Do unto others

“Do unto others” names the Golden Rule: a call to measure one’s treatment of others by the care one would hope to receive. In the novel, its biblical wording opens a chapter that brings Michael and Angel to a church, where Angel’s memories of humiliation make the rule’s moral promise collide with her experience of cruelty and unanswered prayer.

Biblical Form and Placement

The chapter opens with the words, “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them,” identified as coming from Jesus in Matthew 7:12. Set before the scene of Michael and Angel traveling home with their purchases, the epigraph supplies an ethical frame for what follows: the question is not only what belief says about goodness, but how people act toward someone who has been treated as less than worthy of it.

The Church and Angel’s Objection

Michael stops at a small church on the way through town and invites Angel inside. She is reluctant, and the people who look up at their late arrival intensify her discomfort. Her refusal is rooted in childhood memories: boys who insulted her and her mother also attended Mass with their families, appearing scrubbed and respectable on Sunday mornings. Their religious observance did not prevent them from tormenting her. Angel therefore tells Michael that she will never sit in a church.

Mercy, Suffering, and the Rule’s Tension

Michael answers that God had nothing to do with the boys’ cruelty. Angel counters that God did not stop it either, and asks where the mercy Michael reads about was when her mother received none. The Golden Rule’s appeal to reciprocal care thus meets a concrete moral challenge: religious language cannot, by itself, undo the harm Angel recalls or answer why the vulnerable were left unprotected. The scene gives her objection its force without resolving it through argument; Michael remains silent for a long time.

Recurring Biblical Interpretations

The chapter’s epigraph belongs to a wider pattern in which biblical language shapes Michael’s understanding of his marriage and his response to Angel’s suffering. He recalls the story of Hosea and Gomer as a possible parallel, while Angel answers that story with sarcasm and suspicion, imagining its ending as punishment rather than redemption. Elsewhere, Michael’s anguish over Angel’s childhood abuse becomes a direct questioning of God, and Angel later asks whether God is playing a horrible joke on him when their hopes are tested. The Golden Rule therefore stands among the novel’s religious expressions not as a simple resolution, but as an ethical standard against which human cruelty and the problem of suffering remain visible.