Matthew 25:40 and Connections

 (Some parts of this presuppose my previous entry.)

I have been trying to make sense out of the Book of Matthew and I might communicate my thoughts about it later. Trying to forget the heat in my non-airconditioned place, I also did something dangerous for mental health this morning: checked the news (usually AP).  Some unusual reporting there, an article about a textile worker also suffering in the heat. There used to textile workers in my home region of Kentucky, but those jobs were “outsourced.” The article reported on a man named Sibaram Pradhan, a 35-year-old textile worker who left his home in Odisha and traveled about 2,000 kilometers to Surat in western India to find work. Farming in his home region has become increasingly difficult because of floods, cyclones, and unreliable weather, so he supports his family by working in a large textile factory. He lives in a crowded dormitory with many other migrant workers, sharing a small room with up to nine men. The building houses hundreds of workers, and many people share only a few toilets. The rooms are hot and poorly ventilated, and he often wakes several times during the night because of the heat. During the day he works twelve-hour shifts supervising textile machines that weave polyester fabric. The factory is extremely noisy, hot, and humid. He spends much of the day drenched in sweat while moving between machines, replacing spools of thread, and watching for problems. The work requires constant attention because accidents can happen when workers become tired, and injuries to hands and fingers are not uncommon. Despite the long hours, he earns only a modest wage, much of which he sends home to his wife and two children. Although the work allows him barely to support his family, he hopes his children will have different opportunities. He wants them to stay in school and find safer, more secure jobs so that they will not have to endure the same hardships he faces every day. Well, I did’t feel like whining about the lack of AC after reading this.

 

     Reading the news is dangerous because it inevitably leads to a further breakdown of my defense mechanisms, and I think about the heat wave now (global warming / cars, computers, planes, etc.); the mention the phenomenal corruption of the current administration, it’s attempts to install a pop-fascist regime, and the rise of populist-fascist movements all over the place: the cruelty to suffering people who immigrate; I just wrote of the fate of the animals under human control; at another level, working people put through “austerity” for the sake of "growth" i.e. the getting bigger of the gigantic piles of money that are multinational corporations and the billionaires who control them; the never-ending Russian war to colonize Ukraine; a UN report on the horrors inflicted on the children of  Gaza by the Israeli military/government, supported by American tax dollars (and all the other dead children and innocents everywhere in that cursed part of the world – the girls school in Iran). Etc. It’s just overwhelming. I want to crawl back into my little world and forget it all so that I can do something life-affirming with this day.

 

    What does this have to do with Matthew? One passage: What you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me (Matthew 25:40-45).  That passage might be the most powerful in the Bible. In any book. Ever thought. What does it mean practically?

. . .

 

     I want to make a point but for myself need to lay out the theological background, grossly over-simplified. In Judeo-Christian understanding (not, interestingly, in Islam, which insists on the complete otherness of Creator and Creature, as I understand it) the human being (Adam) is created in the image of God. Obviously, not in a physical sense as God is not a physical creature. The imago Dei (image of God) means that creatures uniquely participate in divine life through their capacity for truth, freedom, love, and relationship with God, Creation, and other people.

The imago Dei is both a gift and a vocation: every person possesses an inherent dignity that transcends utility or social status but is also called to become more fully what he or she already is through participation in truth, goodness, and divine love. The doctrine means that every human being is more than a biological organism, consumer, worker, citizen, or social role; each person bears a depth and sacredness that points beyond the finite world toward God. In my words, drawing on a long tradition of interpretation, I am an image of God in that I share God’s being (finitely): I have the potential to understand and to love. Sin, which, restricting the concept to self, is to say, separation, disconnection, alienation from this capacity, my ego-consciousness in other words, darkens the image but cannot destroy it. In Christian thought, Jesus is the perfect image of God, the perfect Adam.

    And now the radicality of Matthew 25:40 bites: what you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me, to Christ, to God. You cut yourself off from God by cutting yourself off from other human beings, from textile workers like Sibaram Pradhan. We’re connected in reality even if we are blind to it in this life due to the wounded relationship. Christ is thus present – however darkened – in the face of every suffering human being. However much you train yourself to try to see Christ/God in the face of others, suffering or not, you can never succeed. It is the relation of the circles we draw to the ideal geometrical circle that judges all real circles, which necessarily fall short. But you can try to get better, if you take that image seriously, which I guess few do, few can. Not sure I can or do.

    There are secular ways to express solidarity with other human beings, but I will just assert they wouldn’t be fully intelligible with something like this theological background.

