"Who is the neighbor?"

Luke 10:25-37

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 neighbor 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 neighbor?" Jesus replied,

"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

“Who is my neighbor?” This question belongs on the Bible’s list of The Worst Questions Ever Asked in the History of the World. Alongside, “how many times must I forgive my brother?” and “when you come into your kingdom, can we sit at your right hand?” and “am I my brother’s keeper?”, this question lives in biblical infamy.

But this isn’t the only bad question that's asked in our text. The first question is, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well, what’s wrong with this question? Maybe nothing, as far as it goes. But notice, it’s not, what do I have to do to be a good person, or to please God, or what have you. It’s, what must I do to inherit eternal life? What do I have to do to get the reward? But even before the man opens his mouth to ask his first wrong question, we know it’s bound to be grim. The story, after all, identifies the man as “a lawyer.”

At first, Jesus plays the lawyer’s game. He knows the man is just asking to test him. But even so, he answers the man on his own grounds, asking his counterquestion in terms that a lawyer will understand. “What is written in the Law?” Jesus asks him. And the man of course knows the answer, as do we all. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, etc., etc., and your neighbor as yourself.” That’s right, Jesus tells him. A gold star for the lawyer boy. Now all you have to do is go do it: “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

And it is here of course that the story really gets going. Because in answering the lawyer on his own grounds, by accepting the premises of the lawyer’s wrong question, Jesus leads him straight into the point at which his question and assumptions are all wrong. The lawyer knows the answer to his question. The lawyer knows the Law, knows the Good. The lawyer knows what Jesus will answer, even. The lawyer knows a whole lot. But what Jesus knows, that the lawyer doesn’t, is that knowledge isn’t enough. Knowing the answer is not really the answer. The real answer, to the right question, is not about knowing the Good. It’s about doing it. “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

The lawyer knows he’s caught. As are we all. You may have heard, perhaps, of the “famous seminary experiment of the Good Samaritans.” The experiment was designed to test whether or not people thinking “helpful, religious” type thoughts would be any more likely to stop and offer assistance to someone who needed it. So the researchers recruited seminary students, told them to give a talk on the Good Samaritan, and made them late for it. Then they said, “hey, you’re late—you better get going” and placed a slumped-over man, coughing and moaning, in their way. Less than half of the students stopped to offer any help…and apparently some of them literally stepped over the man in the alley in order to get to their destination and give their talk on the Good Samaritan.

This appalling truth about humanness is why Jesus corners the lawyer with his simple and indisputable pronouncement: “Do this and you will live.” Know this, and only know it, and you’ll know what it is you lack, the exact dimensions of your failure. But do this, and you will live.

The lawyer, the seminary students in a hurry, all of us, we’re all caught, we’re all cornered. And so the lawyer, advocating for himself (or perhaps all of us), wanting, as the Bible tells us, to justify himself (or all of us), hastens to ask that desperate, infamous follow-up question.

“And who is my neighbor?”

We all know the parable Jesus tells in reply; we know it by heart. A wounded man, a priest and a Levite (the seminary students of their day, if you will), and a Samaritan ( perhaps today's devout Muslim?). Jesus’ strategy in reaching the lawyer changes with the telling of the parable. At first, he accepted the legalistic question, leading the questioner straight into the absurdity of the divorce of knowledge and action. But the lawyer pushes on, even further into the absurd--preferring, apparently, to be absurd rather than wrong. He’d rather be silly than stupid, rather be ridiculous than repent. And so Jesus tells a story, and at the end, as he so often does, instead of answering the wrong question asked of him, he asks his interrogator a right question instead. Not “who is my neighbor?” but “which of the three was a neighbor to the wounded man?”*

The difference between these two questions is vast. “Who is my neighbor” can only be answered in one way, with a list of who is not: not Samaritans, not wounded men on the sides of roads, not homeless people with a hacking cough, not people in Africa dying of AIDS, not people I don't know, not those people who need so much help that I don’t have time in my busy schedule to give, or any idea how to really help them. But “who was a neighbor to the wounded man?” is not answered that way. And the lawyer--smart man!--gets this answer right, too: he answers, “the one who showed him mercy.” Who is the neighbor? Not the wounded man; the Samaritan! Because the answer to Jesus’ question is that one makes oneself a neighbor—not somebody else.

