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?