The Implicit Precept of Proximity as Relational Responsibility

It is a widely held fallacy that the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) advocates loving everyone. It has often been turned into something like the soppy sentimentality of Hollywood stars upon receiving their Oscars shouting ‘I love you all’. 

While there is an implicit message to love all, peoples or races, that is not the parable’s main point. It is much more an implicit precept of proximity as relational responsibility that fits our finitude in time and space. Acting on proximity or nearness to one’s neighbour, not walking to the other side of the road as the Jewish priest and Levite did, is its key message. It is also the key relational category and measurement for the Relationships Foundation’s path-breaking work.

Further, being near enough to know our neighbours — and not assume nastiness, but being open to being surprised by their goodness — is critical relationally. The half-caste Samaritan was the last person the Jewish audience was expecting good neighbourliness from. They expected the Jerusalem-bound Jewish priest and Levite to be the story’s heroes. But their going to the other side, to disconnect from a possibly dead man, to maintain ritual purity and racial identity, thus ‘othering’ his helpless humanity, is both cowardly and inhuman.

Turning to our world of racial, sexual and religious conflict and relational disruption, how can we be vehicles or vessels of the priceless value of such radical relational and spiritual proximity? Let me give some examples moving from intimately personal and medical to international relations.

First, from medical ethics, Arne Johan Vetlesen argues that “an ethics of proximity regards the close relationship between an I and a Thou to be the basic ethical relationship” experienced as an ethical subject and an ethical addressee ^[1].

I once heard a nurse give the most moving illustration of such embodied proximity during her first exposure to death as a young student. She was called to wait outside a dead patient’s room until her supervisor called her to help her wash and prepare the patient for the funeral. As the supervisor washed the elderly woman gently, she explained to the deceased all she was about to do: “Mabel, this is Leonie and we’re about to wash your face and head, dear. We’ll now wash your shoulders and breasts” and so on over her whole body. Mabel was treated with a dignified and gentle touch and voice, embodying the greatest sense of relational respect and love. As they left the room the supervisor said to the new student nurse, well done dear, great job. And 20 years later Leonie had not forgotten such a formative relational and embodied experience (albeit, without Mabel’s conscious participation). Hearing her live was electrifying – drawn relationally near to Mabel and her carers’ sacred space.

Second, debate has heightened in Britain and Australia regarding asylum seekers arriving after treacherous and often deadly sea journeys. Britain has recently taken on the former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s (but largely bipartisan) uncompromising and harsh approach to such arrivals by sending them to effectively long-term and demoralising, despair and suicide-inducing legal detention offshore — in Australia to Manus Island (in Papua New Guinea) and Nauru — in Britain to Rwanda. Though legal, many in each country doubt the ethics and humanity of such policies. One key argument is from the ethics of proximity, whereby rich western countries fail to recognise their human and international responsibility to welcome these desperately needy people until they are assessed as to whether they are genuine refugees or not. The vast majority are and would be found to be genuine, but governments want to avoid the moral and legal claims that proximity (via landing on their soil or sea-space) makes. 

Australian sociologists Robert Manne and David Corlett drew on the proximity argument in their book Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference^[2] (2004). The argument was not adequately answered by the Australian government then nor now. The British should beware of following us morally downunder.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan affirms that proximity or nearness demands neighbourliness and mercy. Jesus, accused of being a Samaritan himself (John 8:48), doesn’t demand any more of us than he asked of his own relational proximity.

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