Jesus likes large neighborhoods full of diversity

I am retired and preach only rarely; however, my pastor occasionally asks me to preach.

This happened recently, and I quickly looked up the lectionary Bible readings for the Sunday I was to preach. My pastor had given me a plum. The Gospel reading was from Luke. It is the report of an encounter between Jesus and a lawyer. The lawyer asked Jesus what was the greatest of all commandments. Jesus responded that the greatest was to love God with heart, mind and soul. He added a second — we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The lawyer agreed and asked the critical question, who is my neighbor? Agreeing that neighbors should be loved finds little disagreement. Defining neighbor is the hard part. There is broad disagreement about who qualifies as a neighbor. In response to the lawyer’s question, Jesus told the familiar story of the Good Samaritan. If some are unfamiliar with the story, take the time to read it in Luke 10:30-37. I consider it the greatest story Jesus ever told.

Israelites were commanded to write the command to love God on their hearts. The story of the Good Samaritan should likewise be written on the hearts of every confessing follower of Jesus.

The first lesson that comes from the story is that to have a neighbor, a person must be a neighbor. The Samaritan is the neighbor model that Jesus has given us. The Samaritan crossed the road, became personally involved and spent his money with no thought of a return of any kind. Neighboring was shown to be a mutual experience, but there had to be an initiator. The Samaritan was an initiating neighbor.

When the lawyer asked the question “who is my neighbor?” the answer given by the story is “that’s up to you.” Jesus and the lawyer had no disagreement about what was the second greatest commandment in their mutually held religious tradition. The challenge of the commandment comes in the details. Every follower of Jesus is stuck with the task of deciding whom she/he will turn into a neighbor.

The practice of choosing our neighbors is an ageless game. Typically, we choose to make neighbors of people who are most like us. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of people out of the neighbor circle. We then reason that the people who are not like us are not our neighbors and we have no obligation to love them. The command to love our neighbors is very old. The command to love neighbors did not originate with Jesus. It was an ancient Israelite practice.

When he Israelites first appeared on the pages of history, they were a nomadic tribe that encountered other nomadic tribes. Were other tribes friendly or unfriendly? The Israelites had a standard. If the other tribe would bow down to their tribal God, they were friends and neighbors. The once alien tribe was to be loved as the Israelites loved their own tribal members. If an alien tribe did not bow down, war and killing was the alternative.

The debate about who we should love and who we should kill still rages among people of this world. Jesus was an intruder in that debate. He gave us a neighbor model who was a despised racial minority and a religious outcast.

At the base of the wars in the Middle East is tribal conflict. The wars that rage across Africa are based in tribal conflict. The gang wars that plague our larger cities are simply another version of tribalism. America continues to pursue segregating. We segregate according to race, wealth, ethnic origins, education, and religion. With passion we pursue people of our own kind. We make neighbors who are easier to love and who can give us something in return. In the process we define who we can shun, reject and, if deemed necessary, kill.

I have pondered much about how to define who is a Christian. I decided to reduce the definition to something simple. If a person says, “I am a Christian,” he/she is one. Being a Christian is never an achievement. Being a Christian is a gift and always by the grace of a loving God. Who am I to judge? Christians are never perfect, but for those who want to be a better follower of Jesus and a better human being, the beginning point is not necessarily church attendance, Bible reading or agonizing prayer. A step forward is more likely to involve crossing the road into unfamiliar territory, becoming thoroughly involved and giving of yourself and your resources. In so doing, we will become neighbor to a lot of folk who are quite different from ourselves. To whom will we become a neighbor? Will we seek a neighbor in a walled community or on the other side of the road? That is up to us. We can draw our neighborhood boundaries as large or as small as we want.

I believe Jesus likes large neighborhoods full of diversity. The story of the Good Samaritan should be written on the hearts of us all.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

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