a teaching method. In his case, this method was very sophisticated if we were to believe the dialogues written by Plato. Socrates always gives the impression that he does not have any answers. At the same time, he allures his interlocutors into traps as they confidently present their opinions and then Socrates mocks them. His method has been called "therapeutic" because it is not about the care of souls, but rather about the care of knowledge and prejudice.
Most of us have heard numerous times how important it is for people to get a chance to unload their feelings and experiences. However, the words are not always even needed. The book of Job tells how his three friends came to him when he had lost everything a man can lose. According to the story, his friends sat silent with Job for many days. And then, they, unfortunately, committed a mortal sin for a physician of the soul: they began accusing Job and explaining that he himself was to blame for the punishments inflicted on him by God. Instead of listening, they called upon him to convert and to repent.
Thus, the story of Job has reference to both respectful silence and religiously motivated accusation. In the latter option, we simplify and generalise the problems of a fellow-citizen.
Is it even possible at all to understand another human being? One way to answer this question is to start with the fact that both are humans. I can empathise with another human life situation by comparing it to my own experiences. But this approach involves risks. When I begin from my own starting points, I might forget that the other human is different from me and that his experiences are different from mine as well.
As fellow men who are ready to listen, we should avoid comments like: "I know exactly how you feel, I have experienced this myself!", or "I have a friend who has been through the same process". In doing so, we are cutting off the train of thought of the other person and perhaps starting to tell about ourselves or our friends. Of course, we hope that our story would somehow help our conversation companion. But unwittingly we have already put him in a specific box or human category; we no longer are open to his uniqueness. And we do deal with his situation as an individual case, but we just offer universal standard response.
Each and every human being is always, in some sense, is different from all the others Different, but still valuable. This is the key concept in our Christian faith. The Story of Creation teaches us that the human is created in the image of God. You and I, therefore, are the image of the largest and the most inscrutable mysterious image of all.
French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, has said: human life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery, in the face of which we should pause and render quiescent. In my opinion, this is a valuable wisdom of life. Human can have many problems, but he is not the problem. Problem can be solved using right methods and tools. Human life does not need a solutions - life is to be lived. We certainly need help and advice at times, but not necessarily in a form of solutions and answers, but rather with the support of fellow-citizen and the help of God-given power.
Every human being should have the right to be seen as he is. No one should be treated as a typical representative of some group, sex or race. When we see a fellow-citizen only through stereotypical judgments, we rob them of the right and freedom to be themselves. If we are not able to overcome our prejudices, we will never move along with the interactive transformation process that should lead every discussion.
When we, as empathy-oriented fellow-citizens, encounter a fellow man in distress, I think that we rush to find a solution too fast. I, myself, am a typical representative of such approach. We think that we cannot finish the conversation before we have offered a ready-made solution to the other. Such pragmatic approach may have positive points. It is worth if we succeed to guide, carefully and with respect, our fellow-citizen from the difficult life situations by showing him what kind of small concrete steps he could take to gain more solid ground under his feet. In our eagerness to find a solution, we take to carry too large portion of the other person's responsibility n our own shoulders, and we do not respect the other person's integrity.
So, the solution is not the only possible outcome of the good conversation. Sometimes, the conversation itself is already enough to help, if a person feels that he have been heard and seen. When one human being in distress realises that the other human being volunteers the time to listen to him, his self-esteem can rise which may be the first step on the way to change. The story of Jesus' encounter with Zacchaeus is a very good example of this. Jesus stopped under the tree and looked at Zacchaeus who climbed up into a tree and offered to visit his home. After Jesus' visit, Zacchaeus changed so much that he was willing to make his wrong right and return to people the money he stole from them.
When we are given an opportunity to share our experiences, we are offered, at the same time, an opportunity to form a coherent story from the individual, possibly chaotic, memories and experiences. The healing effect of telling is born when the pieces, so to speak, "fall into place", or at least the will become a part of a more or less coherent life story. Also for this reason, the discussion can lead to the strengthening of the life control, even when the volume of the words does not seem to show visible results.
The second stream we can tumble into is hence a preconception that another human being is the same as me. But there is always a second stream. In that case, I assume the opposite that the other human being is completely different than me. Putting such label as "different" on another human being can happen, among other things, when we activate prejudices directed at certain groups of people in our society. For example, "Men do not know how to express the feelings" or "immigrants are lazy and simply want to enjoy our social security benefits". In a similar way, we may label others as alcoholics, hypochondriacs or unwilling to work, just like those names represent objective categories.