The Neighbor Within Reach
We approach elections carrying concerns about our families, our communities, and the future of our country. We have judgments about what needs to change and whom we can trust. As citizens, we also have responsibilities. How should we approach them as Christians?
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus gives us a place to begin.
The rich man is clothed in purple and fine linen. He feasts every day. Lazarus lies outside his gate, hungry and covered with sores. The gate separates abundance from deprivation, but it also reveals how close these men are. Lazarus is within reach.
We are not told what the rich man thought about poverty, how he explained Lazarus’s circumstances, or whether he considered himself generous. We know that he feasted while Lazarus went hungry at his gate.
It is possible to have strong opinions about suffering while becoming accustomed to the suffering person nearby. We can explain the problem, assign responsibility, and describe what someone else ought to do. Meanwhile, Lazarus still suffers.
Christian citizenship begins with learning to recognize a neighbor. Love gives our civic action its purpose; prudence helps us choose how to act; responsibility requires us to act and answer for the consequences.
The people affected by our decisions are persons made in the image of God. They have names, families, fears, and hopes. Their lives matter beyond how well their stories serve as evidence for our arguments.
This includes people suffering material deprivation, as Lazarus did. It also includes those burdened by loneliness, estrangement, illness, and despair. It includes people whose troubles we struggle to understand—and people whose political judgments we struggle to bear.
Love as an Examination of Conscience
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul describes gifts that anyone might admire: eloquence, knowledge, faith, and extraordinary generosity. Without love, even these amount to nothing.
We can understand a great deal and still fail to love. We can make sacrifices and still fail to love. We can give away everything we possess and still fail to love. The effort devoted to acquiring knowledge and cultivating discipline does not guarantee that we are using those gifts well. We can even turn them toward harmful ends.
Applied to politics, this should make us cautious about treating the strength of our convictions or our ability to defend them as evidence of spiritual health.
We may have studied the issues, identified a real injustice, and developed good reasons for our judgments. We must still ask what is happening in our hearts as we speak and act.
Saint Paul says that love is patient and kind. Does that describe the way we discuss public affairs? He says that love is neither arrogant nor rude. Does that describe how we treat people who disagree with us?
Love does not rejoice at wrong. Can we resist taking pleasure in someone’s disgrace because that person belongs to the other side? Can we acknowledge wrongdoing when it comes from someone we support?
These questions belong in our examination of conscience. If we approach them with a willingness to learn and repent, they can help us grow in wisdom and prudence.
Prudence Takes Consequences Seriously
Prudence is the discipline of discerning what love requires here and now, with these actual people, under these particular circumstances. It brings our moral commitments into contact with the world in which we must act.
Our obligation to care for the hungry is clear. Which policies will best relieve hunger requires further judgment about circumstances, institutions, and consequences. Some proposals are better supported than others, and some means are themselves unjust. Invoking compassion does not settle those questions; invoking complexity does not excuse us from answering them.
This helps explain why faithful Christians may disagree about a policy while sharing a commitment to the people it is meant to serve. Such disagreements call for careful inquiry. We need to examine the strength of the arguments, the evidence supporting them, and the moral character of the proposed means.
If we want to help our neighbors—and as Christians we must—we have to take the consequences of our decisions seriously. Is a proposed remedy likely to work? Who will benefit? Who may be harmed? What have we overlooked? What evidence would lead us to reconsider?
The warmth of our feelings cannot answer these questions. Good intentions are a beginning, but love demands that we keep learning. We must learn from our mistakes and acknowledge how little we may understand about other people, their needs, and the workings of the institutions we hope will serve them.
This requires humility. None of us understands everything. No candidate possesses every virtue. No party perfectly expresses the will of God. Every human institution needs correction, and every one of us needs repentance.
Yet we still have to act. Uncertainty cannot become a permanent excuse for avoiding responsibility.
Humility helps us carry that responsibility honestly. We make the best judgment we can with the knowledge available to us, while remaining willing to recognize and correct our mistakes. We should be prepared to discover that we were less right than we thought—and that someone else was less wrong.
Responsibility Beyond the Voting Booth
In a democracy, we share in decisions that shape other people’s lives. That is a serious trust. Our votes, our speech, our service, and our willingness to hold leaders accountable all have moral weight. We should bring our Christian convictions into these responsibilities. Mercy, justice, truthfulness, and respect for human life belong in the voting booth. They must also shape what we do when we leave it.
An election does not discharge our responsibility to Lazarus. Supporting a public program does not relieve us of the duty to be generous with our own time and possessions. And that goes both ways; practicing personal charity does not relieve us of the duty to consider whether our public arrangements treat people justly. Our neighbors need us to take both responsibilities seriously.
This work continues when the people we supported take office. Loyalty cannot excuse us from examining their conduct or the consequences of their policies. The same concern for our neighbors that informed our vote should inform our willingness to both offer encouragement and demand correction.
Government and the Limits of Politics
We also need a sound understanding of what government can accomplish and what we are asking it to carry. Government can restrain wrongdoing, protect the vulnerable, and help establish conditions in which families and communities can flourish. Its failures can cause terrible suffering. So can its abuses of power and its attempts to require what conscience forbids.
Following St. Paul’s first letter to St. Timothy, we pray every morning and at every Divine Liturgy that the Lord would strengthen our civil authorities so that it might provide a safe place for us to pursue perfection (1 Timothy 2:1–4). This is the basis of our political theology. The government’s failures, to include those times it oversteps its proper bounds and acts in accordance with anti-Orthodox ethics, can cause terrible suffering. These things matter.
The government, and thus politics, are important, but we ask too much of politics when we expect it to give us our ultimate identity, secure our hope, or overcome the brokenness of the human heart.
Our hope, for ourselves, our nation, and the world, is in Jesus Christ. He heals our estrangement from God and from one another. In His Church, through prayer, repentance, the sacraments, and the daily practice of mercy, we learn to receive His life and share it.
This should make us more faithful in our civic duties. It should also free us from the desperation that treats every political opponent as an enemy and every political victory as deliverance.
After an election, we will still need to pray for those who govern, speak truthfully, resist injustice, and love our neighbors. We will still need to repent.
And Lazarus will still have a name.
Hearing the Word and Acting on It
At the end of the parable, the rich man asks that his brothers receive an extraordinary warning. Abraham answers that they already have Moses and the prophets. They must listen to them.
We, too, have been given the word of God. We have heard that love is patient and kind, that knowledge and sacrifice are empty without love. We have been shown a hungry man lying at a gate.
The question is whether we will allow what we have received to shape our lives.
As we exercise our citizenship, let us ask God for wisdom to judge carefully, courage to accept responsibility, and humility to receive correction. These virtues grow through practice, including our response to the neighbor, like Lazarus, who is already within reach.
We can learn his name and listen to his story. We can share our time and attention, offer practical help, and sit and pray with them in their suffering. We can make clear through our actions that we see this person’s pain and desire their peace and salvation.
May the love we proclaim become the love our neighbors actually receive.