By Kevin J. Parker

Christianity commands love, including love of enemies, and it commands forgiveness without limit. It also insists that none of this can be done by effort alone. This is an essay about a command that arrives after a gift, and about what it asks of the people who receive it.

On a Wednesday evening in June 2015, a small group met in the fellowship hall of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to study the parable of the sower. A young white man none of them knew came in, and they made room for him. He sat with them for most of an hour. Then he drew a pistol and killed nine of them.¹

One was Ethel Lance, aged seventy. Two days later, on Friday 19 June, the man appeared by video link at a bond hearing, and the magistrate asked whether any of the families wished to speak. Lance’s daughter, Nadine Collier, went first.

“I forgive you,” she said. She told him he had taken something very precious from her: she would never talk to her mother again, never hold her again. Then she asked for mercy on his soul.²

Others followed, and several spoke of forgiveness. Felicia Sanders, whose son Tywanza had died in the hall at twenty-six, reminded him that they had welcomed him to their Bible study. She asked God to have mercy on him. She did not say that she forgave him.³

Two Christian women, one room, one command. The command is in the prayer both women had said all their lives: forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. One obeyed it within two days. The other, that morning, did not, and let what she left out say so.

Neither thought the command was optional. What separated them was a question of order: whether forgiveness is spoken first and the heart follows, or whether some words cannot be said until they are true.

Christianity is the tradition that took that difficulty and put it at the centre. It commands love, of neighbour and of enemy, and it commands forgiveness past any number a person could keep count of. Then it says, with equal force, that none of this lies in the power of the person commanded. The love must be given before it can be required. Augustine put the whole arrangement into one line of prayer: “Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt.”⁴

The command is the second word. The gift is the first.

A new commandment

Can love be ordered at all?

The Hebrew Bible had already said “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Asked for the greatest commandment, Jesus joined that line to the command to love God and called the pair the heart of the law.⁵ In John’s Gospel he goes further: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you.”⁶

The objection is old and strong. You can order someone to feed a stranger. You cannot order them to feel anything about it. Kant, reading these very passages, drew the obvious conclusion. Love as an affection, he wrote, “cannot be commanded”; what Scripture must mean is kindness done from duty, “practical love and not pathological.”⁷ On Kant’s reading the commandment survives only by ceasing to be about love.

Christianity has two replies, and they pull in different directions.

The first is Kierkegaard’s. In Works of Love he argues that the command does not embarrass love. It protects it. Love that rests on feeling rises and falls with feeling, and fails at the moment it is most needed. Love that has become a duty is secured against change. The “shall” holds what the heart, left to itself, would drop.⁸

The second is Augustine’s, and it is stranger. He agrees with Kant that no one produces love on demand. His conclusion is not that the command must mean something else, but that God must supply what God requires. When his prayer was quoted in Rome to the British monk Pelagius, Augustine later recorded, Pelagius could not bear it and nearly quarrelled with the bishop who repeated it.⁹ Pelagius held that a command must be something the commanded can do, or the moral life collapses into waiting. Augustine held that a love you could manufacture by effort would not be the love the command meant.

That quarrel has never been settled. Everything that follows sits inside it.

Which of these three

The parable of the Good Samaritan begins with a lawyer trying to settle the quarrel in his own favour. He has recited the two great commandments and been told he answered well. “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?”¹⁰

It is a lawyer’s question and a fair one. If I am commanded to love my neighbour, I need to know where the category stops. Jesus answers with a story. A man is stripped, beaten and left half dead on the road to Jericho. A priest passes by on the other side, then a Levite. A Samaritan, one of a people the lawyer’s community held in contempt, sees him and is moved; Luke’s verb is visceral, a word for a churning of the gut. He binds the wounds, carries the man to an inn and pays for his keep.¹¹

Then comes the question that turns the story round. “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”¹²

The lawyer asked who counts as a neighbour. Jesus asks who acted as one. In the Greek, which of them became neighbour. The category is not a list of people you are obliged to love. It is something you turn into, on the road, by what you do. And the one who turns into it is the outsider. The Samaritan is not the stranger to be helped. He is the stranger who helps.

Neighbour is not a list of people you are obliged to love. It is something you become on the road.

