Who is My Neighbor?

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

July 14, 2013; 8 Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(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."

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You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 

Okay.  Then who is my neighbor?

It’s a good question.  To whom do I have responsibilities?  How should I regard other human beings, near and far?  Where are the boundaries?

These are the kinds of questions that people ask Rabbis, teachers.   A lawyer, like the one in our gospel, was probably not a lawyer as we think of them today, but was probably one who spent his time studying Torah, the law of scripture.  He engages Rabbi Jesus in a typical conversation about the law.  Starting with a question in the traditional manner, “Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

Jesus turns the question back with a question.  Good Rabbinical technique.  “You tell me.  You are the scholar of the law.  What does the law say?”

The law says, "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."

Good answer.  Do this and live.

“But,” says the lawyer.  “Who is my neighbor?”

There was a conventional answer in Jesus’ day.  According to my friends, archeologists and scholars Charles Page and Paul McCracken, the correct first century Rabbinical answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” is:  “Your neighbor is a member of your family.”[i]  The Biblical obligation to “love your neighbor as yourself” was a family obligation. 

The lawyer would have known that.  He would have known entire context in Leviticus 19 where we read the commandment “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Listen to it now.  But try to hear with Jewish ears, hear the tradition of parallelism, where the writing says the same thing twice, using different words.  “You shall not hate in your heart any one of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.  You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself:  I am the LORD.” (Lev. 19:17-18) 

The passage where the love-your-neighbor commandment occurs parallels the word “neighbor” with “kin” and with “your people.”  Your neighbor is your kin, your family.  That’s the traditional answer a Rabbi would have been expected to give.

That’s still a pretty broad obligation.  In that day, families lived together in multi-generational homes, and within a village like Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, the interrelationships might have been so thorough that a liberal interpretation could extend the notion of “family” to the whole village. 

So this lawyer, the Jewish Biblical scholar, expected Jesus to answer him with some nuance of one’s responsibility to love and care for one’s family or one’s extended family or village. 

Surprise.  Jesus tells a story about a hated Samaritan.  Samaritans had been bitter enemies of Jews for more than five centuries.  Samaritans were heretics and unclean.  Think Sunni-Shia in its worst forms.  Jesus tells the lawyer that the Samaritan is the example of being a neighbor.

Jesus tells a story of a naked body on a dangerous highway.  A priest and a Levite were forbidden by Law to approach nakedness.  Ritual contamination from a corpse would render them unclean for their official duties.  From a conventional point of view, they did the right thing by passing on the other side of the street.  They had no obligation to a stranger.  Besides, it could be a trap.

Jesus blows all of the conventional notions away.  In fact, his story is calculated to offend Jewish sensibilities of moral propriety.  Jesus did a lot of that. 

Over and over, Jesus broke down the barriers and boundaries that his careful, moral, ethical, and religious culture had erected, and he widened all of the connections. 

Jesus made direct, intimate connections, first between people and God – passing out forgiveness freely without the need of Temple sacrifice; speaking to God as Abba, a childlike address of intimacy and affection. 

And he made direct, intimate connections among people, especially people who were regarded as “other” – unclean, unreligious, foreign, outsiders, even enemies. 

In some sense, Jesus’ whole teaching had to do with dismantling the various ways we have of making distinctions and creating hierarchies of identity – neighbor and stranger, clean and unclean, good and bad, us and them.  He replaced that whole system of “either/or” thinking with a new way of being. 

We are all one.  We all belong.  All human beings.  Including Samaritans and lepers and demoniacs and enemies.  We are all one. 

And we are all one with God.  Connected in one organic being like the vine and the branches. 

Imagine his eyes looking at you as he looked at the people – diverse crowds, Jews and Gentiles, believers and skeptics – looking upon them with loving compassion and saying to them, (saying to us):  We are all one.  “I am in you, and you are in me,” he said.  And then he connected that human unity with the divine.  “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” and “I am in you and you are in me.”  We are one with God and with each other.  His message is clear.  We are all one, living within the very life of God.

So, when we hear Jesus say, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the context is radically changed.  He’s not just talking about your responsibility to your family.  He’s not even saying “Love your neighbor as much as yourself.”  He’s saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love your neighbor as an extension of yourself, as a continuation of your very own being.[ii]  And he’s speaking universally.

We are all children of God, created by God, from God, in the image and likeness of God.  Every human being is made of the same divine stuff.  We are all expressions of infinite life. 

So when I see a stranger lying naked, half-dead in a ditch, I see not only my neighbor, my fellow human being, I see myself – an extension or continuation of myself lying there in the ditch.  To care for that other, then, is to care for myself.  To love my neighbor as myself.

It’s a completely different way of being in the world.  That’s the radical shift that Jesus announced when he proclaimed the Kingdom of God.

When we look at Jesus we see one who befriended all:  Samaritan, Canaanite, tax collector, Roman soldier, Pharisee, Sadducee, Zealot, widow, leper, slave, sinner, and demonic Gentile living in the tombs.  His empathy and love extended toward every human being.

What if we adopted that world view?  What if we adopted that identity?  Every other human being is one with me, and I am one with them.  I am one with God, and so is every other human being.  We are all extensions of the divine life, expressions of God’s very own being.  How different might we be if we looked at the world that way?

We talked about these things the other night at “Theology on Tap.”  Cynthia Bourgeault’s book The Wisdom Jesus explores these topics.  During our discussion, parishioner Pam Burton shared this quote she heard from author and retreat leader Jim Finley:

   Although I am not God,

      I am not other than God.

   Although I am not you,

      I am not other than you.

   Although I am not the earth,

      I am not other than the earth.

In Christ, there are no others.  We are all one; we are all manifestations of God’s light and life.

So the lawyer asks, who is my neighbor?  How will you answer?

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[i] Paul McCracken, Jerusalem Institute for Biblical Exploration, July 9, 2013, from his weekly email lectionary notes. 

[ii] see Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Shambhala:  Boston, 2008, p. 31

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