July 14, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

Neighbor Come Near

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 82
Micah 6:6–8
Luke 10:25–37

“But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.” Luke 10:33 (NRSV)

Love is not a principle which we apply, but an event in which we are involved, person to person, creature to creature.

Douglas John Hall

A stay-at-home mom, an accountant, and a lawyer were asked “How much is two plus two?” The mother replies, “Four!” The accountant says, “I think it’s either three or four. Let me run those figures through my spreadsheet one more time.” The lawyer pulls the drapes, dims the lights, and asks in a hushed voice, “How much do you want it to be?”

The pervasiveness of lawyer jokes reveals a stereotype that lawyers will bend the truth if it will benefit their clients and in turn themselves. We know this stereotype is unfair. We have many excellent lawyers as members of Fourth Church who serve the cause of justice and whose work to defend clients is highly commendable. But the lawyer we meet in today’s scripture account does not really seem interested in the truth. He poses a question for the purpose of testing Jesus. Maybe he just got out of law school and had this question on his final exam and wanted to see if Jesus knew the answer.

The lawyer asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus threw the question back at him: “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” The lawyer recited, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus affirms his answer and says, “If you do this, you will live.”

Preacher Clarence Jordan wrote that the lawyer’s response went like this:

‘Oh . . . now, I didn’t mean I was gonna live by it. I just love to quote it.’ You know how some people quote scripture. They don’t mean any harm by it; they love to hear it. They just don’t want to live by it. And the lawyer began to pick a little flaw. You know, lawyers can get you by hittin’ on technical details. So this lawyer said, ‘Well, there’s one little point there that needs clarifying. Who is my neighbor?’ (Clarence Jordan and Bill Lane Doulos, Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation, pp. 133–134)

Jesus again doesn’t answer the question the lawyer posed. Instead he tells a parable. Clarence Jordan said,

A parable is something you use when the situation is very dangerous. You hide your truth in it; it’s sort of a literary Trojan horse. . . . Jesus used that kind of Trojan horse technique under certain circumstances . . . when the situation was dangerous, and when his hearers were difficult. When they would just stop up their ears and shut their eyes, and they wouldn’t hear and they wouldn’t see. Jesus would bring out a Trojan horse to ram it through their ears and get it beyond their blind eyes. (Clarence Jordan and Bill Lane Doulos, Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation, pp. 38, 40)

The parable of the Good Samaritan is so familiar to many of us that it no longer carries any surprise like a Trojan horse. But not so for Jesus’ hearers. Jesus chose the characters in his story carefully: a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan. The Jews and Samaritans were of different races and held strong prejudices against one another. Levites were descendants of Levi whose bloodline authorized their roles as religious leaders. Priests also provided religious leadership. Once upon a time there was a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan. To make this parable more contemporary, let’s take the example Clarence Jordan and Bill Lane Doulos use and say there was a preacher, a minister of music, and an African American man.

All encountered a person who had been robbed, beaten up, and left for dead on the side of the road. As the preacher whizzed by the beaten man on the side of the road in his car, his homiletical mind probably made the following outline: 1. I do not know this person. 2. I do not wish to get involved in any court proceedings. 3. I don’t want to get blood on my new upholstering. 4. I would be embarrassed to be seen with this man. 5. A minister must never be late for a worship service (and he was going to preach that evening on “God Is Love”) (Clarence Jordan and Bill Lane Doulos, Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation, p. 134–135).

The minister of music was also on his way to the worship service. He saw the injured man, but he had told the choir to meet him half an hour early so they could rehearse the song “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” so he passed him by.

Then along comes the African American man. He sees the wounded person, stops his car, gets out, and goes near him. He might have said something like, “Somebody’s robbed you. Yeah, I know about that; I’ve been robbed, too. And they beat you up bad; I know. I’ve been beat up, too. And everybody just went right on by and left you hurting; yeah, I know–they pass me by, too” (Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation, p. 136).

