WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?

Luke 10:25-37

The Golden Rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself” which we hear in today’s gospel is not just a Christian thing. Every conceivable religion and culture in the world has the Golden Rule in one form or another. Here is a sampling:

Judaism: “What is hateful to you; do not to your fellow man. That is the law: all the rest is commentary.”

Islam: “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”

Hinduism: “This is the sum of duty: do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.”

Buddhism: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”

Confucianism: “Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you.”

If the Golden Rule was so well-known in ancient cultures why then did Jesus spend so much time teaching it as if it was a new thing? It is because Jesus brought a completely new understanding to the commandment. The Golden Rule is understood differently in different religions and cultures. And the key to its understanding lies in the question that the lawyer asks Jesus: “Who is my neighbor?” Who is my neighbor that I have an obligation to love?

Among the Jews of Jesus’ time there were those who understood “neighbor” in a very limited sense. They understood "neighbor" to mean one's fellow Jew who belonged to the same covenant which God made with the people of Israel.  That was the understanding of this scholar of the law; his question was genuine: Who is my neighbor?” The new thing in Jesus’ teaching of neighborly love is his insistence that all humanity is one big neighborhood. He breaks down the walls of division and the borders of segregation and suspicion that humans erect in the society. To bring home this point he tells the story of the Good Samaritan. Remember that the Samaritans are regarded as Enemies Number One by the Jewish simply because they are Samaritans, and in today’s story, the Samaritan is the one who finally proves himself to be neighbor to the Jewish man in need. To the question “Who is my neighbor” Jesus’ answer is: Anyone and everyone without exception.

There is a lesson for us. We know that for some of us, your neighbor is the one who shares the same religious confession with you. Others would understand neighbor to include only those who share the same nationality or same ethnicity with them. Others will think the neighbor is limited only to those of their social and economic level. Still others will think the neighbor is the family member, or the person they know. So if you are not in that circle, you are not regarded as a neighbor. You are are outsider.

Jesus reminds us that our “neighbor” should include the “nobody” of the society. We need to know that the Christian understanding of “neighbor” admits no borders. Today we are called tear down all the borders we have erected between those who belong to us and those who don’t. The gospel challenges us all to dismantle these walls. Only in that way we will work with Jesus to recreate the world as a neighborhood without borders. Today, Jesus speaks to you and to me those words he spoke to the scholar of the law: "Go and do the same".