"And who is my neighbour?" 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.
(Luke 10:29-33)
I like to hope that Jesus’s
parable maligns priests and Levites unfairly.
Jerusalem to Jericho is to this day a dangerous road. Yes, they should have stopped… we have all
“not done what we ought to have done”.
The Samaritans on the other hand were by no means part of Israel. They were ostracised because they were
different, they had certain different beliefs, and they had their own temple on
Mount Gerizim.[1] In Jesus’s story, the Samaritan, the heretic,
the Untermensch, the inferior, risks stopping
to render generous help. It meant
hanging around on that lawless road. He
had to go out of his way to find a lodging for the injured man… he paid for the
lodging and even said, When I come back
I’ll refund whatever more you spend. That story would have been startling indeed to
Jewish ears.
The story was Jesus’s answer to
the question, Who is my neighbour? My neighbour, says Jesus, is the one who
needs me, or who responds to my need.
My neighbour may be the one I never expected, the one religion has
perhaps ignored or failed or abused or discarded. I don’t cease to be a neighbour, moreover,
because there is nothing practical I can do – neighbourliness begins in coming near, as the Samaritan shows, that
is, a willingness to understand, listen, risk, share pain and anxiety – it
begins in the heart and moves into practical help. The Samaritan, says Jesus, was moved with pity. His first instinct was not self-protection –
although he may have been well aware of that need. The others went by on the other side.
So neighbourliness, Jesus
recognises, doesn’t have sides. In that
way it is God-like. It ignores social walls
and boundaries. My protestant tribe in
my youth was un-neighbourly to the Catholics, for instance, for all our diligent
church devotion and attendance to the Gospel. Some even thought that was righteousness. Jesus demolishes those fences. In his own life he simply ignored them. There are no fences, consequently, in our
silent and still presence to God. If
they emerge -- memories or damage or whatever between us and anyone else – it’s
better not to fight these things, or try to pull down the walls. That would probably be a losing battle. We go back yet again to the faithful, gentle
repetition of the mantra. We restore its
priority in our prayer. It is God who,
in God’s time and way, will bring down the barriers and make peace. Paul wrote it this way: For he
is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down
the dividing wall, that is, the hostility… that he might create in himself one
new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace. (Ephesians 2:14-15)
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