The one who stopped could have been a Muslim refugee or an undocumented worker from Mexico or a high school dropout or anyone our society would be surprised to have lifted up as a role model. Jesus’ point is that it is not what one believes, nor one’s vocation, religious affiliation, social status, class, or race that defines who is a loving neighbor. It is one’s actions. A loving neighbor is anyone who sees another who is suffering, allows one’s heart to be moved, and does something to help.

Loving your neighbor is not an abstract concept, a theory to analyze or affirm. It is an action, a response to brothers and sisters that gets us involved. We are called to do whatever the situation requires. If the hotel where you try to drop off an injured person won’t take her, find somewhere that will. If your money isn’t enough to cover her medical expenses, get help from others and work for a health care system that covers the most vulnerable. If more people get robbed and beaten up in the neighborhood, work for safety and for more economic opportunities in the community. If you’re too busy with your own agenda to respond to the needs of your brothers and sisters, you need to realign how you use your time. Love your neighbor, and you will live.

Jesus answered the question “Who is my neighbor?” by describing what a loving neighbor does. He didn’t bother defining or setting limits on who is our neighbor. We may wish he had, because if he had defined who our neighbor is, then we could also say who our neighbor isn’t.

The needs of others can be overwhelming. Some of us, every day we work or shop in the city, walk by more than one panhandler on the street wanting money. We probably all have the experience of being inundated by mail requests for money for many important causes. Watching news reports online or on television, we see grieving people in Iraq, Syria, and Haiti. Are all of these people our neighbors? How are we called to love them? We have our limitations, and we may struggle with compassion fatigue or a sense of helplessness.

We can legitimately question whether the most helpful thing we can do for the homeless on the street is to give them money. We should assess whether our acts of charity truly honor the dignity of others and assist them to progress beyond poverty. But what we must not do is allow our hearts to grow numb and turn to stone so we do not respond at all.

The first thing the Good Samaritan did was see the man lying by the road, bleeding. He saw him. That’s the first important step—opening our eyes and hearts to truly register that another is hurting. Sometimes even a person close to us may be hurting and we don’t see or hear it—in our own spouse, our own children, our own coworkers.

Then there is the larger world of pain we do not see. We are assisted in not seeing it. Governments hide flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers. Networks keep us from seeing what our bombs do to civilians. Stories of persons shot and wounded in our poorest neighborhoods don’t make the news. The city doesn’t want to hurt tourism, or we have just gotten used to it. The first thing is to see, truly see, our neighbor.

Of course, the priest and Levite saw the wounded man, too. So loving our neighbor takes more. The Samaritan allowed what he saw to move him with pity. He refused to accept that one just gets used to seeing people along the road half-dead. His heart was broken open. And then he took action. It wasn’t just enough that he saw and that he had feelings of compassion. He did something.

One of the purposes of the church is to help us see, have compassion, and take action to love our neighbors. You can help prepare community meals on Sunday and Monday evenings. We are actually looking for people willing to take on more of a leadership role in coordinating those efforts, so let me know if you feel called to explore this. You can tutor; you can mentor a someone who is a member of a gang; you can advocate for an increase in the minimum wage. You can pressure corporations to stop using tax loopholes to decrease what they pay the state, thus decreasing resources for the most vulnerable. You can befriend someone in prison; you can help refugees and immigrants settle into their new life in this country; you can push for reform in our immigration policies. You can support families around the globe by purchasing fair trade products and investing in microlending. You can address the problem of human sex trafficking by providing managers in nearby hotels with information on how to spot traffickers and report suspicious behavior. You can fund internships for at-risk youth at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm so they will more likely find a job in the future. You can support the Cameroon American AIDS Alliance to educate pastors and their congregations about what truly spreads AIDS.

God will guide and strengthen us to be loving neighbors when we refuse to be blind and pass by and instead come near and be moved to action. Do this, and you will live.