A concept known as “emotional intelligence” gets top billing in the psychological and organizational literature of our day. Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to understand, regulate, and responsibly express emotion, as a core foundation for healthy relationships, wise decision-making, and effective leadership. Like cognitive intelligence, we all possess varying degrees of these capacities, but we’re all crippled to some degree by life experiences, poor role models, DNA, and our environment.
Emotional development is a lifelong process that begins in our earliest relationships, but continues into adulthood. Secure attachments in childhood, supportive learning environments, and models of self-reflection and empathy help develop the emotional skills that enable adults to regulate impulses, understand others’ distress, and respond with sensitivity rather than defensiveness. Conversely, deficits in emotional formation—whether from trauma, neglect, or patterns of avoidance—can make it harder for well-meaning adults to engage with others in ways that are healthy and life-giving.
Experts describe emotional intelligence not merely as feeling what we feel, but as the capacity to recognize our emotions, to reflect on how they shape our choices, and to integrate that awareness into how we get along with others. Those of us who develop these competencies tend to be better at empathy, conflict resolution, and navigating complexity with compassion rather than with impulse or reactivity.
Importantly, emotional maturity is not simply a matter of age or experience. It isn’t guaranteed by the passing of years alone. Instead, it involves conscious growth: learning to accept one’s emotions without being ruled by them, developing empathy for others that is distinct from self-interest, and choosing responses that reflect wisdom rather than instinct. This capacity to pause, reflect, and act with integrity shapes not only personal well-being but also the quality of our civic and communal life.
In recent years, psychologists and behavioral scholars have offered candid conversations about the emotional lives and public conduct of leaders in high office. Some have described certain leadership patterns in terms of malignant narcissism—a blend of grandiosity, hypersensitivity to criticism, and intolerance of vulnerability that reshapes how individuals perceive threats and respond to others.
Others note that when leaders exhibit high levels of traits such as entitlement, low empathy, a need for constant affirmation, and a readiness to manipulate information for their own advantage—traits associated in research with the so-called “Dark Triad”—the result is not merely individual insecurity but a relational style that dehumanizes and degrades others.
In professional ethical discussions, clinicians remind us that diagnosis is not appropriate without direct clinical evaluation. But many also acknowledge a duty to warn when patterns of emotional instability and reactive behavior among public figures have clear consequences for others’ well-being and for institutions tasked with protecting human dignity.
It would be easy to hear these descriptions and imagine that they apply only to someone else—to leaders, to public figures, to people whose brokenness is amplified by power. But that would miss a harder and more hopeful truth: the traits being described are not foreign to us. They are common human strategies for coping with fear, shame, and vulnerability.
A common reaction is to blame the victim when confronted with tragedy.
Our own emotional formation—how we learned to cope with shame, fear, and vulnerability—matters deeply here. Each of us carries scars that sometimes urge us to avoid discomfort. What makes a person a good neighbor, however, is not lack of fear but the courage to love despite it. Fear blames, but love heals.
Most of us know what it is like to defend ourselves by diminishing others. Most of us know the temptation to avoid situations that might demand empathy we feel unequipped to offer. Most of us, at one time or another, have protected ourselves by insisting we do not need anyone.
These are not signs of moral failure so much as unhealed emotional formation. They are the scars left by lives lived under pressure—by wounds we did not choose, fears we did not invent, and lessons we absorbed long before we knew we were learning them. Crossing to the other side of the road, away from victims, is often the body’s way of saying, this feels like too much.
This is why none of us is meant to function alone.
Healthy emotional life—whether in families, churches, or nations—depends on interdependence. We need others to name what we cannot see in ourselves, to slow us down when fear accelerates us, to remind us of our shared humanity when our instincts push us toward isolation or domination. The problem is not that we have these traits; the problem is when they go unchecked, unchallenged, and unhealed—especially when combined with authority.
Fortunately, the gospel speaks a clear word of hope. Scripture assumes our brokenness long before we confess it. God does not wait for us to be emotionally whole before offering grace. Instead, God meets us precisely in our fear, our defensiveness, and our avoidance—offering not condemnation, but formation.
Grace is not permission to remain as we are. Grace is the power that makes growth possible. To remember that fear blames, but love heals.
God works through relationships—through community, accountability, and love—to strengthen our capacity for empathy, restraint, and compassion. God does not remove our scars overnight, but God gives us something stronger than fear: an inner freedom that allows us to move toward others even when every instinct tells us to cross the road.
This is why Jesus never asks whether we are wounded. He knows we are. The question He presses is whether our wounds will be allowed to rule us—or whether grace will teach us a different way.