My book, The Backbone of Kindness, argues that kindness is the oldest habit of our species, and the one each age is quickest to mistake for weakness. It reads the parable as a story about who is willing to see, to stop and to act for a stranger in distress.¹³ That reading holds, as far as it goes. But the parable asks something harder. It does not only ask the lawyer to see the wounded man. It asks him to imagine the man he despises as the one who does the seeing. Asked which of the three was neighbour, the lawyer answers, “He that shewed mercy on him.” He does not say the word Samaritan.

In a study published in 1973, two Princeton psychologists, John Darley and Daniel Batson, tested the parable on the people most likely to know it. Seminary students were asked to prepare a short talk, some of them on the Good Samaritan, and sent across campus to give it. In a doorway on the route sat a man, slumped and coughing. Whether a student stopped depended much less on his religious outlook, or on his topic, than on whether he had been told he was late. Of those in no hurry, 63 per cent offered help. Of those in a great hurry, 10 per cent did. On several occasions, the authors reported, a student on his way to speak about the parable “literally stepped over the victim.”¹⁴ The sample was small, forty students, and the study has been argued over since. Its lesson survives the argument. Knowing the story is not the same as being its Samaritan.

The parable ends with an instruction, not a doctrine: “Go, and do thou likewise.”

Sun on the evil and the good

Love of neighbour can at least be read as a kind of exchange. Love of enemies cannot. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” runs the Sermon on the Mount, and the reason it gives is drawn from the weather. Be like your Father, “for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”¹⁵

The model for this love falls regardless of deserving. The Swedish theologian Anders Nygren made that the centre of Agape and Eros. Eros, in his account, is drawn by value: it loves what it finds lovely and wants it. Agapē, the love of the New Testament, is indifferent to value. It does not love because it finds worth in its object. It loves, and so confers worth.¹⁶

That cuts against almost every secular account of kindness, which begins by noticing something in the other person worth caring for. It also invites the strongest objection Christianity has ever faced. Nietzsche read the love of enemies as the trick of the powerless, impotence given a halo. “Not being able to avenge one’s self,” he wrote, “is called not wishing to avenge one’s self, perhaps even forgiveness.”¹⁷

It is a serious charge, and the best answer to it comes from the courtroom rather than from theology. Nadine Collier was not powerless. She stood in a court of law with the full weight of the state about to fall on the man in front of her, a public hearing, and every reason to curse him. Whatever she was doing, it was not making a virtue of being unable to strike back. Nietzsche would say the resentment had simply gone underground. That cannot be disproved. Neither can its opposite.

One caution about the word itself. Nygren’s contrast needs agapē to be a technical term for a distinct love, and the New Testament does not use it with that discipline. The plainest case comes at the end of John’s Gospel, where the risen Jesus asks Peter three times whether he loves him, and the Greek verbs shift. Whether the shift means anything is among the older arguments in New Testament scholarship, and it is not settled.¹⁸ What agape means in Christian ethics comes less from the word than from what the texts have it do: fall on the unjust, forgive the unforgiving, go looking for the lost.

A hazel-nut in the palm

Why love like the weather? Christianity’s answer is that this is how the one who loves was loved first.

In May 1373 a woman in Norwich, thirty and a half and believed to be dying, received the last rites and then a series of visions. We know her as Julian, probably after the church in whose cell she later lived. In one vision she was shown “a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball.” She asked what it was and was told: “It is all that is made.” She marvelled that anything so small could last, and was answered: “It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it.”¹⁹

Everything that exists, on this account, is held in being by a love it did nothing to earn. The hazelnut does not deserve its keeping. It is kept.

That is the ground beneath the commandments. “We love him, because he first loved us,” says the First Letter of John. Paul makes the order explicit: God’s love is shown “in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”²⁰ The gift comes before any merit. The command to love the undeserving is an instruction to pass on what one has already received, on the same terms.

Julian followed the logic further than her church was comfortable with. She could find no wrath in God, and concluded that God, strictly speaking, does not forgive, because God is never offended in the first place: “our Lord God, anent Himself may not forgive, for He may not be wroth.”²¹ Forgiveness, on her account, is something creatures need, because only creatures take offence.

Which brings us back to the courtroom.

