My internet service has been out since last Saturday. I have been occupying myself by writing a series of reflections on Jesus’ teaching and example. Like the sermons that I preach and the homilies that I write, these reflections are not only for visitors to this blog but also for myself. They are reminders of how God desires my fellow Christians and I to live, love, and serve.
In the Great Commandments, or the Summary of the Law, Jesus gives as the second great commandment, Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself.’ In response to the question of a lawyer, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.
In the parable a man is waylaid by robbers who beat him, steal his valuables, and leave him for dead. Along comes a priest of the Temple. He sees the man lying in the road, crosses to the other side of the road, and hurries past what he assumes is a corpse. The Jews believed that touch a corpse rendered them ritually unclean. A ritually unclean priest would not have been able to perform his duties in the Temple until he had purified himself. Purifying himself would have been inconvenient since it was a length process. The priest has no desire to inconvenience himself by touching a corpse of a man who was not his kin and under the ritual rules and regulations of Judaism he had no duty or obligation to touch. He goes on his way, leaving the man for the wild beasts, flies, and beetles. The priest may have feared for his own life since the robbers might still be about.
After the priest has disappeared around a bend in the road, along comes a Levite. The Levite takes a closer look at the man than did the priest. The man is in bad shape, but he is still breathing. The Levite decides that tending a dying man would be too much of a bother. While he was tending the man, the man might die from his injuries, and he would have the inconvenience of purify himself from handling a corpse.
No thought of showing compassion to an injured man enters the mind of the priest and the Levite. They were more concerned with keeping the ritual rules and regulations of their religion and the inconvenience that they might suffer if they touched a corpse than they were showing mercy to a fellow human being, to a fellow Jew.
When the Levite has disappeared around the bend in the road, a third traveler comes along. This traveler is a Samaritan, a resident of Samaria, the former kingdom of Israel, which was conquered by the Assyrians. When the Assyrians conquered the kingdom of Israel, they transported its inhabitants to other parts of their empire as was the policy when they conquered a kingdom. They left some members of the lower classes to work the soil. They resettled in the kingdom of Israel people from another part of their empire. These people intermarried with the remaining Jewish population and adopted their religion. Their sacred scripture was the books of the Law. They believed that Mount Gerazim, and not Mount Zion in Jerusalem, was the site of the original holy place where the children of Israel had offered sacrifices to God when they settled in the promised land. Their descendants were the Samaritans. The Jews viewed the Samaritans as a mongrel race and hated and despised them. The Samaritans returned the enmity of the Jews.
Does the Samaritan cross to the other side of the road and hurry past the injured man? No, he stops, and tends to the man’s wounds, puts the man on his donkey, and takes him to the nearest inn. At the inn the Samaritan pays the inn take care of the injured man. He tells the innkeeper that if the money which he has given the innkeeper does not cover the man’s expenses, he will compensate the innkeeper on his return trip. Here Jesus concludes the parable. He then asks the lawyer, “Who was neighbor to the injured man.” The lawyer responds, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus instructs the lawyer to go and do likewise.
We do not know what happened to the injured man. We can only speculate. Did the man recover from his injuries, or did he die? Did the innkeeper once the Samaritan had gone on his way turn the injured man out of the inn to fend for himself, pocketing the money that the Samaritan had given him to tend for the injured man? Did he tell the Samaritan that the injured man had recovered and gone on his way? Did he tend the injured man until the Samaritan returned? Jesus did not provide these details. While they may intrigue us, they are not essential to the parable.
The thrust of the parable is that we are neighbor to everyone, and everyone is neighbor to us. It does not matter who they are, whether they are people like us, or people different from ourselves, whether they are friend or stranger. We all are neighbor to each other.
In the Old Testament a neighbor is someone like us, a brother or a sister, a kinsperson, a member of our tribe, one of the children of Israel, but not in Jesus’ teaching. In his teaching Jew, Samaritan, and Gentile are all neighbor to each other.
What then does it mean to love someone? It is a phrase with multiple meanings. It can mean to be fond of someone, to feel warm affection for them, to feel goodwill, kindly feelings, toward them.
It can mean to be enamored of someone, to be inspired with love for them, to be made fond of them. It can mean to have feelings of tenderness and love toward someone; to have great love or liking for them; to dote upon them—to be passionately fond of them.
