<a href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=64169906">Luke 10:25-36</a>
Most of you have probably at least heard of the "Good Samaritan." It's a phrase that gets watered down in popular culture to refer to a nice or generous or helpful person. Maybe someone who makes a personal sacrifice to help someone else. But the "Good Samaritan" is quite a bit more than just a general do-gooder.
The parable of the Samaritan is actually Jesus's answer to a trick question from his audience:
<i>Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’
He answered, ‘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 neighbour as yourself.’
And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?</i>
"Wanting to justify himeself--" in other words, looking for an out; looking for an easy rule of thumb; a clear, bright line between someone he must love and someone it would be okay to ignore. Jesus then tells the story of the Samaritan. You can read it at the link above but basically, a nice, presumeably Jewish man falls among bandits while travelling and is left by them for dead. Three people walk by and see him there. Two are fine upstanding, good, holy men. They make excuses not to stop and pass on their way. The third is a Samaritan--someone belonging to a group of people related to the fine upstanding Jews of Jesus's time, but spurned by them for supposedly abandoning the proper way and mixing with other, non-Jews. Samaritans weren't Gentiles and they weren't Jews. The Jews of Jesus's crowd thought they were the worst sort of people because they <i>ought</i> to be good Jews but failed.
So the man on the road and the Samaritan were pretty much supposed to depise each other. Like Palestinians and Israelis; like the KKK and the SCLC; like Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, Jesus's audience is on one particular side of this split--the anti-Samaritan side. The "Good Samaritan" is called "good" specifically because Samaritans are generally presumed bad. He's supposed to be unusual for a Samaritan.
After the story ends, Jesus asks his questioner, "who acted as a neighbor to the man on the road?" The Samaritan of course.
And there is the answer to "who is my neighbor?" The answer is, "whoever needs your help, perhaps most especially if that person hates you and is your sworn enemy and/or vice-versa."
As far as I'm concerned, this story pretty much speaks for itself, as Jesus intended it to do. But if you understand Jesus as a reformer of the religion into which he was born (one among many at a time of great upheaval, multiple reforms, branchings and splittings) is that Jesus is also speaking into that context. Here is where I think this passage is related to the one I wrote about last Sunday--the one I told you came from a longer piece addressing (and hoping but failing to prevent) a schism in the early Church. The point Jesus is making is that stupid stuff that divides people in deathly rivalries has nothing at all to do with what he calls "the Kingdom of Heaven." Who the heck cares whether someone picks wheat and eats it on the Sabbath, even without ritually cleansing their hands? Who, especially, cares if someone keeps the Sabbath perfectly but leaves a fellow human being dying on the side of the road?
The point is that there is not "justification" for leaving anyone out of the category "neighbor." Everyone born under the sun counts. Everyone. Including the person you are absolutely certain doesn't count. In fact, that person is at the top of the list. <a href="http://twinklelittlestar.typepad.com/letter/2007/12/two-questions-u.html">See Lisa on a eerily connected topic)</a>
This is another "hard teaching." How do I accept that the most forgotten, most thrown-away people are my neighbors, given to me by God to love as I love myself? How well do I love myself when I shut down the compassion that would let me love them?
I do see this passage as a call to love ourselves. But loving myself is not the same thing as giving myself an easy out.
These days in particular, I am trying to learn to love myself as much as I love my children. Because my love for my children is ultimately only as perfect or as flawed as my love for myself. I can't feel real compassion for them when I am afraid to open my selfup to the feelings I would teach them to embrace. On a simpler scale, I can't patiently prepare their meals when I'm have a moody blood sugar drop myself (I wish I could get this once and for all, it seems I have to remind myself to eat every day!).
I don't think these various personal reforms (learning to love myself, learning to love my children, learning to love the unlikliest of my neighbors) are tiered or prioritized. In other words, I don't have to be perfect at one before I can move on to the next. That would be a great excuse, wouldn't it? "Sorry, neighbor, I'm too busy learning to properly love myself, I'll get to you when I've mastered that!"
In fact, loving--through action, however grudgingly offered--my neighbors (whether friendly ones like my kids or less friendly ones like the telemarketers who call at 8 pm on week nights) is an exercise of my love muscles that ultimately helps me love myself better, too. I can practice on anyone, any time. I'm not saying I do this well, or at all half the time. But if I remember that encounters with my neighbors are "love exercises" that will eventually benefit me, I tend to make it through the day with a better attitude.
Keeping in mind last week's passage, that "God is love" well, wow. Added to the lessons of this passage, I start to think that God only has a fighting chance of having any effect on this world when we offer God to one another through the practice of love, whether we always "feel" it, or not.
I'm not talking about martyrdom, here! If you are thinking that's what I mean, please return to the bit above about cooking for others when your blood sugar is dropping. Martyrdom is rarely love, it's usually a selfish attempt to make oneself the center of attention. If you're just a pretty happy, well-fed person yourself, you don't get to be the big dramatic, suffering star of the show. There's time and energy to put your love into practice.
It seems more to me like a balancing act that is in constant motion and needing constant adjustment. Not easy. But when I think "love my neighbor as myself" it helps me adjust the balance. Maybe I think "geez, poor neighbor!" and I know I need to attend to myself. Maybe I think "geez, I guess I could forego the new dress I have nowhere to wear anyway and buy a bag of groceries for the food drive." The passage helps me balance.
And when I'm absolutely sure that someone is definitely, certainly, could not possibly be my neighbor...that's when the little bell in my head goes "ding!ding!ding!" and I have something to chew on for a while.
So tell me, who is <i>your</i> neighbor?