In Luke 10:25-37 Jesus is talking to a religious leader — a lawyer —about what it means to be faithful. Together, they review the Jewish scriptures (Leviticus 19:18): The way to live right is to love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. Looking for a loophole, the lawyer wants to know who qualifies as a neighbor. Jesus answers by telling him The Good Samaritan Story about a man who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead by a marauding gang. A priest and another religious man walked by and, seeing the man on the ground, they did nothing. But a Samaritan — a mixed-race person considered in ancient times to be an impure enemy of the Jewish people — did not cross the street. Instead, he tended to the wounded man. The moral of Jesus’s story is that the despised Samaritan is the good neighbor — thus, The Good Samaritan!
In using this story to answer his companion’s question about the definition of neighbor, Jesus was getting to what He considered to be the essential laws — love God with all you have and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells the story to make the point: What you think is outside, God has put inside. The Samaritan is more inside the boundaries of what is good and pure and loving than the passersby who is a religious leader, no less, and who did not stop to help the bleeding, beaten man on the street. In telling this story about a hated, mixed-race Samaritan doing a good deed, Jesus is disrupting the idea of borders and boundaries. If you want to know what love looks like, Jesus is saying, here it is: Love crosses borders and boundaries; it makes new cultural rules; it cares for the stranger. Love turns strangers into friends. Fierce love is rule-breaking, border-crossing, ferocious, and extravagant kindness that increases our tribe.
Dear friends, we all need to think deeply about what Jesus is saying, including me. We live in a culture today that has largely tossed out this essential commandment, this essential law of Jesus Christ. As a Christian we are compelled to love everyone without passing judgement. This kind of Divine Love does not require that we agree with every lifestyle choice or perspective and opinion expressed by the beloved. But love unconditionally we must do or we cannot call ourselves a Christian. For in any relationship, fierce love causes us to cross boundaries and borders to discover one another, to support one another, to heal one another. Fierce Christian love requires that we love others as Christ loves us. When we do this, when we go crazy with affection, and offer wild kindness to our neighbor across the street or across the globe, we make a new kind of space between us.
We make space for discovery and curiosity, for learning and growing. We make space for sharing stories and being changed by what we share. This is the space of the border, of mixed race. We can learn to see the world not only through our own stories, through our own eyes, but also through the stories and worldview of every other person we meet. We simply must open our eyes, look across the room, the street, the division, the border — and reach out to that neighbor, offering our hand, our compassion, and our heart.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.
From the Bible:
“Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word:
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” Romans 13:8-10.
“Judge not, that you be not judged” Matthew 7:1.
“If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well” James 2:8.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful” 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.
“Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love”
1 John 4:8.
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