David Sharp was 34 when he died five years ago. And depending upon whom you ask, his death was either unavoidable or preventable.
The British citizen was attempting a climb up Mt. Everest in May of 2006 when he died in a shallow snow cave from a lack of oxygen. That he died, in one sense, was not unusual. Many have died attempting to climb the world’s largest mountain. But what was unusual about Sharp’s death was that more than three dozen people passed by his location and recognized his plight and most did nothing to help him.
A few checked on him but said he was too close to death to attempt to help. At least one team left him some oxygen. But no one attempted to get him down the mountain to medical help. That so many could refuse to play the role of the Samaritan is difficult to comprehend:
“We’ve been seeing things like this for a very long time,” said Thomas Sjogren, a Swedish mountaineer who helps run ExplorersWeb, a Web site widely read by climbers. “The real high-altitude mountaineers, the top people in the world who are doing new peaks and going to mountains you don’t know much about, most of these people have become completely disgusted by Everest.”
The top mountaineers “often help each other,” said Sjogren, who has made many Himalayan climbs. “If you know him or you don’t know him, it doesn’t matter: you try to help him until he’s confirmed dead.”
Yet others seemed to give it tacit approval:
But many of today’s Everest climbers are on commercial expeditions, some paying tens of thousands of dollars to guides who are under fierce pressure to get their clients to the summit.…
“The sheer pressure of numbers and accessibility to these mountains [have] changed the kind of people who go,” said Lydia Bradey, a 44-year-old New Zealander who in 1988 became the first woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen.
As a result, Bradey said in a telephone interview, Everest climbers may be forced to decide whether to jeopardize their once-in-a-lifetime investment to help a dying person.
“If you’re going to go to Everest … I think you have to accept responsibility that you may end up doing something that’s not very ethically nice,” she said. “You have to realize that you’re in a different world.”
In other words, if you’ve paid the going rate of $50,000 to summit Everest, then a different morality determines your actions.
Now Sharp’s story is admittedly an extreme story, yet the motives that drove the actions of the uncompassionate climbers is not significantly different than would be found in a random sampling of our world. Those approximately 40 climbers gave evidence to the rule of love in the world — “I will love and sacrifice for another if it is convenient and beneficial to me.”
In the church we find a different principle. We love because we have been commanded to love. And we love because we have been equipped to love. This equipping comes in two ways — it comes through the love of Christ that has been given to us —
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 Jn. 4:7-11)
In other words, because we have received an extravagant love, we not only should love others, but we have been enabled to love others.
But there is another means by which we are equipped to love others. It is through adhering to the Word of God:
But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. (1 Tim. 1:5)
In other words, the teaching of the apostle Paul (which came from the Scriptures) had the goal of producing love in the hearers. And specifically, that love would be derived from a heart that was purified, a conscience that was made morally good, and a faith that was made sincere and unhypocritical.
That is, the one who listens wisely and carefully to Scripture will be increasingly pure, good and sincere, all of which will also result in becoming increasingly loving. Now some will ask, “is that love for God or love for people?” It is both, because it is impossible to love God without also loving people (see the passage in 1 Jn. 4 again), and it is impossible to love men without first knowing the love of God.
It is also important to note that we grow in love not by merely hearing the Word of God, but by hearing it with the intention for which it is given — to stimulate love. But not everyone listens to Scripture that way. Some are prone to arguing about truths they do not really comprehend (vv. 6-7) instead of being convicted by their sin and submitting to Scripture for restoration and healing (vv. 8-11). In other words, the way we read Scripture teaches us to either love or be hypocritical. To whatever degree we are hypocritical, it is because we have inaccurately read and applied Scripture.
So grow in love for others — particularly those who are of the household of faith and grow in that love by being attentive to the words and purpose of Scripture. How well you love others will be determined by how well you listen to the Word of God.
Words of Grace 