Am I my neighbour’s keeper?

A lawyer asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life and Jesus responds by asking him what is written in the law. The answer given is love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself, which Jesus agrees with. Wanting to justify himself, the lawyer pushes Jesus further: but who is my neighbour? It would be so much easier to keep the law if my neighbour is the one who is like me, who lives in my neighbourhood, and with whom I agree. Unfortunately, for both us and the lawyer, Jesus’ answer is far removed from this. Read it in Luke 10:25-27. The neighbour in the story is the one who shows mercy to the man who has been robbed. Interestingly, the lawyer does not say that the man was a Samaritan. But the answer – the one who showed mercy on him – has some deeper truths.

It shows that the lawyer did actually know who was his neighbour; we are not told how he responded to the parable, but one hopes that he took the message away, rather than rejecting it. The one who showed mercy was unlike the others; it was the one who was despised, and with whom there was little contact. In order to love our neighbour, we must be willing to break down barriers, to befriend those who are not like us, to see beyond our own communities. But to love our neighbour, we must also follow Jesus’ last words to the lawyer: go and do likewise; go and show mercy to those in need. But who are those in need in our society? The answer will be different depending on where we live, but will almost certainly include some people who are beyond our own boundaries, and whom we might be tempted to dismiss. It is so easy to blame others for their own misfortunes; after all, if the man who was robbed hadn’t been travelling on a dangerous road on his own, he wouldn’t have had any trouble, would he? Why should I endanger myself when it was his own fault? These responses say more about ourselves than they do about the one in need.

It can be very tempting to identify our ‘neighbour’ as the one who is like us; the one who agrees with our worldview and lives our lifestyle. It is much more challenging to see those who are different from us as our neighbour; those whom we do not understand, and therefore whom it is so much easier to condemn rather than to love. But it is possible that it is exactly these people whom Jesus is calling us to love in response to the call to love our neighbour as ourselves. It is this which challenges the lawyer: are you prepared to acknowledge that the one who was a neighbour to the man in trouble was a despised Samaritan? Precisely the one who was ‘other’, and whom we need not care about, until this parable tells us we must.

Who are the ‘Samaritans’ in your life? Against whom do we build barriers and walls, to keep our neighbour out? How do we justify excluding our neighbour rather than loving them? Who are the ones to whom we must give mercy … and from whom must we accept mercy? If we claim to be true followers of Jesus, we must examine this question, and prepare, time and time again, to answer the challenge contained in that summary of the law: love the Lord your God and love your neighbour. It starts with love of God, but must never end there. Loving our God must always lead on to loving our neighbour.

In a world which is increasingly connected, and in which we can almost instantly hear about events happening on the opposite side of the world, it should feel easier to stretch our boundaries, and discover more about those neighbours who are not like us. But, increasingly, the opposite seems to be happening: people relate, online and in reality, to those who are like them, and often find out less about those who are ‘other’. Those who are different are ‘othered’ and we can, scarily easily, often find out confirmation of our biases online, whether that confirmation has any basis in truth or not. That is not to say that all those who are different from us are good people, or even people whom we should let into our lives. That is not so. But we should also be careful that we are not excluding others, that we are not passing by on the other side, that we are not allowing those who shout loudest, in whatever means, to dictate what we think.

Any faith which is rooted in the love of the Lord our God, the God who creates, redeems and sustains us, must go hand in hand with the love of our neighbour. Loving our neighbour is rooted in, and flows out from, loving our God. What happens when that love is shattered, or limited by, our notion of who we think our neighbour is? What happens to our relationship with God when we cannot or will not accept the possibility of loving those who we see as ‘other’? Actually loving them may take longer, it is tough, but to completely reject the possibility is to reject those whom God loves.

Our world today seems ever more fractured, with those who wish to exclude others becoming more vocal. In some cases, the ‘wish to exclude’ is taken further, to online platforms or physical violence. We may feel we can do little to love those of our neighbours who are the victims of this behaviour; we may wish to avoid it and pretend it isn’t happening. But it is, and we cannot. Exactly what our response is, I cannot tell you. We can pray; we can stand up against extremist rhetoric; we may even, in some circumstances, be able to bind wounds. But if we are to stand true to Jesus’ call to love our neighbour as ourselves, we must not forget that ‘neighbour’ includes those who are different from us; and that it is these neighbours from whom we may have much to receive.