 

      This is theology. It is abstract, a mere skeleton without the flesh of experience.  Consider a few examples in addition to the AP reporting.

 

A dying parent with advanced dementia no longer remembers your name, cannot reason coherently, contributes nothing economically, and may not even recognize his own children. Yet many people who love him – and that love can be the love of a saint as well as a family member – experience a powerful conviction that he remains someone to whom reverence is due. Not merely a living organism, but someone. The dignity seems to survive the collapse of the very capacities often cited as constitutive of personhood. That experience is one place where many encounter what Christians mean by the image of God.

 

Or the moment in Dead Man Walking that has moved so many readers and viewers. A murderer awaiting execution has committed terrible crimes and appears to have forfeited his humanity. Yet Sister Helen continues to address him as a person whose worth has not been exhausted by his deeds. She does not deny his unimaginable guilt. Rather, she refuses to identify him completely with it. Something remains that deserves love even there. That "something" is very close to what the tradition is trying to express.

 

One sees a photograph of a wounded child in a war zone. What is striking is not merely that suffering is occurring. Animals suffer too. Rather, one experiences the suffering as a violation, as though something sacred were being desecrated. The response is not only pity but a sense that "this should not happen to a being like this." The language of rights, utility, or social contracts often seems too thin to capture the depth of the reaction.

 

Primo Levi's account of Auschwitz is another negative revelation of the imago Dei, perhaps the most moving I know of. The camp did not merely inflict suffering or death; it systematically sought to strip away everything associated with personhood. Prisoners were reduced to numbers, deprived of names, possessions, families, privacy, meaningful work, and even the ability to care adequately for their own bodies. Just too terrible to imagine. Hunger, exhaustion, fear, and humiliation became instruments of domination. The aim was not simply to kill but to transform persons into things to make the killing industrial. Yet Levi's testimony is filled with moments in which humanity reappears: a shared piece of bread, a remembered poem, an act of kindness, the refusal to betray another prisoner. These moments matter because they reveal something the camp could not completely extinguish. From the perspective of the imago Dei, Auschwitz represents denial the sacred worth of the human person, while the survival of compassion, memory, and moral responsibility testifies to a dignity that persists even amid radical degradation.

 

And then there is the Cross, which is also a revelation. It says something sublime about human worth. Christianity claims that God identifies himself not with the successful, healthy, beautiful, and powerful, but with a tortured, humiliated, abandoned victim. That is why the Cross and Matthew 25:40 belong together. If Christ is found in the crucified one, then the image of God is revealed not only in human excellence but also in human vulnerability. A healthy child running through a field bears the image of God. So does the dying prisoner. So does the refugee. So does the lonely elderly woman in a nursing home.

So does the person who has become dependent, confused, frightened, and weak. The image is not what remains after suffering is removed. It is what suffering cannot finally destroy. The image of God is disclosed whenever a human being appears to us as more than a thing, more than a function, more than a role, more than an “identity,” as someone whose reality exceeds every description, whose worth cannot be measured, and whose suffering feels like a wound in the fabric of the world itself. The theology is rooted in our deepest experiences. In the Christian story, that image is revealed most fully not in triumph but in the face of the crucified Christ, who identifies himself with "the least of these." (Aristotle, Nietzsche, others would find this slave morality.)

 

     There is also a quieter side of the imago Dei, which appears in moments that have nothing directly to do with suffering: a father watching his sons sleep, a student suddenly grasping a difficult idea, a Bach fugue, a line of Dostoevsky that sheds light on one's life, a walk through woods at dusk, gratitude that seems larger than any object for which one is grateful. In such moments one senses not merely survival but participation in truth, beauty, and love. These, too, are traces of the image of God, for they reveal the soul's orientation toward realities that transcend utility and self-interest. They remind us not only what human beings must be protected from, but what they are for and why it matters that the image of God in us gets darkened.

 

Any instance of lucid, non-sentimental love reveals the image of God, whatever that mystery amounts to. Otherwise, as science assures us, we would be nothing more than a collection of elements obeying bio-chemical and physical laws, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound of fury, signifying nothing.

 

. . .

 

     Back to the common experience I suffered through this morning – being overwhelmed by all the evils of the world of which one senses one is somehow a part of without being able to do much of anything about them, so blocking them out to function and even to preserve some sense of the love of life and the world, of joy. For me, space for my children, philosophy, teaching, literature, enjoying food, a Sunday nap, the beauties of nature that still remain, friends, less walking these days due to my health but maybe one day that again.

 

    It is hard not to connect the evils I mentioned, among many others, to the structure of whatever global capitalism has mutated into. It is not a matter of whether markets or property are useful, of whether some real human goods are being produced in this system, or of going back the socialism that existed in the USSR. Markets are useful as long as they stay in the marketplace and don’t take over the whole city including the family.  Property is human in the form of, say a family farm; it means something totally different when we’re talking about controlling a huge share of stock in a giant tech corporation. I am talking about the real-existing system behind all the evils I mentioned above, from the heating up of the earth to the oppression of working people to the corruptions of politics to the horrors inflicted on animals to the to the pollution of the oceans to the loss of topsoil to the immiseration of perhaps billions of human beings. And people who have carved out a decent life in this system, as I have, are at some level implicated in it, by choice, against one’s will, mostly blindly, thoughtlessly. Which brings me to the powerful passage in Matthew: 19:40. And to the Psalm de profundis. Hyper-moralism?

 

. . .

 

      What you do to the least of your brethren, you do to me. Globalization has made visible connections that were invisible to previous generations. The Indian textile worker, the child in Gaza, the migrant at a border, the elderly person living alone in Berlin, the sweatshop worker making electronics, the victims of climate change all can suddenly appear as neighbors. The difficulty is that Matthew 25:40 was written for creatures with finite powers but infinite responsibilities. We can now know about suffering on a planetary scale while remaining unable to do much about most of it. Which creates a moral burden unknown to earlier ages. Overwhelming.

    There is a distinction between responsibility and culpability. We may have some responsibility toward a suffering child in Gaza or an suffering worker in South Asia, but we are not equally culpable for that suffering. We may be entangled in structures that contribute to exploitation, but that does not make us morally identical to those who designed, profit from, or deliberately perpetuate those structures.

    One reason Christians developed doctrines about sin, prudence, vocation, and limits was precisely because otherwise Matthew 25:40 becomes psychologically unbearable. The point is not that we are guilty of every suffering we cannot prevent or are implicated in. The point is, I think, that our relation to God (or the Good) cannot be separated from our relation to the vulnerable. Simone Weil knew that no individual can answer all the world's suffering. The obligation is absolute; our capacity is not. Wendell Berry argues that our responsibilities are universal but our actions must be local. We are responsible for the whole world in one sense, but we can only faithfully act within particular relationships, places, and communities. And yet my purchase of the shirt I can afford draws Sibaram Pradhan into my world.

 

. . .

 

    I think of another important very in Matthew – 19:24:  And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.  The rich young man who occasioned this wisdom is not condemned for personal cruelty. His wealth itself has become a barrier. The camel and the eye of the needle should be disturbing because riches are form of spiritual blindness. One begins to live protected from the realities of others. That is the fuel that drives capitalism. In that sense Matthew 19 and Matthew 25 belong together. The one concerns the effects of too much money on the soul; the other concerns the blindness to the suffering of Christ in the other.

       To me – perhaps there is better perspective – no one who takes these truths seriously can think that global capitalism, or whatever label one attaches to this complex, mutating creature of Mammon, is anything in overall tendency but a systematic desecration, a reduction of any and everything naturally good. Christians who do not oppose it are either blind, or ignorant, in the grip of a powerful ideology, or hypocrites. I see no rational way to affirm it as it is. Perhaps it can be tame and brought under rational, political, moral control. Perhaps he needs to go the way of the socialism of the USSR. In any case, the problem is not commerce per se but the subordination of all other goods to commerce, to the enrichment and political power of the 1% at the expense of the world and the Creation.

     What about this argument. Some of the goods I cherish have themselves depended, in part, on the very system I condemn. Reading presupposes books, which presupposes a certain kind of economy. (Of course, socialism produced book, more affordable ones too. Just the damn censor.) In raising my children I benefit from a very good infrastructure here in Potsdam, much better than pre-industrial ones. Again, the best socialist economies, even the bad ones under Soviet domination, had a passable infrastructure.  I suppose having access to the medical care that has kept me alive through several recent setbacks is the main thing I have for this system, which used to be somewhat tamed in Germany to the benefit of people who work for a living. A defender of the present capitalist system would ask: "Would this life have been available to an ordinary person in 1300? 1700? 1850?" The answer is probably not. That doesn’t refute my criticism but it does introduce an element of tragedy, the prospect of losing genuine goods to save even more fundamental ones. The same industrial order that produces sweatshops also produces antibiotics. The same globalization that exploits workers also reduced certain forms of poverty in parts of Asia. These benefits have come at too high a cost and I think most can be preserved in a more decent economy, but one must acknowledge this. But no benefit justifies evil done. I recall I have heard people defending Hitler by saying he built the autobahn, gave the unemployed work and allowed Germans to feel national pride again – yes, all the glorious pride parades. I don’t want to go down to road of justifying evils as the price paid for some set of benefits. And is oppressing workers like Sibaram Pradhan as necessary price for antibiotics? I feel compelled to try to imagine alternative.

