Sept. 12, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

Part 2 in a series based on Jim Wallis’ book, “The False White Gospel”

Jim Wallis says the question, “Who is my neighbor?” will become the most important for our democracy’s future—not just the church’s future.

In Luke 10:25-37, a young lawyer stood up to test Jesus by asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus asked him what the Torah said: “How do you read?” And the lawyer quoted the shema, which says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

And when Jesus replied, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live,” the lawyer, who was fishing for a particular answer from Jesus, asked, “And who is my neighbor?” To which Jesus answered by telling the parable of the good Samaritan.

A Samaritan was regarded by Luke’s Jewish audience as the least likely candidate to help anyone who’d been beaten and robbed by the side of the road. You might say Samaritans were the objects of some of the most negative “identity politics” within the community Luke wrote his gospel for.
No one would’ve expected Jesus to have the Samaritan be the helper in this situation.

But he was. And that’s where Jesus makes his point: The Samaritan shows us that one’s neighbor is actually the person right in front of us, regardless of their identity label or what group they belong to. The Jericho-to-Jerusalem road was a notorious route to travel, day or night, with rocky underbrush providing choice places for thieves and robbers to hide from unsuspecting travelers and attack them without notice.

And then the Samaritan goes out of his way to help the man, making sure he got first aid, was stable, and then transport on his own donkey to a place where he could recover, paying an innkeeper out of his own pocket to cover the man’s expenses.

Wallis cites Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan in calling this a “challenge parable” meant to blow up assumptions about our own most-hated “Samaritans” who are OUR neighbors. To let Jesus do the talking, as Wallis suggests, is to realize that, “In a democracy, citizens agree and disagree, collaborate and compete, but must still be neighbors and not enemies.”

We see dangerously expanding ideologies that don’t regard “others” as belonging—“Go back to where you came from!” Our neighbors are not seen as fellow citizens, but as enemies to destroy, and even erase from our culture and politics by banning their books and history….That is the essence of white Christian nationalism.

Wallis says the radical commandment implicit in the Samaritan parable is that “Love is not ‘us’ and ‘them’.”

What are the implications for you and me as we seek, as people of faith communities, to walk a different path than the politicians who seek to divide us, and model a different orientation toward others whom we may see right now as OUR enemies?

Who is your neighbor? Who is mine?