The Good Samaritan

“One does not have a neighbor; I make myself someone’s neighbor” -Paul Ricœur

This parable from Luke 10 is considered one of the most well known in the gospels. Like many other Christians, I have heard this story hundreds of times.  However, it wasn’t until adulthood a mentor gave me a more significant understanding of this story. 

When an expert in religious law, a lawyer, asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”, Jesus answers him with this parable. A man traveling down a well known dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho is ambushed by robbers, who steal his possessions, and beat him leaving him “half dead.” Two members of the lawyer’s own religious class pass the man by but the one who does stop is an outsider, a Samaritan, who takes pity on the man, caring for his wounds, and takes him on his donkey to a nearby inn. He is the true neighbor. Jesus tells them to go and do likewise. The Jewish listeners would have winced because at the time Samaritans were considered a member of an excluded group, an ‘other’. Jesus is giving the lawyer a lesson in God’s law of love.

In his short essay on this parable Paul Ricouer notes that the Gospel would completely condemn the modern world. Jesus is telling us that we don’t simply HAVE neighbors. We MAKE ourselves someone’s neighbor. This is a very anti-modern attitude. Through a modern world of fences, borders, screens, social media, ring cameras, automobiles, etc. we are increasingly living in an age of a dehumanized world of abstract, anonymous and distant relationships. Many often using, religion, politics or “the law” to distance themselves from the wounded and most vulnerable people in our communities. Immigrants, refugees, single mothers, the unhoused, and those in prison. Like all of the parables, Jesus is using this one for the church to imagine the kind of community it is called to be. The parables are meant to be lived. If you want to love your neighbor you are going to have to go make yourself one.

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