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Who Is My Neighbour?
by Captain
Christopher Button
A Reflection on Luke 10: 25-37
Love God with all we are and love our
neighbour as ourselves. This is the whole of the Law. To be
obedient to God means obeying those commands. But sometimes
simplicity is complicated. The expert in the Law wanted to
justify himself. He knew what the Law said. But he tried to
justify his behaviour by asking who his neighbour was. He was
probably a bit unsure about how well he loved his neighbours.
Deep down, he probably knew the answer already. But he is like
us. He wanted an excuse for not obeying the two love
commandments. Just like we do. Just like the Serpent in
Genesis. “Did God really say…?” Is the same kind of question
as “Who is my neighbour…?”
Jesus is having none of it. Jesus gives
the lawyer a parable. We normally think of parables as a story
with a meaning. A helpful and handy way to teach. However,
John Caputo offers a different approach. He says that a
parable is like a projectile which punctures our projections.
Jesus uses parables to lure us into a false sense of security.
Then, with a twist in the tail of the story, our expectations
are turned upside down. The puncturing of our assumptions
reveals the truth. A truth which should have been obvious
anyway. This is what Jesus does with this story.
We know the story, but familiarity
sometimes means we stop paying attention. The road from
Jerusalem to Jericho was famous for being so dangerous that it
was called the ‘Way of Blood.’ It’s a long, winding, and steep
road. It is about 18 miles long, starting at Jerusalem,
roughly 2300 feet above sea level, and finishing at Jericho,
800 feet below sea level. The listeners would not have been
surprised that the traveller had been robbed and beaten on the
‘Way of Blood.’
Then we have the Priest and the Levite.
Two people associated with the Temple in Jerusalem. Both are
religious figures. Both are expected to follow the Law
properly to be able to do their jobs. Numbers 19:13 says that
anyone who touches a dead body is unclean. For the Priest and
the Levite, being unclean means not being able to serve in the
Temple. The Jewish audience knew this. The religious pair were
good, obedient followers of God’s Law. However, the Jewish
audience would also be aware of the oral interpretation of the
law. The Rabbinic Mishnah made exceptions for neglected or
abandoned bodies so they could be properly taken care of.
They could have used the Law to justify
helping the man or equally to justify avoiding the man. Just
like the lawyer, they wanted to justify themselves. They put
more weight on completing their religious duties than taking a
risk with their spiritual purity by checking on the possibly
dead body. They walk by on the other side of the road to keep
themselves pure at the expense of the person in need. Their
religious ethics were more important than a broken and
bleeding body. But for the audience, that was understandable.
For Priests and Levites, it was even to be expected. They were
doing what they were meant to do.
Then comes a Samaritan onto the scene.
The hated Samaritan. For Jesus’s
audience, the Samaritan is the bad guy. They would never guess
that the Samaritan would be helpful. They probably guessed
that the Samaritan would rob the poor man again. The
Samaritans were the descendants of the Northern Kingdom of
Israel. But they had inter-married during the Assyrian
occupation. They worshipped the same God as the Jews. But they
did not share the same books of the Bible. They worshipped in
different places. They used different prayers. They were
similar enough to be hated. The Jews destroyed the Samaritan
temple on Mount Gerizim. But the Samaritans desecrated the
Jewish temple by putting human bones in it just before
Passover. Jews and Samaritans hated each other. The Samaritan
would only make things worse.
Except he doesn’t.
Along comes the Samaritan. The
Samaritan is not worried about breaking the Law, even though
he also follows the Law. He puts the needs of the wounded
person above his religious needs, caring for the person,
spending money on him, and making sure he’s okay.
Jesus asked the student of the Law who
the neighbour was. The lawyer couldn’t even say ‘Samaritan.’
Instead, he said, ‘the one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus
commanded him to go and do the same. This is where our
familiarity with the story lets us down. We sometimes fail to
understand who our neighbour is.
Like the lawyer, we want to know who
our neighbour is. We ask the question even though we already
know the answer. Sometimes, we think a neighbour is someone
who lives near us or someone like us. Other times, we might
think that everyone is our neighbour. But none of this is what
Jesus is saying. The neighbour is the person who shows mercy.
The person in need is not the neighbour. The neighbour is the
person showing mercy.
A neighbour is not a status a person
possesses. People are not neighbours because they are not me.
I become someone’s neighbour when I show mercy to them, when I
care for them, and when I love them. Someone else becomes my
neighbour when they are in need. This should fundamentally
change how we see the world. Jesus commands us to love our
neighbour. Who is our neighbour? Not everybody, but the person
in need.
The oppressor, the abuser, the tyrant –
these are not our neighbours. They are fellow children of God,
in need of Jesus, but they are not our neighbours. The people
they are abusing, oppressing, and dominating are our
neighbours. We are called to love them, which means caring for
them, serving them, and showing them mercy. Loving the
neighbour is not a neutral activity. It means taking sides.
Loving God means loving the neighbour,
and loving the neighbour means actively caring for the person
in need. This is a challenge for all of us, but one that Jesus
has commanded us to fulfil.
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