How to be a Neighbor

Like most folks who have read (and in my case, preached on) the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37, I always thought the point of the story was Jesus answering the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor.” But after reading David Young’s excellent book, “Systems, Salvation, and Solidarity,” I have come to see his view that the real questions Jesus wants to invoke in this story are, what does it mean to fulfill God’s command to love your neighbor and am I being a good neighbor to everyone I encounter?

To understand this properly, you need to read Luke 10:25-37 in light of Leviticus 19:1-18.

Well, don’t just sit there! Go read those passages and then come back here.

Ok, glad you’re back. The first thing I want you to note is that when the lawyer responds to Jesus’ question, “What is written in the Law?", the lawyer replies, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind"; and, "Love your neighbor as yourself.”

"Love your neighbor as yourself" is the summation of the Leviticus passage I asked you to read. Note that it begins with a passage about keeping the Sabbath. Thus, I think it is fair to say that our state and federal legislators who refuse to raise the minimum wage and thus force many of our lowest-paid workers to hold down two or more jobs and work a seven day week just to afford the barest necessities are not being good neighbors to the working poor. And they certainly have no right to say they want America to be a Christian nation when they force people to work a seven-day week to survive.

If you think about the "harvest" passage starting at verse nine in Leviticus as an instruction for the wealthy to provide for the poor among them, then the "neighbor" is the poor person, whether citizen or alien, who needs our assistance to survive. We love our neighbors by making sure their basic needs are provided.

I think we can extrapolate from verse 13 that for a business owner to be a good neighbor to his employees, he or she must pay them a living wage. Verse 14 tells us that we must not, like our past president, shame the physically disabled but instead be a good neighbor to them by removing stumbling blocks that keep them from thriving. In verse 15 we see that a judge is a good neighbor when he shows no partiality based on class in his rulings. And in verse 16 we are told not to do anything that might endanger a neighbor's life. When the Thumpublicans in Congress and the White House did away with some of OSHA's workplace safety regulations and the EPA's environmental protections were they not endangering the lives of their neighbors, their fellow citizens? And in so doing, were not these self-proclaimed Christians flagrantly disobeying the command of the Scripture to love their neighbors as themselves?

End of my rant. Thank you for reading it all.