Book Review: The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus by Mark Labberton
Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010). 236 pages. $15.83
In our post-9/11 globalized world where a war of ideologies expresses itself with mass beheadings, rape, and pillaging in Iraq and Syria, and where human difference erupts in violence in Ferguson, MO, to give dignity and worth to our neighbor becomes of paramount importance, not only for the very survival of civilization as we know it, but more supremely, the very essence of what it means to put our worship of God into tangible action.
Following his highly acclaimed 2007 publication, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary and the inaugural Lloyd John Ogilvie Chair in Preaching, incisively and eloquently speaks to us about what it means to live out God’s justice in our human relationships with the holy other. He doesn’t beat us over the head and make us guilty for not empathizing enough with the homeless mother or putting that extra dollar bill in the offering plate for the special offering to combat human trafficking; he leaves that task to the Holy Spirit to convict us of what we’ve done but more often of what we have left undone. What he does do is name our fears, identifies what lurks in our hearts that causes us to be apathetic and indifferent towards our neighbor, and the methods we employ to express an implicit or, often times, explicit disregard toward our neighbor.
Drawing from his 16 years as the senior pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley before he assumed the presidency of Fuller, as well as his work with the International Justice Mission and other ministries, Labberton asserts that radical transformation of the heart comes by how the heart properly “sees”: what he calls “perceive (see and assess one another), . . .name (frame and position one another). . .act (engage or distance one another).” (23)
In our perceiving, we make initial assessments, value judgments about people, particular persons, and often times of whole categories and groups of people. We, then, name them, framing them and framing ourselves in some sort of anthropological Rolodex that is convenient for our understanding of the world, of others, and of ourselves. We then comport ourselves, our posture, our approach towards the other, either through engaging with their lives or we seek a safe distance.
Far too often, when we read a feed on Twitter, see a Facebook status, or hear about an injustice in our community or in the world, we may be moved to sympathy, and even have some level of empathy, and maybe even indicate a “like” on the Facebook status or retweet the Tweet, or even write a check. But there’s a vast chasm between being touched by a sight of injustice and being gripped by it. It’s not about a philanthropic nobles oblige, it’s about the Gospel of Jesus Christ that grabs a hold of our lives and of this world to show us and give us the dangerous love of God.
What Labberton seeks is a recalibration of the heart. Just as in his previous volume the necessary component of the dangerous act of worship is living out and engaging in God’s work of justice in the world, Labberton in this book invites us to take on the heart of Jesus and to see others through the Savior’s own heart and eyes. This requires new eyes, being “born again.” It’s reframing social categories, re-naming labels that have been placed on the other, it’s re-positioning our lives and our actions towards the other where engagement with our neighbor results in solidarity with their suffering, witnessing the image of God shining forth in our neighbor, and discovering again and again the very purpose of God pursuing the world as the servant Jesus. As Labberton puts it so aptly, “Worship as reperceiving” (200)
This book, without question, is a must-read and a must-do for all preachers, teachers, pastors, and disciples of Jesus Christ. The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor calls us to live out the Gospel in words and in deeds, with our very lives. And in doing so, we live out what it means to love God and to truly worship God. But, watch out! Be warned. Loving your neighbor is dangerous — your heart will be changed forever.
