Who Are These People?

The scriptures referred to are 2 Corinthians 5:6-17.

Some of the most horrifying parts of the recent pandemic were the decisions some doctors had to make when faced with more patients that needed respirators than the number of respirators on hand at their medical facility. Should they try to save younger people rather than those whose age was near or exceeding life expectancy? Should they try to figure out which patients they could help and which would die anyway? Should they choose to save a sick colleague over a person who seems to have a lower value to society? In medicine we swear an oath to do no harm and to treat all who come to us for help. This last year was a nightmare for all but especially for doctors and nurses.

But why? From a purely rational and scientific perspective, we know that all living beings die. Why should their age or manner of death bother us? On average, more than 150,000 people die everyday. The so-called “great men” of history have slaughtered millions. Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees, our closest relatives, go to war against each other and even resort to cannibalism at times. We too kill and we too die. We can at best delay death. But why should we? What makes humans so special?

For an answer, let's start with today's passage from 2 Corinthians. Paul says, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.” What does he mean by that?

In the very first chapter of the very first book in the Bible we are told “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27) And the importance of that is empathized in the very first covenant God makes. Just 8 chapters after we told that God made us in his image, we are told that murder is wrong for that very reason. (Genesis 9:6)

So because of that alone, we should not look upon anyone as “merely human.” That's why when asked for the greatest commandment, Jesus threw in the second one, the one about loving your neighbor as yourself. Everyone is made in God's image and should not be treated as less than that.

Yet we humans love to reduce complex things to something simpler. And we do that to people.

We reduce some to stereotypes. We pigeonhole people according to categories based on external features, like ethnicity or race or language or religion or sex. We put all such people in a nice neat box, even if sometimes we really have to work hard because reality resists fitting in nice neat boxes. But that's easier than recognizing the complexity of every single person.

We reduce some people to tools. In other words, we see them only as they relate to us and benefit us. So rather than loving them as people, we use them as if they were our servants or as if they were apps designed to help us with some task. We may order them around or manipulate them to do what we want. What we often don't do is consider that they have lives and needs of their own and ask, with no strings attached, if they simply want to help us. The ironic thing is most people do like to be helpful. But they also want to be acknowledged and appreciated for what they do and who they are. And, if they are your employees, they want to be properly compensated.

We reduce some folks to annoyances. Again, this comes from only considering people on the basis of how they relate to us. We act as if people who are in our way, who are hindering us from doing what we want, who are slowing us down, or who making things difficult for us, are doing so just to annoy us. We don't stop to think of other reasons they may be acting as they do or that (GASP!) it may have absolutely nothing at all to do with us. The car that breaks down in your lane wasn't thinking of you when it did it. Why do we assume that everyone whose personal problem becomes our problem has anything against us?

We reduce some people to enemies. And sometimes there is enmity towards us. But we assume it's totally without cause, as if comic book nemeses actually existed in the real world. But generally there is a reason. It may not be a good one. Maybe you were an annoyance to them and that got inflated in their mind and you got promoted to enemy. Maybe they had a conflict with someone like you and overgeneralized their anger to all people who are like you. But maybe they have a genuine beef with you.

Right now in the Middle East there are lots of conflicts on which both sides have genuine reasons to be angry with each other. Anyone who thinks either the Palestinians or the Israelis are evil or innocent doesn't understand the problems involved. Both sides have real grievances and neither side is blameless. But it doesn't help to reduce one side to the good guys and the other to the bad guys. For one thing, they are way more complex than that. They are human beings, not characters in a Victorian melodrama. For another thing, if you reduce one side to irredeemably evil villains, you will never be able to sit down with them and resolve the problems you both have. Which, after lots of people have been killed, is how all wars end anyway. There is no magic glove whose fingers you can snap to make all your enemies disappear. Eventually you will have to figure out how to live together. And the problems you didn't resolve before the war will still be there and will probably have been made a lot worse.

Oversimplifying humans is, ironically, a common human habit. It's behind racism, sexism, ageism, and every kind of “ism.” Yet Paul doesn't refer to the fact that each and every one of us is made in God's image. Instead he says, “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one died for all...” The Gentile Christians to which he wrote may not immediately have thought of the Jewish idea that we are all made in God's image. But they wouldn't be Christians if they didn't believe that Jesus died for them. However if they thought he died just for them, they wouldn't have a reason to care about all human beings. They could just feel that they were the elect, the favored ones. But Paul points out that Jesus “died for all.” So while not everyone is your brother or sister in Christ, everyone could be. Jesus died for them all and loves them all and that should guide how you treat them.

