Neil Darragh describes how our understanding of Scripture can deepen our love of Earth.

The Season of Creation is intended as a time when we deliberately make connections between our interpretation of Scripture and our awareness of “creation”. We have an inherited problem in making these connections because our traditional ways of reading Scripture have commonly been focused through the lens of personal spirituality (what does this say to me?), the Church, or social justice/peace. It takes some reconfiguring of our brains to see what impact Scripture, especially the New Testament, could have on our attitudes towards the Earth.

As an example, we can use the passage in Luke’s Gospel about “eternal life” and the commandment of love (Luke 10:25-42). The idea of eternal life and the commandment of love are central to New Testament teaching so this seems a good place to start.

Eternal Life and the Commandment of Love

A lawyer asks Jesus: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’s response is: “What do you read in the Law?” And the lawyer’s answer, approved by Jesus, is essentially, "Love God and love your neighbour". So far so good. We’ve all heard a multitude of homilies and talks on this. Yet the lawyer wants to take it further: so, what does this really mean in practice? In response, Luke gives us two stories, one a parable — the “good Samaritan” story — and the other an interaction between Jesus and his friends Martha and Mary.

The good Samaritan story, at its most obvious level, demonstrates that the commandment of love is fulfilled by actions which come to the aid of a person in serious need, a victim. This is an act of compassion. It is an action rather than a feeling — a thought or an intention.

By contrast, the story of Martha and Mary demonstrates love as listening — “sitting at the feet of” the teacher. Martha, in looking after her visitors in a very practical way, is essentially, though less intensely, doing the same as the good Samaritan — looking after other people’s needs. What Mary illustrates is the complementary side of such loving action. It takes listening, meditation, reflection to know what a loving action is (as distinct from, for example, thoughtless, self-motivated, intrusive, arrogant, or insensitive action). We have all had experience of people who want to do us good but haven’t listened to us and so get it all wrong. And the history of the mission of the Church is strewn with the skeletons of good intentions gone wrong. Active compassion requires meditative listening and vice versa.

Going Deeper: a Second Level

The interpretation above is the most obvious level at which Luke’s two stories operate as messages for us. But there is a deeper level in both of them. In both cases, there is a “shock” component which shifts us to another level of interpretation.

In the good Samaritan parable, the shock component is that it is a Samaritan, not a Jew, who lives out the commandment of love. How did this reversal of race get in here? Jesus is here confronting what was apparently widespread in his time — the racism inherent in his own Jewish culture. How could an inferior Samaritan be held up as an example of love and an inheritor of eternal life? In this parable, it is not just personal behaviour, but racism that is being confronted. The parable confronts a deeply embedded attitude in society — an attitude that is gravely at odds with the realm of God which Jesus is promoting.

In the story of Martha and Mary, a similarly deep social attitude is confronted. Luke gives us plenty of clues to look deeper at subconscious attitudes which contradict the evolving realm of God. The actors in the good Samaritan parable are all men. The actors in the story of Martha and Mary, with the exception of Jesus, are women. Jesus’s taking the side of Mary, in the altercation between Martha and Mary strikes most of us as unfair. This is the “shock” component that shifts our reading of the story to a new level. Martha is doing all the work while Mary idles about. Yet the key point here is not so much in Mary’s apparent idleness, but in Martha’s attempt to prevent Mary from playing a different role, ie, paying attention to the teacher. Martha is doing culturally approved women’s work and expects Mary to do the same. But Mary is playing the part of a disciple — “sitting at the feet of Jesus” and “listening”. The work of attentive listening is not to be left to the male disciples. (See Kathleen Rushton’s more extensive interpretation of this story in TM Issue 272 July 2022.)

These stories operate, then, at two levels: a) a personal level (act with compassion but combine this with attentive listening); b) a sociological level that confronts deeply embedded cultural attitudes (racism and sexism are incompatible with the realm of God). That the early Christian Church understood these messages is evident in the fact that they baptised people of any ethnicity (not just Jewish) and they baptised women as well as men. Neither race nor gender was a barrier to belonging in the Christian community.

Going Deep: a Third Level

Yet there is a third level of messaging in these two stories about eternal life and the practice of love, which was perhaps not obvious to the early Christian community. Reading the Scriptures today involves applying their messages to the issues of our own time and place. Today, the third level “shock” component here as we read these stories does not come directly from within the written Bible itself but from its later continuing history. The new shock was the 20th-century confrontation for Scripture readers that we professed to believe in a Creator God yet we were vandalising God’s creation.

The parable of the good Samaritan is about a compassionate response to a victim of violence. We know now that human beings are not the only victims of human violence. Many of the non-human species and processes of Earth have also been victims of senseless human violence and human prejudice. The story of Martha and Mary is about the value of listening and gender equality. Mary paid attention to (listened to and looked at) the divine presence in the voice and face of a human being, Jesus. It is a relatively small step from there to learn to pay attention to the voice and face of God in every created being. This is a third level of interpretation of these two stories. We need to undertake this third level just as much as the previous two levels so that we, too, may become inheritors of eternal life and practitioners of the commandment of love.

We cannot do this kind of interpretation with all passages in the Bible. We need to tread warily because turning every biblical text into an occasion for saying something about ecology is just as bad, or perhaps worse, than assuming there is nothing (or practically nothing) there. Yet there are many passages where an alertness to their impact on our behaviour towards Earth adds a neglected depth to both our understanding of Scripture and our attitude to Earth.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 274 September 2022: 4-5