The seam

Here this essay parts company with my book.

Christianity makes forgiveness a condition, not a courtesy. The Lord’s Prayer asks to be forgiven “as we forgive our debtors,” and Matthew’s Gospel adds a gloss that leaves no room: “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” When Peter asks whether seven times is enough, Jesus answers with a number meant to end the counting: seventy times seven in the King James Version, seventy-seven in many modern ones. The Greek allows either.²²

The Backbone of Kindness says otherwise. Its chapter on the fractured world argues that kindness across difference does not require forgiveness, and that demanding forgiveness of people who have been harmed adds a second injury to the first: the denial that their pain is legitimate.²³ On the book’s account, Felicia Sanders’ silence that morning was not a failure of kindness. It may have been its honest edge.

I still hold that. But the tradition’s case deserves its full strength, and it is stronger than the book allows.

First, Christian forgiveness at its best is not what the book fears. It is not pardon, which belongs to courts, and it is not reconciliation, which needs two parties. Nadine Collier’s forgiveness asked for no charge to be dropped, and none was. It released her from a debt she might otherwise have carried for life. It released him from nothing the law required.

Second, the book leans on Hannah Arendt for its account of forgiveness as the faculty that lets human affairs begin again. Arendt said plainly where she found the idea. “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs,” she wrote, “was Jesus of Nazareth.”²⁴ The book’s secular authority was drawing on the very source the book resists.

Third, the command is addressed to the one who forgives, for that person’s sake as much as the offender’s. That is the tradition’s answer to the charge of a second injury: resentment left to itself becomes a second captivity, and the command is a door held open, not a debt collected.

I cannot dismiss that reply. Nor can I accept what follows from it, that the mother who did not forgive that morning was falling short. The disagreement is real. Christianity holds that forgiveness is owed as surely as love is, and that grace will supply it to those who cannot yet give it. The book holds that some things cannot be owed, only given, and that no one may collect them on another’s behalf. Both positions were in the room in Charleston, held by two women of the same church.

The command is the second word. The gift is the first.

The shadows

The parable of the Good Samaritan casts a long shadow, and its readers cast it.

For centuries Christian preaching read the priest and the Levite as figures for Judaism: men so bound by rules of ritual purity that they would leave a dying man rather than risk touching a corpse. The Samaritan became grace, and the passers-by became the Law. A story told to break down contempt for one outsider was turned into a warrant for contempt of another.

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, has spent years taking that reading apart. The purity explanation, she argues, does not hold on the text’s own terms. And it misses what a first-century Jewish audience would have heard: priest, Levite and then, they would expect, an ordinary Israelite, with the pattern broken by the arrival of the enemy. The shock of the story was never that the religious failed. It was that the despised one saved.²⁵

The same slide threatens every argument that sets grace against law, including this one. It is easy to make the gift-then-command shape of Christian love look finer by setting it beside a caricature of obedience that is only obedience. Christianity did that for most of its history, and for Jews in Christian lands the cost was never only theological.

The second shadow falls nearer the courtroom. A tradition that makes forgiveness a duty will be tempted to demand it of the people least able to give it, and to hear its absence as a spiritual fault. Within a week of the Charleston hearing the writer Roxane Gay, while honouring the families, asked why forgiveness had become the story so quickly, and why it was so welcome to so many who had not been harmed.²⁶ The families did not ask to be made into a lesson in grace. Others made them one.

Coda

What does Christianity think kindness is? Love given first and commanded second. A gift handed on, on the terms on which it was received: to the undeserving, the enemy included, and without keeping count.

What does it think kindness costs? The ledger. The right to decide who has earned your care, the comfort of a grievance kept, and at the last the pride that would rather earn than receive.

What does it think kindness is for? Likeness. To become like the giver, the Father who sends rain on the just and the unjust. And, in the parable’s plainer words, to become neighbour.

On the night of 17 June, the passage open on the table in the fellowship hall was the parable of the sower. Seed falls on the path, on stony ground, among thorns, and on good ground. Nadine Collier’s forgiveness came up in two days. What came up in Felicia Sanders, and when, is hers to say.

The parable does not rank the good ground by its speed. It says only that it bears fruit, “some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some an hundred.”²⁷