Humane Borders Opinion Pieces: Oded's Indictment

Paper delivered bt Rev. Robin Hoover, Ph.D., at the International Conference on Migration and Theology, Notre Dame University, South Bend, Ind., 09.18.04

Migration where I live is an inexorable flow of humanity from the oppressed south to the co-dependent oppressive north. Theology, as we know, is at least the study of the normative relationship of the human to the divine. Social theology involves more context. For my purposes, I define social theology as the link between theology and matters of public policy. Fortunately for we who are concerned about migration and who think theologically, sometimes those links and that topic come together in the written witness of the people of faith. Sometimes these biblical texts have greater heuristic value than social science or politics. Even though they are old texts, sometimes, they offer an even more contemporaneous analysis than otherwise imagined.

We live in a postmodern condition in which meaning is indeterminate or at least not unassailable. Often, the quest for appropriate ethical referent systems are exhausting and inconclusive. However, texts that are derived from current or at least formerly common stocks of knowledge are particularly useful because under the postmodern condition, fixity of text is always problematic.

Traditions such as mine that appeal to biblical texts are fortunate when the texts are generally familiar to the public and ensconced in so many ways into the cultural ethos. The downside to many inquiries which appropriate sacred texts is that the pursuer of truth often goes to the texts seeking justification for one's particular activist endeavors. Thankfully there is a test for the propriety of such activity. One test to determine if one is engaging is self-referential analysis is the degree to which one can take a deep, enabling subjectivity to the text with sufficient openness to allow the text to be read both proleptically and analeptically. When you go to a text or a text gets hold of you, will the text lead you to perceiving, behaving, and becoming in another way?

Rabbi Ben Bag Bag once wrote, "Turn it, turn it, round and round. In it, everything can be found." Certainly in such a case any old text would suffice. If you choose, you can proof text yourself to any position. We are best served, however, when we find texts that at least share the same locus of potential meaning and then start turning and looking, knowing that the text may next lead the reader-investigator in a new discerning path and on to new action. Ben Bag Bag's hermeneutic can also be used to deconstruct a text. Such is the orientation of this brief paper.

Here, I will read the so-called Good Samaritan texts from Luke and 2 Chronicles.

From Luke, we read about the self-justifying lawyer who is called by Jesus to see the world differently. Jesus speaks of the man who is standing on the border of jurisdiction and authority. The Good Samaritan story, if anything, is a border story, not just a perennial example of the good deed doer. It is clear that borders create opportunities for crime, and both self-interest and the project of deterrence are re-defined in this ethical space.

Governments to either side of the line do not naturally share interest in the well-being of the citizens of the other country. Being in one nation, but at the border, one is truly on the margin of each of the respective nations.

There are lawless people on borders. Any proposals for border reform that do not take seriously the element of crime are doomed to failure. This text lets us know that more than one person assaulted the victim in this story, removed from him protection from the elements, left him physically impaired to help himself, left him alone, and they were fully aware of what they had done. How well we know these stories.

The potential helpers approach. They assess the situation and move on. The story raises the question of purity by pointing to priest, to Levite, and to the Samaritan. The contrast is between the pure and the impure, but it turns out that the impure is pure! The story is a good gospel point. The Samaritan, though, has a heart, and he has resources he is willing to use. The Samaritan is ritually unclean according to the land he is in. He is a traveler. He is not a sojourner in the land. He is not bound economically to any Jew. He is a free, moral agent. He sees the man in distress, and he is moved act. In this borderland, his ethical referent is the divine not the artifact of human law. This Samaritan initiated action without request. He bandaged wounds. He poured oil and wine. He shared both food and beverage. He shared his own animal. He took the man to the inn. And as the temple is being marginalized in this story, the "market" slowly enters into the solution in this analysis, just as it does in our story.

The Samaritan pays for the Jew's care. The foreign-national purchased health-care for the person who should have been entitled. And, this was not a minimal gift. The Samaritan says to the innkeeper, "I will repay whatever more you spend." This is restorative justice on the edge of corporate life.

Then Jesus asks the lawyer, based on the data, based on your understanding of the law, which person fulfilled the role of neighbor? Answer: the one who showed mercy. The choice of the word mercy is important. It makes each person mentioned in the parable and each person hearing it a moral agent. There's no question but what the priest and the Levite failed in their attempt to manifest the divine in their midst. All should be shamed and know that the Samaritan was good when they were not.

