Who Is My
Neighbor?
Ps 82; Lk 10:25-37[1]
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.
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.”[2] 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.[3]
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.[4]
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.[5]
The Youth and Adults of the Presbytery of the New Covenant
spent two weeks this Summer serving the poor and homeless population of
Austin. One of the key themes that the
volunteers and staff there continually emphasized to us was that we were not
working “for” them, but “with” them.
Whether it was washing clothes, or distributing food, or praying about
their needs, the point was that in serving the poor and homeless people we met,
we were recognizing that we are all equally loved in God’s eyes. We’re all equally valued from the perspective
of a merciful Creator and loving Redeemer.
I think it’s the same point Jesus was trying to make in his parable, but
it’s a point we may not want to hear. We
may be more comfortable with “working for” them, because that maintains a sense
that we are superior to them.
In Austin we learned that approximately twenty percent of
the population there lives at or below the poverty line. As defined by the federal government, that
means persons with $11,000 per year or less to live on. In Austin there are about 400,000 people
living in poverty. But we don’t have to
go to Austin to find people living in poverty.
In the Houston metro area there are about 6 million people. And it was estimated in 2009 that about
twenty-eight percent of the population of Houston are living at or below the
poverty level.[6] That’s about 1.7 million people! If you took the entire populations of
Pasadena, the Clear Lake area, Pearland, Baytown, League city, Texas City,
Galveston, La Porte, Friendswood, La Marque, Deer Park, Galena Park, Dickinson,
and Santa Fe, that would only be roughly half of the number of our
“neighbors” who are living in poverty in Houston.
They are all around us if we will only open our eyes and
our hearts to them. The question for us is whether we will do that. Will we continue to favor those like us or
will we “Give justice to the weak and the orphan” and “maintain the right of
the lowly and the destitute” as the Psalmist calls us to do?[7] I would say that is one of the Hebrew Bible’s
definitions of “loving your neighbor as yourself.” But in order to love our neighbors living in
poverty, we have to first recognize their humanity. We have to recognize the humanity of the
homeless, the refugees, the migrant workers, and the single moms and elderly
retirees on welfare in order to love them enough to truly work with
them to improve their well being. That’s
where compassion starts. This requires more of us than just feeling sorry for them,
or giving money to causes that support them.
It requires recognizing “that every human face is the face of a
neighbor.”[8]
[1] ©
2013 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 7/14/2013 at First Presbyterian Church of Dickinson, TX.
[2] Cf.
Fred Craddock, Luke, 151: “This man who delayed his own journey,
expended great energy, risked danger to himself, spent two days’ wages with the
assurance of more, and promised to follow up on this activity was ceremonially
unclean, socially an outcast, and religiously a heretic.”
[3]
The question “who is my neighbor?” betrays
the selfish desire to restrict the range of “love” to those who are just like
“us.” Cf. Darrell Bock, Luke 9:51–24:53, 1018, 1021, 1028, 1035, where he points out that the
important question, according to this parable, is not “who is my neighbor?”,
but rather “how can I be a neighbor to others in fulfillment of God’s command?”
[4]
Cf. Naim Ateek, “Who Is My
Neighbor?” Interpretation 62 (Apr
2008), 156: “So long as we divide the world and our own communities into
friends and enemies, neighbors and strangers, we feel no moral obligation
towards those whom we have already designated as outsiders.”
[5] Cf.
Robert Funk, “How Do You Read? A Sermon on Luke 10:25-37,” Interpretation 18 (Jan 1964): 61: ““The parable of the Good Samaritan is a language trap which
the lawyer could not comprehend. He asked a straightforward question; he got an
enigmatic answer. Jesus in effect is saying: If you knew what love means, you
would not have asked the question.” Cf.
similarly, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Luke
X-XXIV, 884: while the point of the story is that a neighbor is “anyone in
need with whom one comes into contact and to whom one can show pity and
kindness, even beyond the bounds of one’s own ethnic or religious group,”
Jesus’ final question turns the lawyer’s effort to justify himself on its
head. The point is not define the
“neighbor” as the object of mercy, but rather to define one’s own attitude and
actions in terms of being a neighbor
as an active effort to show mercy to others.
Cf. also Karl Barth, Church
Dogmatics 1.2:419.
[6] See
the data at http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Houston-Texas.html. The Houston Chronicle reported a lower rate
of approximately 24 % in 2011. See Renée C. Lee, “Houston
poverty up, but so is income across the city: Local census data show mixed
economic signals,” The Houston
Chronicle September 19, 2012;
accessed at http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Local-census-data-show-mixed-economic-signals-3879028.php.
[7] Cf. Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 60, where he defines this kind of
compassionate justice in terms of recognizing “the intrinsic claim of every
person to be considered a person.”
[8] Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer, reprinted inMinistry and Spirituality, 134. Cf. also
Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 97-98, where he says, “Fellowship with the crucified one cannot be lived
in any other way than in fellowship with the least of [his] brethren.”
