Lately, I've been thinking much about the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
In this story, found in Luke 10, Jesus is responding to a lawyer who asks a crucial question: how to gain eternal life. Jesus turns the inquiry back on the man: "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?"
The lawyer replies with the core commandments: "You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus commends him and encourages him to "Do this, and you will live." But the lawyer, looking to justify himself, shoots back with the defining question: "And who is my neighbor?"
Jesus answers with the parable.
The story involves a man who is badly wounded and left for dead on the side of the road. Several people, including those who were religious and outwardly “morally upright”—a priest and a Levite—see him and pass by. The one who stops to care for the man is none other than a Samaritan, a man from a different ethnic and religious tribe who was widely considered an enemy by the Jewish people. This enemy cares for the victim, bandages his wounds, takes him on his own animal, and pays for his stay at an inn. (The rest of the details are in the good book…you can read for yourself.)
The reason I recount this story now is that in light of recent events, I wonder if I have been guilty of the same. Like the man who sought to justify his limits, I wonder if I sometimes place boundaries on who I am “required” to love.
Is my neighbor defined by shared citizenship? Is it limited by ethnicity and race? Or gender, sexual ethics, or even political tribe?
I know I want to think I love everyone as is commanded, but how is that love displayed in the way I care for the poor, the broken, and the strangers in our midst? Unfortunately, far more often than I’d like to admit, I find reasons to justify not loving or helping those around me.
These folks are just trying to take advantage of the system.
They got themselves there in the first place.
They did it to themselves.
The list of rationalizations goes on...
And yet, I don't believe Jesus gives us the room to pick and choose how we display his love. I am brought back to his words in Matthew 25:
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’... And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’”
No matter how we vote, how we feel about immigration policy, or how we debate the intricacies of law—if we're seeing what's happening in the news and our first thought is not, "This isn't how it's supposed to be...something is profoundly broken here," then perhaps we have missed the point of Jesus's parable.
This is as much a personal reminder as it is a caution to us all. We must check our hearts. It is far too easy to become calloused to the news, or quickly divert our hearts toward "whataboutism," as if to unburden ourselves from the actual weight of our duty to love.
As Christ followers, we are called to love. Boldly, radically, without any strings. And when we dispense the love of God in this manner, we can trust that people will come to experience the power of God that will change our world in a way that external laws and rituals cannot.
Short of this, we are no better than the lawyer who is looking to put limits on God’s commandment. To exclude rather than to include. To justify ourselves by thinking we’ve done enough.
But that is not the way of Christ. When a culture is so bent on a salvation to be attained through human means, let us be the ones to show a better way. Let us attain to a greater mission.