It can mean to care for someone, to feel concern for them, to take an interest in their wellbeing, to see to their safety, health, and comfort; to look out for them; to protect them, to tend them lovingly.
It can mean to treat someone with kindness, respect, and trust; to be honest and straightforward with them; to regard with deference their personal boundaries; to listen to them; to put ourselves in their shoes; to be sensitive to their feelings; to give them the benefit of the doubt; to treat their ideas and opinions with consideration, not dismissing them out of hand; to forgive them when they wrong us; to make things right with them when something comes between us and them; to own up to the part that we played in a misunderstanding; to recognize that we both can be right and wrong; to help them whenever we can; to encourage them; to support them; to be there for them when they need someone; to sympathize with them; to take pleasure in their personal growth and their accomplishments.
It can mean to take delight in someone. It can mean to admire someone, to like to see them, to enjoy their company.
It can mean being intimate with someone, to be closely acquainted with them, to be familiar with them. It can mean being open and vulnerable with them. It can mean sharing our most intimate thoughts and feelings with them, sharing ourselves with them.
It can mean treasuring someone as dear to us, keeping them in our heart.
In our culture there is a tendency to confuse sexual attraction to someone with love. While sexual attraction can be an element of love, sexual attraction and love are not the same thing. We can feel sexual desire for someone without feeling love for them. Sexual attraction may fade over time, but a couple may continue to enjoy a loving relationship because the more lasting elements of love in that relationship have grown and flourished.
Loving our neighbor, loving others, goes well beyond just being nice to them,
Just as there are many ways of understanding what it means to love someone, there are many ways to love our neighbor, to be neighbor to them. The apostle John ties our love of others to God’s love of us. God himself is love and we love because God first loved us. Our love of others flows out of God’s love of us. Jesus himself drew a connection between our love of others and our love of God. In loving others, he taught, we show our love of God.
Loving our neighbor, loving others can be very challenging. They may not trust us. We may have unintentionally offended them. We may have said and done things that displeased or distressed them. We may not have responded to their words and actions in ways that others have responded to them in the past, leaving them anxious and confused. We may have incurred their dislike.
They may have personality characteristics and annoying habits that do not make them particularly attractive and loveable. They may be domineering, ill-tempered, judgmental, and opinionated. They may be always finding fault with other people, and when something goes wrong, they are the first to shift the blame to someone else. They never accept responsibility for the part that they played. They may go to great lengths to make trouble for other people, getting a perverse satisfaction from causing inconvenience to them or doing harm to them. Rather than overlook a wrong, real or imagined, or forgive the wrongdoer, they retaliate, often in disproportion to the offense.
I expect that we all can think of dozens of things that make loving our neighbor, loving others a real challenge.
In his love for us God does not leave us to love our neighbor, to love others on our own. God works in us to desire to love them and when we desire to love them, works with us to enable us to love them.
God may put people into our lives whom he wants us to love, people who, whether they realize it, may need our love as awkward and as clumsy as we may be in expressing it. They themselves may not think so, but God knows us better than we know ourselves.
In his teaching Jesus compares God with a gardener. God persuades the impatient owner of the vineyard to spare a fig tree and digs around the tree’s roots and manures them, knowing that it is too early for the tree to bear fruit and will likely yield fruit in the following year. He prunes the grape vine, knowing that it will not bear fruit if it is not pruned. God also tends and cares for us like he would flowers in a garden. A gardener knows that some flowers if they are planted next to certain other flowers will do better than if they were planted elsewhere in the garden. God may plant us in his garden us next to people who will help us grow and bloom. The right flowers, when planted together, will help each other flourish.
Loving our neighbor, loving others, comes with its risks. They may not desire, welcome, or appreciate our attention as innocent or well-intended as it may be. We may blunder where we should have trod carefully. They may misinterpret our words and actions. We may overstep their boundaries without realizing it. They may regard us as overly intrusive, thrusting ourselves into their personal lives without invitation.
Do we then stop loving our neighbor, stop loving others? No, we keep loving them but choose other ways of expressing our love for them, ways that are less overwhelming, less intrusive, gentler, and more thoughtful. We learn from our mistakes. We identify our blind spots and do what we can to prevent them causing us to stumble and to say or do the wrong thing.
Loving our neighbor, loving others, comes with pain too. They may reject our love. They may reject us. Regardless of how they respond to our love and to us, we keep on loving them. We do not reject them. We walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
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