“Telescopic Philanthropy” is what Charles Dickens called it.

In his massive novel, Bleak House, there’s a minor character named Mrs. Jellyby. Described as a “lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public,” she is, when we meet her early in the novel, “devoted to the subject of Africa.” “The African project at present,” she says, “employs my whole time.” Letters, mailers, and pamphlets, speeches day and night: Mrs. Jellyby was completely devoted to what she called the “Brotherhood of Humanity,” particularly to the “natives of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger.”

Yet, as Mrs. Jellyby is visited by some of the main characters in the novel—Ada Clare, Richard Carstone, and the heroine, Esther Summerson—Dickens describes a home in utter disarray, full of wild children, the victims of their mother’s neglect. One child’s head is stuck in the railing upstairs; another falling down the flight of stairs, “as the dear child’s head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair.” All the while, Dickens writes, Mrs. Jellyby “had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off.” She was a woman totally committed to her “African project” but utterly remiss in the care of her own children. “Telescopic Philanthropy” Dickens called it.[1] The moral couldn’t be plainer.

Love wrongly routed, misapplied thousands of miles away, devotion at a distance but coldness up close—that’s the problem. We do that sometimes; we lose ourselves in the bigger picture; we get swept up in the macroeconomics of morality; all while we forget, overlook, and neglect the details and particular ethics of our smaller more important worlds.

It’s a perennial problem, which is why we all still get Dickens’ satire, his criticism of Mrs. Jellyby. But perhaps it’s even worse now, now with social media. It’s easy to get fired up about events a million miles away, entertained by marketed issues that at the end of the day have absolutely no bearing upon our lives.

And we’re not as committed to the local as we once were; we’re too mobile, maybe. Wendell Berry talks about this a lot, about our disconnectedness to our immediate environment. “Americans—including, notoriously, their politicians—are not from anywhere,” he says.[2] And this has an effect upon us, and not a good one either. Unrooted from the actual faces and loves which surround us, our thinking tends toward the abstract and often toward the ideological. We’ve all become politicians and bureaucrats, “influencers” (to use that obnoxious word) rather than neighbors and friends. Like Mrs. Jellyby we develop the “curious habit of seeming to look a long way off,” all the while failing to serve or even see those closest to us.

We categorize and rank classes and types of persons, determining in advance who receives our charity. I will help the person who meets these criteria and these only and not those. We create in our minds an idea of charity and ideal recipients of charity all before we ever practice charity. We build charitable institutions—good in themselves—and we give money to those institutions—again, good to do—but then we point to them and use them as an excuse for doing nothing for the beggar standing right in front of us, awkwardly. And all the while we worry about our orthodoxy and take pride in our theology, proud that we’re still good upstanding Christians—followers of Jesus, just better organized.

We modern Christians, I suggest respectfully, are sometimes like Mrs. Jellyby; just as she had become like that “scholar of the law” in today’s gospel with his academic questions. Yes, of course, theology is important, a matter of eternal life and death as both Jesus and the scholar agree. “What is written in the law?” Jesus asks. “You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself,” the man answered easily.[3] He gets it—love God and neighbor—it’s easy. We get it; Mrs. Jellyby gets it.

But then again, we don’t. We don’t get it all actually—they’re just ideas, words, and sometimes feelings, and so often nothing more. We get it intellectually but not actually, our ethics which we praise and approve remain disembodied and mostly meaningless—mere ideas, words, and sometimes feelings—cheap things, nothing more. We keep our ethics theoretical and a little sentimental when need be, but not practical, not when the person in need actually appears before us, the migrant, the beggar. Then we get theological, abstract, fearful. Like the good Reverend Malthus said so long ago, “We wish that it had not fallen our way…We feel a painful emotion at the sight…We hurry therefore…by them, and shut our ears to their importunate demands.”[4]

Which is why the parable of that Jericho crime and Samaritan mercy is so convicting, so nagging in its morality. “And who is my neighbor?” that scholar asked. Jesus answers the question, pointedly and un-academically. The point of the parable is that the question about who is our neighbor is not an abstract, philosophical question. It’s not a question that can be qualified by our politics and economics, by questions of liability or efficiency. Who is my neighbor? Whom ought I to love as myself just as I love God? The answer is simple: it’s the person in need standing right in front of you, wherever you are and wherever he or she is. And whoever you are and whoever he or she is. That’s it. There is no deeper meaning we can hide behind. There are no clever excuses that can justify our imitating that priest who walked on by, no excuses at all.

That old fiery preacher, John Chrysostom put it this way: “Need alone is the poor man’s worthiness…let us not meddle any further.”[5] As Christians we are of course committed to social justice on a broad and systematic scale. Our record in that regard is proud and remarkable. But that’s about justice; it doesn’t relieve us of the ministry of charity and mercy, that sort of constant spontaneous love Jesus demands we stand ready to offer to the needy on the streets, the random sudden victim we suddenly happen upon, that awkward request awkwardly made by the stranger or the child and mother in need.

Now I accuse myself here. I sin when I make excuses, even when they’re good excuses. We sin whenever we point to our charitable institutions (as wonderful as they are) as an excuse for doing nothing in the face of our own Jericho victim or our own Lazarus.[6]

Now I know there are a lot of common sense reasons, good ones too, for not helping a man or woman in immediate need, a person begging. And there are plenty of experts too to dissuade you. “It won’t do any good.” “They’ll keep coming back.” “They’ll just spend it on drugs.” “We’ll do more good with an economies of scale approach; we can’t get bogged down by every beggar on the street.” “There are too many of them.” And on and on. I get it; it’s all true. But here’s the thing: Jesus never gave us those good excuses for saying no. We had to make them up ourselves. He never gave us an out. If anything, he seems to suggest our charity should not only be generous but gratuitous, like God’s love for us is gratuitous. Which might be the Christian point: yes, there are sometimes many good reasons for not helping a person in need. It’s just that those reasons never come from Jesus.

It’s why I remain troubled by my own sinful lack of spontaneous charity and by all our good sensible reasons for doing nothing. We need to remain troubled by this Jericho parable. The poor, migrants, people in need: they need to become our preachers. Among them may be our Pentecost. We need to be challenged and purified by this gospel, not interpret it away. That’s the challenge, the discomfort we must not cast off after we leave our worship of our poor Christ, this God of orphans and widows, having just got our own handouts from this gratuitous God.

Augustine said once, “The Devil believes, but he does not love.”[7] That’s the danger, the risk run by that scholar of the law, by Mrs. Jellyby, by us getting our theology right, but nothing else. We must not only believe, we must also love. And to love is to ask, “How can I help you?” and “What do you need?”

Who is my neighbor? You’ll find him soon, and it’ll be awkward. But it let it be awkward; it’s a charismatic awkwardness. Just remember to pray in that awkward moment; hush your excuses and conventional wisdom and listen to Jesus. Because he’ll likely tell you story, about love and a person in need, a person standing right in front of you, very close by.

[1] Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Ch. 4

[2] Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers, 6

[3] Luke 10:25-28

[4] Quoted in Kelly S. Johnson, The Fear of Beggars, 1

[5] John Chrysostom, Second Sermon on Lazarus and the Rich Man. In On Wealth and Poverty, 53

[6] Luke 16:19-31

[7] Quoted in Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, 316

© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield