Who is your neighbour?
The parable of the good Samaritan seems like a simple story on the surface. We have a person who has run into trouble and has suffered injuries. We have three people who encounter him. Two of them choose to pass him by while the third one takes the time to care. True enough it is a lesson designed to teach us about being compassionate not just to those people whom we know but to perfect strangers. One of the other lessons is to learn that there really are no strangers to God. Every one whom we meet on the street or wherever we may be is not really a stranger but just a neighbour whom we haven’t met before.
But let’s take a closer look at this encounter between the person called a lawyer and Jesus. The person called a lawyer is no doubt a Pharisee. Interestingly enough, the Pharisees were a religious party composed of lay people that originated as a conservative protest movement against what they saw as a dangerous move within the religious leadership to soften their stance on many issues. They were concerned with maintaining strict ritual purity in accordance with the Law of God and would not associate with anyone whom they believed was not as pure as themselves. Their very name in Hebrew means separated or the separators. So this Pharisee who came to Jesus was seeking to determine whether or not Jesus would answer him in a way that would reveal Jesus to be a person who could be trusted to maintain the purity of obedience to the law of God.
The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead even before Jesus spoke of it. But what was a person to do to inherit eternal life and so experience resurrection? This is the Pharisee’s question to Jesus. But Jesus asks him what he believes. He answers by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5. This is known as the Shema and is the basic affirmation of faith of the people of Israel. But the second part of what we have come to know as the great commandment is not in the original in Deuteronomy but the Pharisee knows from his reading of the law that the command to love your neighbour as yourself is a natural summation of so much of the law of God. In fact, the Hebrew people were commanded to receive the outsider and stranger and to allow them to become part of their family regardless of where they had come from.
But while the Pharisee answered Jesus correctly, he wanted to be sure that he clearly understood who his neighbour was. It is at this point that Jesus shares the parable of the good Samaritan. Jesus begins by recounting the basic story: a man traveling on the road has been attacked by robbers and beaten. He is in serious need of aid.
The first person to encounter the man is a priest. Priests in those days had to maintain ritual purity and so to take the time to help the man would have caused him to be impure and unable to perform his priestly functions until he had again purified himself. Arguably, this was not a major obstacle but the priest was thinking more about himself and so made the choice to pass the man by on the other side just in case he might have accidently touched him.
The second person to encounter the man is a Levite. While not having the same status as a priest, he was also a person who would want to maintain ritual purity as he could lose his position at the temple if he found to have come in contact with someone who had open wounds. He also chose to pass by on the other side just to be sure.
The third person to encounter the man is not concerned with ritual purity or position in society or religion. He is a person who sees another person in distress and takes steps to alleviate the person’s suffering. But there is an element of irony to this story. The person who takes the time to respond to the man’s distress is not only an ordinary person with no particular status in the society but he is a person who to the Hebrew people would be seen as beneath them. This person was a Samaritan. Originally the Samaritans were Hebrew people from the northern kingdom. When the exile occurred most of them were sent away but some remained. They intermarried with the people that were brought in to take over the land. As a result, the Hebrew people considered them racially impure and so nothing good was expected of them. Yet this was the person who acted with compassion and showed mercy.
When asked which of these three had proved a neighbour to the man, the Pharisee could see no other choice but to say the one who showed mercy.
So who is your neighbour? Who is our neighbour? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a neighbour as a person who lives near or next to another. The person could be in an adjoining house, on the same street or in the same village. It can even apply to people living in a town adjacent to your own or even to a country next to ours. A neighbour is a person or thing which is in close proximity to another. The Bible takes it even further. Jesus’ use of this parable and the inclusion of the Samaritan as the person who sees the injured man as the neighbour reveals to the Pharisee and to us that we are not to narrow our concept of neighbour to those whom we would naturally reach out to and help. We are to respond to the need of another human being as we are able not because they are of our community physically or spiritually or racially; rather we are to respond to the need of another human being because they are human. Ultimately what is to motivate our response to human suffering is the fact that we are encouraged to love others as God loves us; our desire to receive mercy and compassion for ourselves regardless of who offers it is to be our motivation to offer mercy and compassion to others.
The world is really no bigger today than it was in the days when God walked on this earth as Jesus. The challenges we face to respond to the neighbours in our lives are no more diverse. But just as the past generations struggled with coming to grips with the wider implications of the parable of the good Samaritan, we likewise are challenged to do likewise. By recognizing that all people are ultimately our neighbours, we are challenged to open ourselves up to a dialogue with those who are racially, spiritually or ethically in a different space from ourselves. We will never all be on the same page all the time but we are not to base our decisions to be a neighbour on a set of criteria that support our individual prejudices. We are to embrace the full import of the commandment and see the humanity in each and every person, see the light of God in each and every person and respond to that person’s need with the same mercy and compassion that we would hope and pray another might exercise toward us.
We will struggle with this and that is to be expected. But we are never to give up trying for when we give up, we will abandon any hope of ever understanding the depth of love that is in the heart of God for all humanity!
AMEN