From 2 Chronicles we read the Hebrew Bible version of the Good Samaritan parable. Perhaps better for this paper, we learn from where Luke's copy of the story comes. Jesus only referenced the prophet Oded who is the central character of this longer, more complete, more social, and more appropriate story for structural and action analysis. Oded is the Good Samaritan.

The setting is simple: Israel waits until Assyria wars on Judah, then Israel wars on Judah, kicks her when she's down, takes captives: women, sons, daughters, and takes the booty back to Samaria. In this story the whole people are culpable, not just the military. The narrator indicates that everyone in the story is kin to everyone else. And that discernment is true no matter which side of the border the speakers stand. Like the concept of neighbor, kin is biblically inclusive. This is a story of jumping borders for economic gain, something my country knows all too well. And fortunately for us, and to the point, it is also a story of how to go about changing the situation.

A prophet of the LORD was there, our friend Oded. It helps to have actors who are prepared to act. He speaks to everyone who is present, but he first addresses his remarks directly to the army. The locus of moral agency is vested with all the people, but in this case, the power of immediate remedy is located in the army. He acknowledges that they might have had some sort of justification to act in part, but what has been done is so bad it has reached up to heaven.

The army is not inherently evil. The army is not intentionally malicious. But the army is judged on its outcomes and its consequences, both intended and unintended. The assessment of this moment is such that it exceeds the ethical referent systems of this world. The egregious violations have reached all the way to the heavens. Their plan was economic domination and the resulting judgment is that there has been corporate sin against God.

Oded pronounces his indictment and his demand for action. He speaks directly to the army. He didn't wait and complain to some branch of the government. The offense Oded speaks of is the army's taking captive the nation's kindred. The army was about to increase their sin by bringing these captive kinfolk onto the holy ground of the homeland. I suppose Oded is the one who most clearly practiced homeland defense. He exercises the power of naming. Naming is required in political discourse. It is a game of naming, framing, and blaming. Oded's indictment is simple: God is naming, framing, and blaming you!

The story could have stopped there. How often have religious persons and communities held up their arms and cried "foul", only to experience fatigue and the disappointment of being ignored. But four chiefs, each of whom is a son of a chief stood up against the army. I believe these are the public administrators. These are the persons on the ground with the discretion to implement the policy of the people Israel. They stand up to the army. While they may neither understand Oded or accept his reasoning, each senses the legitimation crisis. They understand that they have a stake in maintaining, preserving, and projecting the image of the nation. It is to invested persons that we must speak.

The civilian-led military stood down. They released the captives and the booty in front of the officials and all the assembly. The people hold the public administrators accountable.

Then, there was restoration:

"Then those who were mentioned by name got up and took the captives, and with the booty they clothed all that were naked among them; they clothed them, gave them sandals, provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys, they brought them to their kindred at Jericho, the city of palm trees. Then they returned to Samaria."

Restoration on the line where I live has to be incremental and within the constraints of law if we are to expect our chiefs to be moral actors. Faith communities are and must continue to speak the indictments, to name the evils, frame the stories, and blame those who contribute to the suffering of migrants.

The chiefs must be engaged even as they seek to be neutrally competent and risk averse. As they are engaged, they must be shown ways that they can exercise what little discretion they have to implement changes that keep the border area from truly becoming a complete conflagration. We are all so familiar with the concept of speaking truth to power. From the construction of the Samaritan stories, we must spend significant efforts in the discernment of truth in our time and our place and know what the distribution of power is in this particular case.

Habermas, with his emphasis on communicative competence, preparation for discourse, and discursive redemption, can be helpful for persons who wish to work on discursive theory for their particularity of time and place.

All of this said, though, we've known for some time that the point is not to understand the system, the point is to change it. My research places faith communities squarely in the arenas of borderline life because far too often, the issues are too difficult for elected officials to lead the way. And in the last analysis, the legal-political system will not be changed outsise of a legal remedy.

I close with this very short story. I was in Mexico City sharing stories and theories about social change. My position was that a few white guys in Washington created our border mess and only they can clean it up. Others wanted me to come live in Mexico for a decade so I could understand.... In walked Don Samuel Ruiz, former bishop of Chiapas. After a few pleasantries, he said, "The problem is that some people in Washington are going to have to change their minds." So, the bottom line is that some Samaritans have to persuade some chiefs before anything will change.

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