    The Christian does not posit the absolute dichotomy of the Kingdom of God versus Mammon. The world is fallen, even if it retains some of its original beauty and goodness. Perhaps I should hesitate before saying that Christians who do not oppose global capitalism are necessarily blind, ignorant, ideological, or hypocritical. Some certainly are. But others may be focused on the genuine goods brought about by the same system that is destroying so much good. OK, bring the beast under rational, political, moral control; make it responsible to local communities; make it respect human dignity unconditionally. Then we can talk. Right now I feel that capitalism (as it currently exists in the USA at least and globally in a sense) is very close to Mammon. And we can’t serve two masters.

 

. . .

 

Yet, my (not only my) normal mode of consciousness is to block all this out, to function and to leave some space for Lebensfreude (joy of being alive), for my sons, philosophy, good food, companionship, teaching, reading, writing,  trees, water, sky, light. Part of me hate all this not because I am a saint who loves God and humanity in any pure sense but because it prevents me from innocently enjoying my private life and all the little pleasures I hang on to. I suspect this is the normal mode of consciousness of almost everyone who remains psychologically functional. Imagine, for a moment, that Matthew 25:40 were not simply believed but experienced continuously. Imagine walking through life feeling vividly present, at every moment, the suffering of every child in Gaza, every lonely elderly person, every exploited worker, every animal in industrial agriculture, every refugee, every victim of war, every person dying alone. Perhaps the saint could endure it but the saint is very rare. The psyche has filters for a reason. We all block things out. The ego blocks things out, in other words, and mine is as fat and relentless as the average person, if not as insanely inflated as some.

    There is a forgetting that becomes indifference but I hope there is also a forgetting that creates room for fidelity. My sons. If I spent every waking moment contemplating the world's suffering, I would have less attention available for them. Less attention for the student sitting before me in a classroom. Less attention for a friend. Less attention for philosophy, literature, and those moments of delight that make life worth living. Love is finite in its concrete exercise even if its horizon is universal. I cannot feed every hungry child; I can only prepare dinner for my sons. I can’t comfort every lonely person but I can be attentive to the person actually before me. I cannot save civilization but I can teach students to think honestly and compassionately. That may sound like a retreat into the local and a justification for my participation in a system I know tromps on the face of God in millions and billions of my fellow mortals. I do not mean it that way, or don’t want to mean it that way. It is simply an acknowledgment of creaturely limits.

    I don’t think the things I mentioned under the heading of Lebensfreude (joy of life) are frivolous distractions from morality. My children, philosophy, teaching, literature, walking, etc.  These are not merely pleasures but goods whose polluting I am lamenting when I criticize Mammon. The system I criticize is objectionable precisely because it threatens forms of human flourishing such as friendship, contemplation, beauty, family life, care for place, and genuine education. If one sacrificed all those goods in order to maintain uninterrupted awareness of suffering, one would paradoxically be surrendering some of the very things one is trying to defend.

     Attention to suffering is morally essential. But reality contains more than suffering. There is also goodness, beauty, friendship, affection, gratitude, wonder, and joy. To attend truthfully is to attend to all of it. Even Matthew itself is not only judgment. It contains wedding feasts, lilies of the field, birds of the air, children, forgiveness, shared meals, friendship, and the promise that burdens can become light. Perhaps joy is one of the things suffering threatens and therefore one of the things worth preserving. A father laughing with his sons, a good class discussion, a walk through the woods, a great novel, a Bach fugue, a conversation with my friend – none of these solve the world's misery. But neither are they acts of betrayal. They are small participations in the good whose violation makes the misery tragic in the first place. But that doesn’t help me with my affordable shirt and its connection to people like Sibaram Pradhan, my chili and the animals in the industrial meat system – and on and on and on. I wanted to deal with that, but honestly I am no closer to an answer now than when I started.