And how? By being a neighbor to that person. The answer to the right question is not an identity; it is an action. This is why it is no accident that the neighbor in Jesus’ story is a Samaritan, a despised person, a reject, an outcast. It’s not identity that makes a neighbor.

Making oneself a neighbor is active. No, more than that—it is proactive, a preemptive strike of neighborliness. The wounded man does nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. He just lies there, wounded. It is the Samaritan who acts: who approaches, binds his wounds, takes him to the inn and provides for further care. The Samaritan makes himself the neighbor to the wounded man through his actions. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus concludes: Go and make yourself a neighbor to the wounded.

But—like the lawyer—I have a follow-up question to ask. What if this were a different story, one we don't know by heart, one where there was no good Samaritan to stop and help—just a priest and a Levite who walk by, and a wounded, abandoned, dying man on the road? Were there no good Samaritan in the story, what would we say? That the wounded man had no neighbor because no one made himself a neighbor to the man? Maybe that would be true, but it’s also only partially true, which means of course that it’s also a lie. Because, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story” is that all three travelers should be neighbors to the wounded man; that all three are neighbors to the man, even if only one of them acted like it.

The truth is, the wounded man does not just do nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. Sure, he doesn't do much. He just lies there, wounded. But that's exactly it. It is his woundedness that makes the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan his neighbor. It is his need that puts these passers-by under obligation to respond to it. Were he not wounded, they would have passed on the road with a nod and a smile, or perhaps less than that. But he is wounded. He is in need. And the neighbor must answer.

The priest and the Levite pass by on the far side of the road. That is their answer. But the Samaritan, Jesus says, “came near” the wounded man and “when he saw him he was moved with pity.” I imagine that he saw the man’s face, and that the wounded man’s glance was one of both supplication and demand. Begging: please help me. And commanding: you must help me! The wounded man has the right to make this demand, simply because of his need.**

Who is the neighbor? Does the Samaritan make himself the neighbor through his neighborly act, or does the wounded man make the Samaritan his neighbor through the fact of his need?

Like all either-ors, to pose the question this way is to present a false dilemma. Yes, the woundedness of the wounded man makes the Samaritan his neighbor; yes, the action of the Samaritan in being neighbor to the wounded man makes him his true neighbor. What we learn from this parable is both of these things. What we learn is not just that the Samaritan comes through as the true neighbor, the one who showed mercy, but that the priest and the Levite fail, utterly, because they refuse to recognize their obligation to the wounded man’s need.

Do we understand their failure? If we’re honest with ourselves: yes. We are too often the priest and the Levite of the story who pass by on the other side of the road, the seminary students of the experiment, who step over the fallen man in the alley. We are stuffed full of knowledge of the Good and so preoccupied with it that we have forgotten that Good is not something you know, it’s something you do. Or perhaps we might even say, God is not something you know; God is something you do.

We live in a wounded world. It’s a world full of wounded people on the sides of roads full of busy people walking by them. We are the neighbor, with the power to help and to heal. Those wounds make us the neighbor. The only question left is, do we act like it. Do we?

“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." We, too, can give the right answer. And Jesus tells us: "Do this, and you will live."

Let us pray together the Prayer of Confession:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your name. Amen.

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that we may both know and understand what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



*from Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: “The parable of the Good Samaritan ends with the famous inversion which Christ makes of the original question. They asked him, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ and when everything seemed to point to the wounded man in the ditch on the side of the road, Christ asked, ‘which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his neighbor” (198).

**from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity : “The gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving—this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches in a dimension of height” (75).