Just Watching?

In Lent and in life, merely watching is not just. Entering the Good Story of the passion and death of a man from Galilee offers all of us, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Agnostic, or Atheist to consider the ethical call to response in the face of an innocent victim.

Imagine this scenario vividly, as if it were really happening to you: You are standing on the sidewalk waiting for a friend to come out of a shop, when you see two things happen simultaneously

• A man on a bicycle who looks homeless and a bit confused catches the leg of his pants in the chain and almost falls. He stops the bike near you and is struggling to get off without dropping the bag he is carrying and falling over. If you move quickly, you can probably prevent his getting hurt.
• A little child, perhaps three years old, is smiling up at her mother as they walk along the sidewalk. Two feet from you, the door of a shop opens wide, the hard edge of the metal frame just a foot in front of her face. She is going to walk right into it. If you move quickly, you can probably prevent her getting hurt.

What do you do? QUICK!

To NOT help: is that a moral choice? Edmund Burke said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil to triumph for good men to do nothing.”
Which to help? Proximity, power, innocence, and identification: these are four factors that influence how we make decisions that involve helping someone in trouble. The closer we are, the more likely we are to help. The more capable we are of being effective, the more likely we are to help. And the more we see the victim as innocent, the more likely we are to help. And the more we can identify with the person, connect them with someone in our life, the more we are likely to help.

What did you do? If you’re just reading, please stop. Go back. Enter the scene; make the people real. What DID you do?

If we distance ourselves, consider ourselves powerless, if we judge, if we don’t see people as part of our lives, we...let…evil…triumph.  Sounds ugly; it is. And if you’re like me, you do it every day. This week let’s stay with the story of the passion of Jesus as a scenario that enables us to learn about ourselves as moral agents, as people free to do good…or to watch from the sidelines, tacitly cheering for evil’s triumph.

Get in the game.  Enter the Story (click for a link). Examen nightly the experiences of your day, and how your moral compass guided you. Start or continue your fast in order to remind yourself repeatedly of your relationship with God, with your truest self.

And notice those who share your sidewalk.


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.