“Who Did You Say My Neighbor Was?”

Luke 10:25-37

Robert Frost wrote that good fences make good neighbors. Up to a point that’s true. Boundary lines are firmed up. Livestock doesn’t wander off into the neighbor’s pasture, or heaven forbid, his garden. Fences maintain order and greatly lessen the possibility of conflict.

Healthy boundaries make for healthy relationships. There are certain boundaries that should never be crossed even in cases where the other person is inviting you to cross them. Unless you’ve hiding in a cave for the past twenty years you know that sexual misconduct is an issue in almost every profession these days. Healthy boundaries, like good fences, do a lot to promote a healthy and conflict-free society.

But too much of even a good thing can cause its own set of problems. Boundaries can become too rigid, especially in terms of neighborliness. The discussion between Jesus and the hotshot lawyer in today’s text starts out with the city slicker trying to put one over on the country bumpkin. The lawyer wants to trip Jesus up in public. Turns out that he wasn’t nearly as slick as he thought he was. After a bit of back and forth over the Great Commandment about loving God and neighbor the lawyer asked Jesus, “Just who is my neighbor?”

The lawyer wanted Jesus to define the boundaries between the children of Israel and the Gentile world. He was hoping that Jesus’ definition of neighbor would reveal flaws in Jesus’ lifestyle and ministry by which he could condemn him. He wanted a rigid definition of boundaries: who’s in and who’s out, who’s acceptable and who’s despicable.

Jesus doesn’t directly answer the lawyer’s question. Instead of telling him who is or isn’t his neighbor Jesus teaches him what it means to be a neighbor. As he often did he used a parable, one that all of us probably learned about in our earliest days of Sunday school: the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

We know how it goes. A man traveling between Jerusalem and Jericho gets beaten and robbed by a band of thieves, who leave him on the side of the road to die. A priest sees him lying there and crosses over to the other side of the road. As did a Levite. Why?

Maybe they were afraid of the same thing happening to them? It wasn’t unusual for bands of robbers to leave a victim in plain sight so that they could beat and rob anyone who stopped to help.

Or maybe as religious leaders on their way to the temple they didn’t want to touch a bleeding man and thus render themselves ritually unclean. Their work was more important than was addressing the suffering of another human being. Plus, if they were self-righteous enough, they probably thought that the man got what he deserved. “Stupid man! Didn’t he know the road was a dangerous place?”

“But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with [compassion].” A Samaritan. A lowdown, no good, despicable Samaritan, someone hated by the Jews, had compassion for that man. It was the Samaritan, not the pious leaders of Judaism, who stopped to help that half-dead man. It was the Samaritan who ministered to him and left him at an inn so that he could rest and recover. And then on his way back through paid the innkeeper in full for the man’s lodging. He asked for no reward, financial or otherwise.

And then when the parable was ended Jesus said to the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer said, “The one who showed him mercy.” To which Jesus replied, “Go and do likewise.” In other words, stop worrying about who should or should not be your neighbor and go be a neighbor to all with whom you have interactions: Jews, Gentiles, even Samaritans.

The lesson is clear: we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. But who is our neighbor? Anyone with whom we interact. We don’t have to like them. We don’t have to approve of their behavior. But when push comes to shove we are to show the saving, healing, compassionate love and grace of Jesus. As today’s Affirmation of Faith tells us, “[Our] daily action in the world is the church in mission to the world. The quality of [our] relation with other persons is the measure of the church’s fidelity [to the Gospel].”

Does that mean that we don’t set boundaries? Of course not, healthy boundaries promote healthy relationships within families, churches, and society. Does that mean that we should never build a fence that physically defines where our rights end and our neighbor’s rights begin? No, good fences, properly built, and maintained with loving intentions, do make good neighbors. Good fences always have gates by which neighbors can interact with one another. Usually they’re low enough that neighbors can converse with one another across them.

The Prophet Amos let the people of Israel know in no uncertain terms that their behavior toward one another was most un-neighborly, especially in terms of how the rich built their wealth on the backs of the poor by way of unethical business practices and a corrupt judicial system. As Amos said what God told him to say he encountered resistance, some of it from the highest levels of institutional religion and the royal family. The high priest Amaziah went so far as to tell Amos to shut up and go home. As today’s Old Testament Lesson makes clear Amos replied in some pretty strong language.

N. T. Wright draws a parallel between Amaziah and the religious leaders in Jesus’ parable. “Like those attacked by Amos, [those first century leaders of Judaism], were so interested in protecting their own status that they could not see what that status – being the official representatives of the people of God – was all about, and were actually jeopardizing it. [Amaziah] was the true ancestor of Jesus’ anonymous passers-by…”

The question we need to ask ourselves is, “Are we their descendents?” As we work, usually with the best of intentions, to protect the church and our place in it, do we become so preoccupied that we look past the pain and suffering around us? As we conscientiously attempt to define ourselves as Christians, do we sometimes denigrate those whose theologies differ from ours?

Are we afraid to taint ourselves by interacting with those whom we or our culture have deemed unclean? Are we sometimes guilty of sitting in judgment of the poor, self-righteously telling ourselves they brought their poverty on themselves by way of laziness, ignorance, and foolishness? Are we sometimes so caught up in defending our political or theological positions that we unconsciously believe those who disagree with us are the modern day equivalent of the ancient Samaritans?

Yes, we probably are. That being true we should not only pay better attention to today’s parable told by Jesus, but also to the words of the Apostle Paul in his various letters. N. T. Wright also addresses that. “When Paul greets the young church in Colosse, the feature of their new life to which he draws attention is ‘your love in the spirit’ [in verse 8 of today’s reading]. Paul… hears from his colleague Epaphras, not that certain people have had wonderful spiritual experiences, not that they have learnt a textbook of systematic theology, but that there has come into existence in Colosse a community of people who love one another across traditional boundaries.”

The members of that congregation treated one another as beloved neighbors. Jew or Greek, rich or poor, old or young, male or female, slave or free: none of that mattered. People once enemies were reconciled. People who in the past would never have socialized with one another now spent time together in worship, prayer, and fellowship.

The lawyer in today’s Gospel lesson wanted Jesus to give him a strict definition of who he should treat as a neighbor. Jesus showed him how to be neighborly. Neighbors in Christ love their enemies. Neighbors in Christ show compassion, even to those who very well might be responsible for their own predicaments. Neighbors in Christ practice hands-on ministry even when that means getting their hands dirty. Neighbors in Christ go out of their way and suffer inconvenience in order to be neighborly. Neighbors in Christ care not one whit about maintaining either their own or the church’s image; they simply, lovingly, and in a neighborly fashion are the church that Christ has commissioned it to be.

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man…?” “The one who showed him mercy.” Go and do likewise.” Thus saith the Lord, Amen.