“BYSTANDER RESPONSIBILITY”
Exodus 23:4-5, Deuteronomy 22:1-4
Today’s message from God’s word is probably more of an ouch for me than it is for any of you. It stabs at the heart of one of my weakest areas of obedience: my habit of sitting and doing nothing where I need to be taking action when someone has a need. Don’t feel like I’m pointing the finger at you today; I have no intention of piling guilt on any of you. I am guilty, first and foremost. If you’re like me, then we’re in the same boat. We can talk, as one sinner to a fellow sinner, on how we can get our act together.
We’re talking about bystander responsibility. Sometimes, when we do nothing, we are guilty. Those of us who are old enough may remember the story of Kitty Genovese, the woman who was brutally beaten to death in New York in 1964 while 38 bystanders stood by for al most an hour and did nothing. And yet, according to one court decision in Texas years ago, bystanders have no legal obligation to help a drowning person. God may disagree, and recently California has passed some Good Samaritan laws requiring others to intervene to break up acts of violence, but it is unclear whether civil law can force uninvolved bystanders to get involved in a crisis.
The laws given in Exodus speak specifically about an Israelite’s responsibility to return your enemy’s lost animal, and come to the aid of his animal in trouble. These two laws come to us in a section on lawsuits, which often involve feuds between enemies. God says we have a responsibility to help, even if it’s our enemy who benefits from our help, like when the US Navy recently rescued the Iranian boat from pirates. Jesus says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27). Paul goes even further. He says (quoting Proverbs 25:21-22), “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink.” (Romans 12:20) Love for enemies is rooted in the OT law.
As the law is restated in Deuteronomy 22, we see that the law applies not just to enemies, but to all neighbors. One of the issues that may not be obvious to us as we read this is that verse 2 is God’s answer to the question, “What if the owner charges me with harboring stolen property?” That was a very real possibility. It was a risk. God’s answer is: “I commanded you to do this. Keep the lost item, and keep looking for the owner.” At the end of verse 3 are some words that are hard-hitting in the Hebrew: (literally) “You cannot (which means, you must not) make yourself blind.” We cannot hide our eyes.
As the author of Institutes of Biblical Law writes, “We cannot rob a man of his property by our neglect; we must act as good neighbors even to our enemies and to strangers.” The writer goes on to point out that when evil is done, the non-interfering bystander becomes an accomplice to the crime. A classic example is the issue of blowing the whistle on evil in one’s workplace: if we fail to act, we become part of the cover-up.
Or think of the tragic stories of genocide in Cambodia, or Rwanda in 1994. 1/3 of the population of Cambodia butchered by Pol Pot, 1 million Rwandans killed, and the whole world stood by and did nothing. We became accomplices to mass murder.
James the brother of Jesus sounds very Presbyterian in his broad definition of sin. He writes in James 4:17, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for them it is sin.”
1 John 3:16-17 – “If anyone has the world’s necessities-for-life and sees his fellow believer in need and closes his heart (literally: guts) against them, how does God’s love remain in that person? Little children, let us love, not in word or in speech, but in deed and in truth.” This is a classic ouch passage for me. Now, John is not talking about all poor people; he’s talking about fellow believers (“brother”, which includes sister). A lot also depends on how we should define the word “need” (the Greek is not much help here). A max-out cell phone bill is not a need.
But Jesus won’t let us off the hook on helping those in need by limiting our compassion to believers. Jesus shines the spotlight on bystander responsibility. He gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan to show that “who is my neighbor whom I must love as I love myself?” applies even to people I despise. A pagan Roman emperor named Julian complained that these Christians “feed not only their own poor, but ours also.”
In Isaiah 58:6-7, God says, Here’s the kind of self-denial I want. “Is it not to share your food with the hungry, and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter – when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh?” Verse 9 says, “Then you will call, and the Lord will answer. You will cry for help, and the Lord will say, Here I am.”
The late Francis Schaeffer was an outspoken opponent of abortion. But he noted that it’s not enough to just defend the unborn child, we also need to care for the mother and for the child after it’s born. The mother may need a place to stay. There’s going to be medical bills. As he put it, “There’s more than one way to be inhuman.” I oppose couples living together outside of marriage. But if a couple moves in together because one of them is stuck without a place to stay, and I do nothing to help them (such as opening my family’s home), my failure to help makes me part of the problem. I become guilty as well. I become an accomplice to the sin I oppose.
What does God say about bystander responsibility? “You cannot make yourself blind.” Why do we do so? Why don’t we get involved? Some people just plain don’t care, but I doubt that’s true for you. Sometimes, the issue is discomfort or inconvenience. Yes, a lot of the needs around us push us out of our comfort zone.
Speaking for myself, I think a lot of the reason can be paralysis. We think we have nothing to offer. We ask, “What can one person do?” That was Kay Warren’s problem. She tells in her book Say Yes to God (also called Dangerous Surrender) that she felt God calling her to do something about AIDS in Africa, but she felt like she had nothing to offer, nothing that could make a difference.
I’ve had the same problem myself. I hear about all these needs in the world where God wants us to get involved (unemployment, folks who can’t pay their bills, kids whose lives are a mess), and I say, “I don’t have gifts in these areas! I’m not a social worker! (I proved that at SIU!) I’m not any good at construction or repair! I’m not a doctor or nurse. I’m not God’s gift to children. I’m just a preacher and scholar. What do I have to offer to the world?”
What is God calling you to do about the problems in the world? Where has God been telling you to get involved, but you’ve been holding back or dragging your feet? Only you can answer those questions. God does not give us the option of standing there and doing nothing. Deuteronomy 22:3 – “You cannot make yourself blind.” When we do nothing, we become part of the problem.
What today’s message from God’s word does for me is that it drives home my need for Jesus Christ. When I look at all the ways that I fail to do what I know God wants me to do, I am overwhelmed with the sense of how much I need a Savior. I’m not saying that God expects us to carry the entire load of the world’s needs. But each of us have our realistic-sized piece of the action where God wants us to be involved, and that’s where I still fail to do what I know I ought to do.
That's where I am so thankful to remember that none of us is saved by our own goodness. We cannot reach God by any program of do’s and don’ts, no matter how well we play the game. None of us can do enough good in this life to outweigh all that we have done wrong or failed to do right. We are saved only by the undeserved mercy shown to us in the saving death of Jesus Christ. And God doesn’t love us today based on how well we’re performing at the moment. God never loved us based on how good we are – never has, never will. All we can do is receive what he has done for us, in faith.
So it is not my purpose today to pile a load of guilt on any of you. I’ve got too big of a pile of my own, for which I am eternally grateful to be forgiven. But once you are secure in the knowledge of God’s saving love, once you know where you stand with God (which should fill you with joy), my purpose is to open our eyes to how we can love God in return, not to pay him back (which is impossible), but to simply say “Thank you!”
God loves us just as we are, but God loves us too much to let us stay that way. We were designed for more. God made us to become extensions of God’s love and care to the world. Finding out how we can do that is the adventure of a lifetime. Whatever that may involve, we know we weren’t made to be bystanders. We live in a world full of need, and our purpose is to each be part of the answer to that world of need. We cannot make ourselves blind to where God wants to use us in this world.
