Loving THAT Neighbor

The Neighbor Next Door

I vividly remember the neighbors who lived next to us when we first got married. We were renting a townhouse that shared a wall with another townhouse. The neighbors were young like us. But beyond that, we didn’t have much in common. They’d play video games with loud music well into the early morning hours (which I may or may not have reciprocated with loud piano playing a time or two). They would have a charcoal BBQ and then throw the coals over the fence into our backyard. They would set off their 4th of July fireworks in our driveway and not clean up the mess.

The Kingdom Comes Near

Luke 10 is a fun passage to study when you’re wrestling with the idea of loving your neighbors. It starts out with Jesus sending 72 disciples into surrounding towns and villages to share the message: “The Kingdom of God has come upon you”.

Now, if you read verse 10-16 the wrong way, you could come to some weird conclusions about how we’re supposed to share this message. You might get the idea that you’re supposed to go in and condemn people who don’t choose to receive the message of the Kingdom. But, that’s not what’s happening.

First, we have to understand that when Jesus sent the 72 out to share the Kingdom, he sent them with peace and healing. He said “whenever you enter a house, first say, ‘May peace be on this house’.” Then he told them to heal the sick in that town.

They come back rejoicing. But we’ll see that they’re focused on the wrong things. Which is what we tend to do. They said to Jesus “even the demons submit to us in your name!” They loved the authority that came with the power of Jesus’s Kingdom. But Jesus said, “Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names stand written in heaven.”

Is there power in God’s Kingdom? Definitely.

Is that the point? No.

How do I know? What comes next.

The Question Behind The Question

There’s this expert in religious law who decides to stand up and test Jesus. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus replies with a question: “What is written in the law, how do you understand it?”

The expert replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind.’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”

Jesus simply responds, You’re right, do this and you will live.

But that was good enough for the expert.

And this is where we usually get ourselves in trouble, misinterpreting the sending out of the 72 and those 7 verses.

The expert wanted Jesus to draw a line. If you just look at it without any cultural connotations, you’d still ask for a line. “Who is my neighbor?” I mean, certainly not every human being on the planet qualifies as being my neighbor, right?

So this guy wants to justify himself. “Tell me Jesus, where is the boundary? How far do I have to go? Who must I include to be considered obedient? Who can I exclude? Can I define this command in a way that makes me look religious?”

And this time, instead of answering with a question, Jesus answers with a story. The one we affectionately call the Good Samaritan, without even thinking about what that means.

The Samaritan Problem

To a Jew, there was no such thing as a Good Samaritan. Every Samaritan was bad. The Jews considered them religiously corrupt, ethnically suspect, and socially untouchable. This wasn’t just a mild disagreement about when it was appropriate to play video games and how loud your music could be. This was generations of ethnoreligious contempt, where bloodlines, choices about worship, history, and identity are all tangled up in hatred.

To the Jews, the Samaritans were the “wrong kind of Israelites.” When Jews had to travel to the other side of Samaria, many would walk around Samaria instead of walking through it. This would add 20+ miles to their trip, which is two extra days of walking. We’ve traveled a lot across the country, and even driving a car, I wouldn’t add that much extra travel time to our trip just to avoid some people.

So, in this story, we have a Priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan, which sounds like a setup to a bad joke. A priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan walk into a bar. The priest says, “I’m just passing through.” The Levite says, “Same.” The Samaritan says, “Of course you are.”

This religious leader wants to know who his neighbor is, and through this story, Jesus paints two of the most revered people in Israel as villains and uses the actions of the despised Samaritan to exemplify what it means to be a good neighbor.

In fact, Jesus asks the religious expert a question: “Which of these three do you think became a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

Which meant the religious leader, who likely despised Samaritans and probably did his fair share of indoctrination as to why they were so despised, had to answer Jesus’s question with: “The one who showed mercy to him.”

Notice, he couldn’t even say Samaritan. But that’s to our benefit, because it gives us more understanding of being a neighbor. Mercy.

What About Us?

According to Jesus, the way to fulfill the command of loving your neighbor like yourself is to show mercy to someone in need. Not just mercy like a cup of cold water. The Samaritan in the story went to great lengths to help the man who had been robbed, beaten, and left for dead.

Notice that Jesus doesn’t define the “man.” The man is just a man. Not a Jewish man or a Samaritan man. Which was probably intentional. Mercy isn’t supposed to be offered only after we have identified whether someone belongs to our group. Our neighbors aren’t just “one of us.” It’s everyone.

Peace. Healing. Mercy.

So, who is MY neighbor?

• The one I’ve been taught to fear.
• The one I instinctively dismiss.
• The one I assume is dangerous, stupid, corrupt, brainwashed, hateful, etc.
• The one I refer to as a category instead of as human.
• The one I would rather walk around than toward.

The Ways We Justify Walking By

We live in a time where it seems almost every group has learned how to justify walking by. The left can justify walking by because the wounded person is too conservative. The right can justify walking by because the wounded person is too progressive. Christians can justify walking past other Christians because we don’t share the same doctrine. We don’t call it hatred. We call it discernment, conviction, boundaries, wisdom, safety, truth, not enabling. Some of this is wise, most of it we use an excuse not to love.

But what if we’re all wrong?

What if it’s as simple as Jesus said to the religious expert? “Love your neighbor as yourself”?

No, it’s not easy. It’s not easy to love that person who is spewing hatred in your direction. It’s not easy to love that person who is actively trying to undermine the thing and/or person you love deeply. It’s not easy to love someone you think is destroying this or that. It’s not easy to love someone who has tried to hurt your family.

It’s not easy.

At all.

No Exceptions To Love

But nowhere in the New Testament are we given exceptions to this command. Sure, we are given some wisdom about what love should look like.

• Setting boundaries with someone who is harmful IS wise as long as it’s not being used as an excuse to not love.
• Disciplining someone who is unrepentant may be necessary, but we don’t stop loving them.
• Refusing to enable laziness or exploitation…
• Avoiding foolish arguments…
• Exposing false teaching…
• Calling evil what it is…

The New Testament gives us many reasons to be wise, careful, discerning, etc. But it never gives us a category of person we are supposed to stop loving. Including our enemies – whom we’re supposed to pray for and bless (Matt 5:44, Lk 6:27-28). There may be people we have to confront, separate from, not trust, refuse to enable, but there are no people we are allowed to dehumanize.

Go And Do The Same

And here’s the thing. Loving your neighbor IS connected to eternal life. The question Jesus was answering with this parable was: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” This isn’t just a preference. This isn’t an interpretational disagreement. No Christian can get away from this teaching. Even though we try. We become like the religious expert, looking to Jesus to say, “Certainly you don’t mean EVERYONE is my neighbor.”

But they are.

We might reply to Jesus and say, “Certainly THAT PERSON isn’t my neighbor. Certainly it’s okay for me to not love THEM. You know what they did to me. You know how they treat me. You know who they are. Certainly, I don’t have to love THEM.

But I do. We do.

Who was the neighbor to the man on the road?

The one who showed Him mercy.

Go and do the same.

(Luke 10:36-37)