The Neighbour

1991 (Year B), 8 September / Pentecost 16

St Peter de Beauvoir Town

A retired priest told a group of Hackney clergy about two French women who turned up in Chester Cathedral one Sunday morning. They arrived too late for one service and too early for the next and obviously didn’t look to be totally at ease so a rather traditional clergyman went up to see if he could help them. ‘We’ve come to assist at the mass,’ they said. You can imagine the look of horror on the clergyman’s face. Assist at the mass. ‘Good heavens what am I to do? They can’t possibly!’ What he said was, ‘Actually we don’t need any assistance, we can manage quite well on our own.’

What had happened was one of these glorious misunderstandings that occur between people who speak different languages. I would’ve had the same look of horror as that clergyman in Chester, because I can’t speak French either. In French to assist doesn’t mean the same as it does in English. He and I thought to assist means to help; he thought they wanted to celebrate the Mass. What they were saying was that they had come to be present at the Mass. To ‘assist’ apparently means to be there, to make yourself present with, to be attentive and join in. It’s much more subtle than English. We have no real equivalent and that’s a great pity.

When another person is really present with us, attentive to us then we feel alive. A relationship exists between us. It is creative and brings joy. When we know the person with whom we are talking is either just going through the motions and doesn’t really care then we feel deadened. I know some of you have experienced the doctor writing a prescription before you’ve even sat down in the surgery, the Vicar standing at the back of church talking to us but looking over our shoulder to see someone they would rather be with.

A classic story of this kind was told to those who went to Warwick University yesterday. A woman went to get help from a social worker because she couldn’t pay her gas bill. She left the social worker without the money, but with the knowledge that her marriage was in crisis.

Good neighbours are divine. They are those who are attentive to us, who are present with us and with whom we have a relationship. They give assistance. Put simply they give life. Bad neighbours are those with whom no relationship exists, there are no connections. And in case you think that this is overstating the case let me say now that all this come straight from the bible for the bible has very different notions about life and death from those we have today. Whereas we think of life as the continuing functioning of an organism, and death as the cessation of that functioning. The bible understands life and death in terms of relationships between people.

To be alive is to be present with and to be joined to a community, just as those two French women wanted to be in Chester Cathedral. To be dead is to be denied that possibility, to be excluded or to put ourselves outside. Life and death, in the bible, don’t have to do simply with the state of the individual person; they have to do with how the person relates to community. So neighbourliness isn’t an option – it’s a direct reflection on how we are present, how we are joined with the community around us. In biblical terms neighbourliness provides a way of assessing how alive we are.

We, like the church ever since the time of Jesus, would really not like to face up to this because we are not comfortable looking at issues which are as stark as life or death. God of course would encourage us in this endeavour and would certainly have us choose life rather than death. Jesus, said as much when he told the stories about Dives and Lazarus, or the Good Samaritan, because they are all stories about people having to make similar choices

Now we could all usefully spend time this week reflecting on the ways in which we as individuals manage to bring life or death to our communities, to our friends and our neighbours. We can also reflect on the ways in which our schools, our government and our church do the same. This is the first step on the road to becoming a good neighbour. The second step is rejecting all that delivers death and embracing all that through God gives life. AMEN