Luke 10 Again- Who Is My Neighbor?

Yeah, I know, I already posted about Luke 10 last week. But there’s more I want to say, so consider this a bonus post. ;)

I want to write about the parable of the good Samaritan. But I don’t want to focus on the parable itself, although it does a fantastic job of making a point about who was neighborly and who wasn't. No, I want to focus on the lawyer who was talking to Jesus. Jesus agreed with the lawyer’s assessment that the Law instructs people to “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.” But after that, Luke tells us that the lawyer, “desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’”

That is what I want to talk about.

The summary of the Law all sounds great and wonderful and poetic in theory, but then we start thinking about how we practically apply it and we want to know who, exactly, our neighbor is. Surely Jesus means that our neighbors are the people around us, the people who agree with us theologically or politically or in other ways, the people we’re comfortable with, the people whose lifestyles look like ours. Right? If so, we’re probably doing a pretty good job of loving our neighbors as ourselves—because, after all, it isn’t hard to love people who are like ourselves!

But if Jesus actually means that our neighbors also include the people we have nothing in common with, the people we don’t like and who don’t like us, the people who make us uncomfortable, the people whose lifestyles are nothing like our own—if those people are the neighbors we’re supposed to love like we love ourselves, well, we’re screwed. In that case, many of us have done a crappy job of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

So we, too, seek to justify ourselves, asking “Who is my neighbor?” We are so good at explaining why we just can’t love that person the way Scripture tells us to. "I’m a Christian, I can’t be seen with the drug addicts or the homosexuals or the sex offenders or the Wiccans or the Democrats (or the Republicans)! People might think I’m approving of them!"

But guess what? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: that is exactly what Jesus meant. They are our neighbors. Do we love them as we love ourselves? We might say we do, but what if someone asked them—would they say that we love them as we love ourselves? Because saying it with our lips and living it with our lives are two very, very different things. We can say it until we're blue in the face, but if we're living it then our neighbors- all of them- will know that we love them.