You can be a citizen of an earthly nation by accident of birth. Nobody is a native-born citizen of the kingdom of God. Even if you were born into a Christian family, there comes a time when you have to decide for yourself if you are actually going to commit yourself to following Jesus. So all of us were outsiders, aliens whom God graciously accepted into his kingdom. And anyone you meet could be as well.

That is why we do not look at anyone from a human point of view. They are not either extras or supporting characters or villains in our story. They are real, whole human beings, all created in God's image and everyone of them is someone Jesus shed his blood and died for. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” Who knows how they will appear to us when we are with Christ at last and see them glorified by him?

Paul then says something very interesting: “even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.” In other words, there may have been a time when we first learned of Jesus and thought of him as just a really good human being, a wise person who said some stuff we like and agree with. But, as happened with the disciples, when we really got to know him, we realized that we originally conceived of him in a very reductionist way. Socrates, Buddha, Mohammed, Marcus Aurelius, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, Gandhi, C.S. Lewis and others also said some very profound things. But they were ultimately human beings and not gods. They may have been good; they were not perfect. They all died but not as a sacrifice for the whole world. And none of them rose again. Nor are their teachings dependent upon their being raised from the dead.

But Jesus is different. Our faith in him definitely depends on his self-sacrificial death and resurrection. Without it, his ethics make no sense. Why turn the other cheek, why love your enemies, why deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus if there is no life beyond this one? Why treat others as you would like to be treated rather than treat them exactly as they treat you? Why not be like Jeffrey Epstein and get all the money and sex you can and then end your life when it looks like you are going to pay the price—if there is no resurrection and no last judgment, not to mention no having to live with what you have become for all eternity?

Paul said it: “If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.” (1 Corinthians 15:32) Because if the dead are not raised then neither was Jesus. And that means the disciples were all either liars or lunatics to proclaim his resurrection. And if liars, then stupid ones because following Jesus got them all killed as well. And if lunatics, then unique ones who somehow all had the same hallucinations. Which all ceased on the fortieth day afterwards, with a shared hallucination of him ascending into heaven. And as a former psychiatric nurse, let me tell you: that is not how psychosis works. A psychiatrist once took 3 patients who all claimed to be Jesus Christ and put them together. There was no meeting of minds. Sometimes they came to blows. In the end, each thought the other two were nuts. The psychiatrist, Milton Rokeach, did not cure them. But, he said, “It cured me of my godlike delusion that I could manipulate them out of their beliefs.” So much for psychotics harmonizing their delusions.

If the disciples weren't liars or lunatics, what was Jesus? A liar who was dumb enough not to tell the truth when the lies could get him killed? A lunatic who was somehow coherent and showed good social skills? A narcissistic cult leader who totally missed the part of the scam where you use your power to get rich, have sex with your followers and let everyone else die and not just yourself? Jesus told the officials who came to arrest him, “If you are looking for me, let these men go.” (John 18:8) Jim Jones didn't do that. David Koresh didn't do that. Instead Jesus put others' lives before his own.

Weirdly, the most reasonable solution to the dilemma of who Jesus was is that he was who he said he was: the Son of God, the way, the truth, the resurrection and the life. Which means he is all of those things still. And if Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the be-all and end-all of existence, then we can still depend on him. His ethics make sense. People make sense. Because we have been given godlike qualities which enable us to shape the world and society in huge ways. And yet we use those powers to do great harm to the world, to others and to ourselves. In Jesus we see the true image of God in action.

It's human to reduce others to neat one-dimensional caricatures of humans. Which makes it easier to dismiss them. But Jesus shows us a whole new dimension to humans. We are not merely, as Shakespeare called us, “the paragon of animals.” We are not simply created in the image of God. We are people God loves so much that he sent his Son to restore that image in us, even at the cost of his lifeblood. You are someone Jesus loved enough to die for. As is the person next to you. As is the person next to them. As is the person seated in front of you and behind you. As is every person outside that church door.

Let's act like it.