“Am I my brother’s keeper?” – one the most ancient questions asked in the Hebrew Scriptures. Despite the clear and unambiguous answer given in scripture, from the prophets to Jesus to Paul, we still struggle to take that answer on board. We want to hedge the answer around with:
- Who exactly is my brother – there must be degrees of connection here surely, not everyone is as much brother as everyone else.
- Yes, but surely within limits – I can’t be responsible for everything
- Ok, but my brother also needs to be responsible for himself – how will he learn if I just take on everything
- I shouldn’t be taking away another person’s dignity, their right to make decisions for themselves – I’ll step in to avoid disaster, but otherwise I should stay out of it.
So the clear answer is “yes” and “everyone”. But even when we acknowledge that, the challenge is real. Being my brother’s keeper cannot mean that we take over someone else’s life, make all their decisions, deprive them of agency.
Today’s readings help us navigate through these issues. In Ezekiel 33:7-9 the issue is placed in the context of the prophet preaching to the “House of Israel”. We don’t here confront the universality of Isaiah, or Jesus talking of the Good Samaritan. But it is made clear that our responsibility is to advise and guide, not take over or dictate. Sometimes the latter may be a great deal easier, and in the extreme case we may have no choice when someone is truly incapable of managing their own affairs. But the model of the prophets (which is directed at all of us) is to guide and correct, where necessary, not dictate.
In our Gospel reading (Matthew 18:15-20), Jesus reframes with a focus which is more about personal relationships within a close community, as one might expect in Matthew’s telling, for a young church still very new and tightly bound together – this is a different world from the “People of Israel” as a large, disparate and diverse group, or indeed the Christian church as it would emerge over the next 300 years. However, even given the particular context for spelling out the message, it remains highly relevant to us today at a personal and parish level. This is the stuff of our real challenges with individuals around us that we meet frequently; that may indeed “rub us up the wrong way”; that frequently are reduced to the two or three (or maybe four or five) doing something in support of the Lord’s mission, maybe feeling a little lonely in our smallness. Jesus tells us we are never small, never powerless, however few in number, because he is with us, even it’s only me and one other person engaged in his work.
And Paul in his summation of what he had learned in his life as an apostle, written for the church in Rome, the center of the known world at that time, boils it down to the core (Romans 13:8-10) – a message which Jesus attempted to communicate in so many ways during his ministry. This teaching is uncompromising – we are not simply responsible for each other, we should love each other. Paul repeats Jesus’ reaffirmation of the old saying: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If we do that then there is no need for rules and regulations. I am not by brother’s keeper, I am my brother’s lover.