Which one of these was a neighbor?
When you drive into Corning from the south on what is now
Interstate 86, on a hill above the roadway is a large series of letters
spelling out “Christ is the answer.”
From as early as I can remember I would look at that sign
and wonder, “What is the question?”
During my brief evangelical days in college, I learned to say,
“Every.” Jesus is the answer to every
question. I suppose that is right in a
way, but as I have read the Gospels more and more over time it seems to me that
Jesus is not so much concerned about being the right answer to every
question. Jesus is concerned with asking
the right question to begin with.
Frequently “the answer” that Jesus gives us is to change the question.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan begins with a
question. A lawyer asks Jesus, “Teacher,
what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
I good question for us to ask is, Where did that question
come from? The text says it comes from a
lawyer. In Jesus’ day that means it
comes from someone who knows biblical law backwards and forwards, a little
different than a lawyer in our day. This
is a scholar going toe to toe with one he calls “Teacher.” And the text implies that his motives are
less than pure. He “stood up to test
Jesus.” He has an agenda, although we
are not made privy exactly to what that agenda is.
The question he asks is a peculiar one. It sounds like a perfectly normal religious
question to us, but it would not have been in Jesus’ day. “Eternal life” is not a great concern of the Jewish
Bible, the Old Testament, as we call it.
In Luke’s Gospel up to this point it is also not a major concern. It is a mystical question, a metaphysical
question, a question about the state of life transcendent, beyond the things of
this world.
Characteristically, Jesus does not answer his question, but
asks him to answer it for himself. That
is one reason why the sign below Corning is a bit simplistic and even
misleading. Jesus was rarely “the answer
guy.” The sign might better be, “Jesus
is the question.”
The lawyer gives the answer it would have been obvious to
give. He speaks the summary of the law
found at Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.
An interesting side note. He adds
to Deuteronomy 6:5. That verse tells us
to love God with three things: all our
heart, soul, and strength. The lawyer
adds “with all your mind.” I think that
is a significant addition. God wants us to love him with our minds.
I suspect Jesus hoped that would end the conversation, but
also wasn’t surprised when the real trap was set. The lawyer has a follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?”
This question was not a new one. It was as old as the text
of Leviticus itself. To whom do I have
this obligation to love equal to myself?
It is a very important question because human nature has a tendency to
choose up sides. Much time is spent in
the Book of Deuteronomy, for instance, defining who is to be excluded from,
driven out of, the land. And of these
nations, it will be said in the Book of Joshua, Israel is not to mix with
them. So the answer in many people’s
mind to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” was a fellow Israelite, or at least
a proselyte, a non-Jew seeking to follow the Jewish tradition.
Again, Jesus does not answer the question. He tells a
story. Again, perhaps the sign below
Corning might better say, “Jesus is the story.”
It is a story that is known well, and the hero ends up
being a non-Jew, a Samaritan, generally despised by Jews. It was brave of him just being on that road
outside of Samaritan territory, and to linger on it should a lack of
self-preservation. Nevertheless,
compassion ruled his actions.
When the story is ended, Jesus his “answer” with a final
question. “And who was a neighbor to the
man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
Now noticed how Jesus has changed the question? We have gone from a question about the state
of the eternal soul to one about showing mercy to those in need. We have gone from a question about me and the
state of my soul to my neighbor and the state of his body. We have gone from the mystical to the
practical. Who have gone from a question
about how we can please God to what we are called to do to those around of us.
In
short, we have learned that the two parts of the commandment—loving God with
all that we have and our neighbors as ourselves is, in fact, the same
commandment. Luke emphasizes this in
that he does not have the lawyer give numbers to the two commandments, like is
normally done. “And the second is
like unto it…” Luke wants us to know
that loving our neighbors is not a second commandment like loving our God, it
is the same commandment as loving our God.
It is impossible to do one without doing the other.
Jesus has changed the question and, in one sense, ended up
where Moses did. Moses said,
This commandment is not too hard for you…No, [it] is
very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to do it.
And Jesus answers the question with the same verb,
Go and do likewise.
It seems to me that the George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin
story is an anti-parable for our times about this very thing. We are so conditioned to assume that the
stranger is our enemy, a threat to us, especially if that person is a young
black male. And people can say that
there are plenty of reasons for that, although every single person who has ever
threatened me has been a young white male.
The bottom line is that we have created a world in which
“threat” is assumed and not “neighbor.”
Jesus wants us to take the risk—and I absolutely believe he knows it is
a risk and sometimes a great one—to assume the stranger is a neighbor and not a
threat. How different would it have
turned out if George Zimmerman had assumed Trayvon Martin was a neighbor and not
a threat.
This is a huge part of the work of conversion that we are
to be about in this world. When we think
about what it would mean to convert the world, we think about the lawyer’s
first question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” But the work of conversion Jesus does with
the lawyer is to help him change his perspective on who his neighbor is and
what it means to be a neighbor. Isn’t it
time we got evangelical about that?
Jesus' vision of the kingdom is a world of neighbors. Actually it is a world of neighborliness,
being a neighbor, an action not a concept.
And, like everything else, it starts with me and you doing what we are
called to do, even when it is hard, and helping others to do the same, even
when it means they must change the way they perceive the world to do it.
Kurt Vonnegut was once addressed by a young man at a
symposium, “Please tell me it will all be okay,” which is a kind of way of
asking about eternal life. Vonnegut
replied,
Welcome to Earth, young man. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the
winter. It’s round and wet and
crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got
about a hundred years here. There’s only
one rule that I know of: Goddamn it,
Joe, you’ve got to be kind.”[1]
[1]
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 107.
Quoted by Douglas John Hall in David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown
Taylor, eds., Feasting on the Word: Year
C, Volume 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), p. 240.
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