Who Is My Neighbor?

The lawyer asked Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds, “What is written in the law?” The lawyer replies, “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,” Jesus tells him that this is right, and that he should do so. The lawyer then asks, as many have before and since, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the familiar Parable of the Good Samaritan, an answer that is both oblique and perfectly clear.

This is my take on the lesson.

The lawyer’s first question was excellent, as it engaged Jesus directly with the core of his message. His second question, however, was self-serving and inappropriate. We take Jesus’s parable as if it was an answer to that second question, and allow this to confuse us. I believe Jesus is actually giving his answer to the first question, the right question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Let me first back up a step, and ask, ”What is eternal life?” For many, it is is singing with the angel choir for all eternity in the great by-and-by. It’s a pleasant thought, and if it is so, I hope they have use for an enthusiastic tenor. But my concern is what eternal life means for me now, in the present, in this mortal life. I believe it means living life in communion with the eternal God.

In the parable, the Samaritan accepts a surprisingly broad definition of “neighbor,” and so makes a choice to live in communion with God, to see a broken, naked man through God’s eyes as his neighbor, rather than as a personification of an ethnic group that despises his. He makes a choice for eternal life in this life. 

And what then of the priest and the Levite who didn’t help? They made a choice too. They made a choice to not to live in communion with God in the moment, not to see that broken, naked man through God’s eyes, even though they shared with him a Jewish identity. Isn’t that choice, the choice not to live in communion with God, even for a moment, the definition of sin?

The Better Part

This article originally appeared as a Faithoughts in the Faith Lutheran Church of Homewood's newsletter of July 31, 2025.

This thought is based on Luke 10:38-42, Jesus’s visit to Martha and Mary, the Gospel lesson for July 20th.

Jesus visits the sisters Martha and Mary. Mary joins the conversation with Jesus, leaving Martha to contend with the burdens of hospitality for herself. Martha becomes exasperated, and asks Jesus to send Mary back to help. Jesus declines, “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

This is my take on the lesson.

Roman-era Jewish society was strongly patriachal, which is to say, a society controlled by men. The status of women was scarcely better than lifestock. A woman without a male protector — usually a father or husband — was in danger of being taken by whoever wanted her. She was under her protector’s control, with no agency of her own. 

There are those who think that if the Bible, and especially the New Testament, describes a particular social arrangement as common among the Jews, it affirms it. In particular, the cultures (Jewish, Roman, and Greek) that Jesus addressed directly were in varying degrees patriachal. Many American Christian Churches have a strong pro-patriarchy message. But Jesus was not sent into the world to condemn or affirm it, but to save it, and saving it requires changing it. I read this lesson as an anti-patriachy proof text.

Martha in this text appears as someone reconciled to the role assigned to her by the patriachal system in which she lives. The system requires her to provide food and drink for her guests, and prevents her from joining in their conversation. Mary breaks from patriarchal expectations and joins the conversation around Jesus. Martha, in her exasperation breaking slightly from the “speak only when spoken to” expectation of those lower in caste in any social system, asks Jesus be the patriachy’s enforcer, denying Mary her agency, sending her back to the kitchen. Jesus refuses, granting Mary the right to her own agency. “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” 

How different the words and actions of Jesus are from those of many who claim to speak in his name! 

Entitlement

St. Paul writes, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” [Rom 7:19, NRSV]. This familiar tension is sometimes represented in popular culture through the image of two tiny angels, one God's, one Satan's, whispering into the opposite ears of a conflicted soul. God's angel calls us to do what we should do, to act accordingly to God's will. Satan's angel is too wise to call us to act according to Satan's will, but instead preys on our sense of entitlement, our self-serving belief that we deserve the things that we want, and that we should have them despite the consequences. Satan's angel does not have our best interest at heart.

We do not often have angels whispering into our ears, but there are many voices in our culture telling us that we are entitled to this, or deserve that. Articles have been written about how the language of advertising has shifted from need, to want, to deserve. The science of persuasion has found our sense of entitlement to be the weakest part of our defenses.