Most of us are blessed to live in circumstances where our emotional shortcomings cause limited harm. We stumble, we fail, we repair, we grow. But the stakes change when emotional brokenness is paired with unchecked power. That is why formation matters—not only for our private lives, but for our shared life as neighbors.
Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan is well known even outside its place in Luke’s Gospel. But it’s important to pause and consider one of the deeper dynamics at work in that parable: the development of emotional maturity over the course of a life. Luke shares both the parable and the backstory in his gospel.
A group of legal experts confronted Jesus, looking for a way to trip Him while blowing their own horns. One of them asks Jesus what one needs to do to please God and thus receive eternal life. Jesus, in His usual manner of responding in such situations, asks a question. “How do you interpret what scripture tells you?”
The way Jesus reacts doesn’t appear to assume anything about the questioner’s intentions or preexisting bias. And his answer seems consistent with how Jesus would answer the question. “Love God and your neighbor,” he replies.
But after Jesus acknowledged that He agreed with his answer, the expert pressed further. Luke says that he was trying to justify himself, which makes me wonder about the man’s emotional intelligence. Nevertheless, his question is a good one. “Who is my neighbor?”
After all, if we’re to love our neighbor, isn’t it important to establish boundaries? There are a lot of people in this world, and most of us will only meet a tiny percentage of them. Who counts and doesn’t count in this critical question of who we’re expected to show love towards.
Jesus responds with a story to illustrate rather than offering specific boundaries. In His story, a man is in need of assistance. Two people see his desperation as he lies helpless, but cross to the side of the road to avoid stopping. A third man stops and goes to great lengths to offer help.
The two who pass by are a priest and a Levite. These are prominent, powerful people with access to power and resources. But instead of stopping, they both move quickly past the wounded man. Jesus doesn’t say that they chose not to help out of malice. But why did they not offer assistance?
Let’s speculate by putting ourselves in their sandals. What if both walked by without helping because of their own emotional framework? What if their emotional maturity was shaped by fear, rule-keeping, or avoidance, leaving them unable to see or to stay with suffering?
The priest and the Levite cross to the other side, perhaps telling themselves there must be a reason this man ended up here. When fear takes hold, it’s easier to explain suffering away, assign fault, and protect ourselves by distancing ourselves from the wounded. Fear blames the victim.
The one who stopped to give aid, on the other hand, was a Samaritan. This information would not go unnoticed by those listening. They would have bristled at the idea of a person from Samaria playing the role of hero in the story. In today’s context, this might be an undocumented immigrant that we’ve been led to believe is dangerous.
Which one of these three acted like a neighbor toward the man? The one who was kind to him. Go, then, and do the same.
Luke 10:25-37
The Samaritan demonstrates a different emotional posture. He notices the wounded stranger, and his heart is moved. To see another person fully—to refuse to reduce them to failure or fault—is an act of love. Healing begins not when wounds disappear, but when someone stays.
He interrupts his journey to engage in the work of mercy. The Samaritan stops, draws near, and tends what is broken. Fear blames. Love heals.
“Who was a neighbor to the person in need?” Jesus asked as He finished telling His story. “The one who gave assistance,” the expert responded. Jesus concludes His response to the man’s original question with, “Go and do likewise.”
The story Jesus told does not ask whether we have scars. Jesus knows we do. The question before us is this: whether our own formation teaches us show love to others in crisis, or to put a safe distance between us and those who suffer?
Luke’s story insists that maturity is not the absence of fear, but the courage to love anyway. Fear blames. Love heals.
This week’s chapters from our companion book remind us that emotional formation—the willingness to know ourselves, to accept ourselves honestly, and to share who we are with others—is not merely a private endeavor. It is the soil in which neighborly love grows.
As we prepare to respond to Jesus’s challenge about who our neighbor is, we can begin by admitting where our own emotional development has helped us show compassion—and where it has hindered us from entering into the suffering, confusion, and need of others.
In our reading this week, Nadia reminds us that our spiritual lives are shaped not only by what we believe but by what we learned early on about survival, power, and self-protection.
In Chapter 6, she invites us to revisit Jesus’ unsettling image of the thief in the night—not as someone who steals what matters most, but as Christ who quietly takes away what we never truly needed in the first place: our illusions of control, our defenses, our carefully constructed identities.
Jesus does not steal our life; He steals the false selves we cling to because they make us feel safe. That kind of theft is terrifying to anyone whose emotional life has been formed around vigilance and fear. Trauma does not make someone cruel, but it does train the body and mind to avoid danger at all costs. When the nervous system is shaped by threat, the instinct is not to move toward pain, but away from it—to bypass, to numb, to survive.
