“Won’t You Be My Neighbor

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

Text: Luke 10:25-37

© July 15, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton United Presbyterian Church.

Over in Finland, the government there has come up with a rather unique way of punishing people. For instance, when it comes to punishing people for speeding, they don’t have a set fine. That’s because they figure that if they fined everyone, say $100 for speeding, for lower-income people, that fine might be crushing to them, while for high-income people a $100 fine would mean almost nothing to them. So what they do in Finland is they fine people based on their level of income. As a result, a few years ago one of the richest men in Finland was caught going 50 miles per hour in a 25 miles per hour zone, and he was fined about $204,000. According to the authorities in Finland, their goal is hand out punishments that are equally severe to everyone.[1]

But when it comes to punishing people, what kind of punishment is the most severe? Fining people and taking away their money certainly can be a severe form of punishment. But according to a psychologist by the name of William James, he says that there is an even worse form of punishment that could be inflicted on someone. According to him, the worst possible punishment that could ever be inflicted is for a person to be set free in society but for that person to go completely unnoticed by everyone around them. When that person spoke, no one would answer them. When that person did something, no one would pay them any attention. To go completely unnoticed and unseen by the world around you, that, psychologist William James said, would be the worst possible punishment that anyone could ever be made to endure.[2]

Well, as we read this familiar passage in the Bible, commonly known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we find that very kind of punishment being meted out. We find two people – a priest and a Levite – who come upon a severely injured man, lying by the side of the road, and even though both of them see the man, they choose to ignore him, they choose to look away, they choose to pretend that he’s not really there.

And that sort of thing happened not just back during the time of Jesus, that same sort of thing happens even today. People come across others who are in dire need of help, but instead of doing what they can to assist them, they choose to look away, they choose to pretend that that person is not really there. As a result, to deal with that problem, more and more states have been enacting laws, often known as Good Samaritan laws, that require you, if you come upon another person who is exposed to some danger or has suffered some kind of grave physical harm, to do what is reasonably in your power to help that person. And if you don’t, if you see someone who needs your help and you choose to look away and ignore them, you can find yourself being sent to jail.[3]

But why in this parable did the priest and the Levite look away and ignore that man who was dying by the side of the road? It’s probably not fair to make the priest and Levite out as some cold, heartless, uncaring villains. No, they probably had a reason for doing what they did. Perhaps they kept their distance from the injured man because they thought that he already was dead, and they knew that if they touched a dead body, according to the religious law, that would prevent them from carrying out their sacred duties in the temple.

Or another possibility was that the priest and the Levite kept their distance because they were afraid. You see, that road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notorious for being a hangout for thieves and bandits. And so maybe the priest and Levite thought that that man wasn’t really injured, but that he was lying there as a trick to get their attention, and that when they went over to tend to him, others would charge out from behind the rocks and attack them and rob them.

But it’s also possible that the priest and the Levite turned a blind eye to that man because they weren’t so sure that he was one of them, they weren’t so sure that he was someone who they had an obligation to care for. You see, according to the parable, when the robbers attacked that man, they stripped him of his clothes. And so to look at that man, you weren’t able to tell if he was rich or poor, you weren’t able to tell if he was a Jew, a Roman, or a Samaritan, you weren’t able to tell if he was a friend or an enemy. To look at that man, all you were able to tell was that he was someone who was severely injured, someone who was half-dead. And so the priest and the Levite might have wondered to themselves, “Is this person someone who I’m supposed to care for or not?”

And that’s the basic question that that lawyer was asking when he approached Jesus. His question was: “Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus basically told him, “You need to love God and to love your neighbor.” But the lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” In other words, “Jesus, I’m willing to love other people, but just tell me where I can draw the line.” And in response, Jesus told this parable, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which essentially says that you can’t draw a line. The parable essentially says that if you want to have eternal life, if you want to see God, then you need to see the hurting people around you, whoever they may be, and do what you can to help them.

You see, we often tend to draw lines and say that we’ll help people if they belong to the same group as we do – if they’re a part of the same religion as us, or the same race, or the same country. But God doesn’t let us get away with doing that. Because right there in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, God tells us that whether we think so or not, we all belong to the same group – we all belong to the only group that exists, as far as God is concerned – and that group is that we are all human beings, we are all people who God created and who God loves.

Or to make that point even more specific, listen to what God says in the Old Testament book of Leviticus: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself….” (19:33-34). Now “alien,” of course, as it’s used there doesn’t mean a Martian or a little green man from outer space. Rather an alien is someone from another country who has moved into your country. But even though the temptation might be for the people in a country to treat “their own” one way and the outsider aliens in another way, God says here, “Don’t you dare do that.” Instead, what God says here is that if aliens come into your land, you not only have an obligation to tolerate those aliens, you also have an obligation to love them and to treat them just like you would treat your own citizens.

For instance, last year the federal government was considering passing a law requiring churches and social service agencies to check people’s legal documentation before giving out any kind of help. In other words, if that law had passed, before a church could give someone some food, or some clothing, or let a homeless person into a shelter, they would have to check to see if that person was a U.S. citizen or else had the paperwork to prove that they were allowed to be in the country.

When that law was being considered, Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles said that he would instruct the priests in his diocese to ignore that law, pointing out that to follow that law would be to go against the very heart of what Jesus taught, namely to show love to and care for other people regardless of who they are. He noted that if that law passed, it might even eventually be argued that before people could come forward to receive the sacrament, everyone would have to hold up a birth certificate or Social Security card, since, after all, isn’t giving communion to people one of the ways that the church helps people?[4]

Like that lawyer who went up to Jesus, we also want to know what it will take for us to inherit eternal life, to have the opportunity to see God face to face. And the answer that Jesus gives us is that if we want to see God, we first need to see the people around us, to see the hurting people around us, whoever they may be, who need our help. And even though the temptation might be for us to come up with all kinds of reasons about why we shouldn’t have an obligation to care for people who are outside of our group – however we may define what our group is – Jesus looks us in the eye and tells us about a Samaritan who stopped and helped a complete and total stranger. Go and do likewise, Jesus says. If you really want to see for yourself what eternal life is all about, go and do likewise.