I find it disconcerting when someone says that I'm entitled to something, and am immediately skeptical. I've internalized the language of our confessions, know that I am a sinner, and that the wages of sin are death. That's all I'm entitled to. That's all any of us are entitled to. Remember this when someone tries to appeal to your sense of entitlement. Don't live in fear, though. It is our good fortune to know that our judge is also our savior, who we know loves us, and will judge us on the basis of his love for us, not on the basis of our sin. As Jesus has loved us, we should love one another.

America, the Beautiful

 A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited our daughter’s family. Along the way, we saw farms and forests, rolling plains and majestic mountains, corn fields and cattle ranches, grain elevators and stockyards. 

In Colorado, we visited Paint Mines, a natural wonder that I’d never heard of before. You might google it, and look at the photographs. It is a place of stunning beauty, comprising multi-colored layers of clays that have eroded into canyons with fantastical spires, caves, and other formations. As we were leaving the Paint Mines, in the afterglow of encountering this majestic beauty, we saw a pickup truck, decorated with decals unambiguously proclaiming the white supremacist beliefs of its owner. The conversation changed.

America is a beautiful, and complex place. As we walked through Paint Mines, we encountered many other groups of visitors. They all appeared perfectly civil, and the closest thing to anti-social behavior we observed were people climbing on the formations in defiance of the signs and potential for damage, in search of the perfect selfie. Most of the groups were white, but there were groups of Hispanic visitors and at least one African-American couple. Except for that truck, there was no visible indication of racial animosity. But the truck was undeniable witness to the animosity held by some.

The extent to which white supremacist views have become normalized over the past few years shocks me. Perhaps they were kept in check by the World War II generation, who understood Nazism as politicized white supremacy and wouldn’t abide it. I remember the sense of shock when KKK leaflets began to appear in local south-side communities a half-dozen years ago. Now, such things hardly raise an eyebrow. I believe we have a particular responsibility to stand against the rising public manifestations of white supremacy. 

Our faith calls us to believe in “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and that “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” We remember the story of Acts 8, that the first Gentile convert to Christianity was a black man. Black lives matter.

One in Six

I write an occasional article for my congregation's weekly news email. Here's today's:

On World Refugee Day this past June 20th, the ELCA tweeted this message from the Lutheran World Federation: “At the end of World War II, 1 in 6 Lutherans were refugees.” It's a statistic intended to strip away the veil that divides us from today's refugees.

Those Lutheran refugees were among the ethnic Germans expelled from East Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia under the Potsdam Agreement. These were areas from which the Nazis had intended to expel Slavic people, creating “Lebensraum” (“Room to live”) for their own. The one-in-six statistic cannot help but also remind us of the fraught history of Lutheranism in Nazi Germany, and of the complicity of many German Lutherans, and of the active participation in the Nazi movement of more than a few Lutherans.

As Lutheran Christians, we prefer to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the other saints of the Confessing Church, who opposed the Nazis at grave personal risk and sacrifice. But the sad truth is that the anti-Semitism that Hitler tapped into was latent in Luther's later writings, and so was in the Lutheranism of his day. We have unclean hands as a denomination, but have tried mightily in the years since to redeem ourselves from the sins of that era. We have told ourselves, with a conviction that comes from never having been tested, “It could not happen here,” and joined others in saying “Never again.”

Our test has come. There are concentration camps in our country today, where people demonized by our country's political discourse are imprisoned. It is happening again. It is happening here.

And if today's camps are not the industrial death camps of the Third Reich, they are places where basic sanitation is neglected, and where people are crowded into pens with too little water, too little shelter, and too much heat. They are places where death is invited and places where death comes.

And we, as American Lutherans, must speak. “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:34, NRSV)

“The Bishop's Cross”

Former readers of Lutheran Surrealism may remember Wendy Hoke, a.k.a. “WW.” She is in the process of writing a book describing her experience of sexual abuse, of the silence of those who knew, and of her subsequent healing. It promises to be a powerful book, of interest to many. For more information, please consult her site on Publishizer, and consider supporting her work.

In as much as the rhetorical question has been asked...

Yes, I do care.