Who is My Neighbor 7-13-25

Who Is My Neighbor?

Deut 30:9-14; Luke 10:25-37

Deut 30:9-14

and the Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors, when you obey the Lord your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Luke 10:25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Prayer – God who continues to come for us and find us on the road, we give you thanks. For your grace in reaching out and stooping down to us, before we knew how to reach toward you, for your caring for us in our need, for the way that you bind up our wounds and restore us, we give thanks and praise. For resisting us when we are at our most self-centered and selfish, for calling us to fulfill outrageous assignments that we think are too great for us, we give thanks – amen.

I wish life wasn’t so hard. But storms can remind us that we are on this journey together. And we need stories. Stories to remind us that we are here. Now. And there are choices to be made. The invitation to say, “Yes”, to compassion, hands to hold, people to care for, hearts to hug, spirits to mend and wounds to heal. And say, “No”, to cruelty, and intolerance, and dismissal. So. It’s story time. Pull up a chair.

“Every Christmas I used to go home to west Tennessee,” Fred Craddock tells the story in “Craddock Stories”. “An old high school chum of mine, I called him Buck, had a restaurant in town, every year it was the same. I’d go to the restaurant, ‘Merry Christmas Buck,’ I’d say, and he would give me a piece of pie and a cup of coffee for free. Every year it was the same.

I went in, ‘Merry Christmas, Buck.’ But this year he said, ‘Let’s go somewhere for coffee.’ ‘What’s the matter? Isn’t this a restaurant?’ ‘He said, ‘Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder. Let’s go.’ So we went for coffee. We sat there and pretty soon he said, ‘Did you see the curtain?’ I said, ‘Buck, I saw the curtain. I always see the curtain.'”

Now what he meant by curtain was this: they have a number of buildings in that little town that are called shotgun buildings (we saw them in New Orleans). They’re long buildings with two entrances, front and back. One is off the street, one is off the alley. In Buck’s restaurant and other restaurants in town, the entrances were separated by a curtain, with a kitchen in the middle. If you were white, you came in off the street. If you were black, you came in off the alley.

“He said again, ‘Did you see the curtain? The curtain has to come down.’ ‘Good, bring it down.’ He said, ‘That’s easy for you to say. Come into town once a year and tell me how to run my business.’ I said, ‘Okay, then leave it up.’ He said, ‘I can’t leave it up.’ ‘Well then, take it down.’ ‘I can’t take it down.’ After while he said, ‘If I take that curtain down, I lose a lot of my customers. If I leave the curtain up, I lose my soul.'”

I don’t know how you do a moment of silence on paper. But I do know that a moment of silence is called for after this story. So, we need to sit with it, just for a spell. And then ask, in what way does this story invite me to (borrowing from John O’Donohue) “live this day compassionate of heart, clear in word, gracious in awareness, courageous in thought, generous in love?” Even if it may be uncomfortable.

We all know the commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s at the heart of our faith. Although it is associated with Jesus, it was the heart of the Jewish faith long before Jesus’ day. It’s not even unique to the Jewish and Christian traditions. Every world religion advocates compassion for one’s fellow human beings. Jesus just set the bar about as high as it could go. He insisted that we treat all people as brothers and sisters, as beloved children of God, as persons of value and worth. That means regardless of where they live or what they wear or whether they went to school or even have a job. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” includes everybody.

When Jesus said to love your neighbor, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbor. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something on the order of: "A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever."

Instead, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the point of which seems to be that your neighbor is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you. The lawyer's response is left unrecorded. 

I believe this is the essence of the gospel lesson for today.  Unfortunately, the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” has become so commonplace in our society as to lose the impact it would have had in the ears of Jesus’ original audience. These days we have made this parable so tame that travelers even have a club named “The Good Sam Club,” whose members pledge to stop and help someone who is broken down on the side of the road! But in Jesus’ day, there was no such thing as a “good” Samaritan in the eyes of most of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries. Samaritans were the “unclean Samaritans,” the “unwelcome Samaritans,” or the “hated Samaritans.” And although Jesus’ fellow Jewish men and women very well knew the command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” those kinds of attitudes make it clear that the vast majority would never have thought to view a Samaritan as a “neighbor” whom one must love as oneself.

  That’s what made the parable so shocking in the ears of Jesus’ original audience. It would have been one thing for Jesus to tell a parable about a particularly righteous Jewish person who showed mercy toward a Samaritan. That person would have been viewed as exceptionally compassionate, but the story would have left intact the Jewish people’s sense of ethnic and spiritual superiority over the Samaritans. In other words, it would have been a story that would maintain the assumption that Samaritans aren’t normally included in the list of people they were supposed to love.

  But that’s not the story Jesus told. Jesus made a despised Samaritan the hero of the parable. More than that, Jesus made him the example for Jewish people to follow if they wanted to obey the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” That was turning their world upside down. The outcast became the ideal for those who viewed themselves above him. That would have been like making a terrorist into a spiritual example for us to follow. It was shocking; it was confusing; it was offensive to them. There would not have been many who heard this parable who would have signed up to be part of a “Good Sam” club.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, preached about the Good Samaritan frequently. And like most of us, King understood that this parable makes clear that the Samaritan, the one who does not pass by, the one who risks himself and gives of himself, is the true neighbor of the wounded traveler. 

King, noting that the merciful stranger was of a different race* than the wounded traveler, also notes that he lives by a different principle from that of the robber or the passersby. This Samaritan, this good neighbor has somehow come to know that "What is mine is thine." Like Albert Schweitzer, peace corps volunteers, and those working and marching and dying for civil rights, the Samaritan understands that "all humanity is tied together." Neither predators nor passersby can be safe in a world where misery, famine, plague, and hatred are the scourge of millions. These ills are contagious, you know...

"He who lives by this philosophy lives in the kingdom NOW!", not in some distant day to come. This is the witness of Jesus, "who said in his own life 'what is mine is thine, I’ll give it to you, you don’t have to beg me for it.' This is why the cross is more than some meaningless drama taking place on the stage of history. In a real sense, it is a telescope through which we look out into the long vista of eternity and see the love of God breaking forth in the night.... It is God saying 'I will reach out and bridge the gulf that separates me from you.'"

For King, the Samaritan neighbor has flipped the implicit question asked by the passersby (what will happen to me if I help?) and acts on the question "what will happen to the wounded stranger if I don’t help?" It is this, and his effective action to render aid, take the wounded traveler to safety, and subsidize his treatment that makes the Samaritan a good neighbor.

In our current context, there is a movement to disabuse compassion and empathy as signs of weakness, as signs of being ‘woke.’ And here we have Jesus teaching us again about what will happen to our neighbor if we don’t help. It is a deeply critical and important question if we intend to be the people God calls us to be. Who is my neighbor? And what will happen to my neighbor if I don’t help? How you, me, all of us answer those two questions says a lot about who Jesus is to us and who we are to the world. May God bless us with seeing and caring and loving as he does – thanks be to God – amen.