Read through that lens, the priest and the Levite are not monsters. They may simply be people whose emotional formation has taught them that stopping is unsafe, closeness is costly, and vulnerability is dangerous. Crossing to the other side can feel like wisdom when fear is in charge.
Nadia confesses her own deeply ingrained belief that she does not need others. Independence, she realizes, had become not a strength but a shield. To need no one is to remain unexposed, unaccountable, and unentangled. But it is also to remain isolated. This is another way emotional brokenness shows itself—not as panic, but as self-sufficiency hardened into pride. When we believe we do not need others, relationships become optional, and neighbors become expendable.
In Chapter 12, we learn from Bobbie and Amy what it means to see one another. They recognize one another’s humanity, not despite their brokenness, but within it. They are not winners in the conventional sense. They have not mastered life. But they have learned something essential: to see another person fully—to refuse to reduce them to a problem, a burden, or a loser—is already an act of love. And that kind of seeing requires emotional maturity and courage.
Taken together, these stories help us name a difficult truth: the inability to love and accept others is rarely a sign of strength. More often, it is a symptom of fear, emotional injury, or unresolved need. Crossing to the other side—whether from a wounded man, a struggling neighbor, or a suffering people—is not neutrality. It is a learned response to a perceived threat.
And here is where this becomes uncomfortably personal. All of us carry emotional scars. All of us have moments when something inside us whispers, keep moving… don’t get involved… protect yourself. The gospel does not deny this reality. Instead, it asks whether we will allow those instincts to have the final word. Most of us, by grace and practice, find the inner strength to move toward others anyway. And when we fail, the harm we cause is usually limited.
But not everyone holds power in the same way. When emotional brokenness goes unexamined in positions of great authority, its consequences multiply. The refusal to see others as neighbors becomes policy. The inability to need others becomes isolation. Fear, unchecked, becomes cruelty.
What is salient for us isn’t clinical labels—but the observable patterns we all see when emotional immaturity is coupled with power: a low capacity for empathy, a quickness to dehumanize, and an instinct to defend oneself by objectifying others. These are the same dynamics that incline hearts to cross to the other side of the road rather than stop, stay, and care for the wounded.
By the end of Jesus’ story, the question has shifted. It is no longer, Who is my neighbor?
The question is, will I cross to the other side of the road?
The road itself is unavoidable. We all encounter suffering, disruption, and need. We all feel the pull of fear—the instinct to explain pain away, to protect ourselves, to blame the wounded so we don’t have to stop. Scripture does not deny that fear. It names it honestly.
But Jesus tells this story to show us that fear does not have to decide the direction of our lives.
The Samaritan is not fearless. He is formed. He allows compassion to interrupt him. He sees the wounded man not as a problem to solve or a failure to explain, but as a human being to be loved. He crosses the road toward him—and healing begins there. Healing begins when we stop pretending we don’t need one another, when we allow ourselves to be seen and to see, when we refuse to reduce others to their wounds or our fears.
Jesus tells us this truth through stories, instruction, and action: Fear blames. Love heals. And every day—quietly, deliberately—we choose which one will guide our steps.
That same choice confronts us again and again. Sometimes it appears in public debates or national crises. More often, it shows up quietly—in conversations we avoid, judgments we make too quickly, neighbors we pass without really seeing. Each time fear urges us to blame or dismiss, we are given another opportunity to ask a better question: What would it look like to move toward healing?
This week, that may mean pausing when fear feels justified, and blame comes easily. It may mean resisting the urge to explain someone’s suffering instead of acknowledging it. It may mean allowing ourselves to need others rather than insisting on self-sufficiency. Love rarely begins with certainty. It begins with attention.
We are not meant to practice this alone. Emotional and spiritual maturity grow in community—through relationships that slow us down, challenge us, and remind us of who we are when fear narrows our vision. God works through one another to form us into people who can stay present, cross toward suffering, and choose compassion even when it costs us something.
We live in a world where blame is easy and rewarded, where fear is amplified and normalized, where turning away is often mistaken for wisdom or strength. But the gospel tells a different story—and offers a different way: Fear blames. Love heals.
The road will be there again tomorrow. By grace, may we notice it—and may God give us the courage to cross it toward love.
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Pastor Tommy
Nadia Bolz-Weber. Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People. NY: Convergent Books, 2015. (ISBN 978-1-60142-755-7 ).
Richard Wood. “Does Malignant Narcissism Fit Trump?” © Clio’s Psyche, Volume 31 – Number 1, Fall 2024. Retrieved from: link