Prayer Tip--“And Who is My Neighbor”

If you use Nextdoor, an app has already decided who your neighbors are. You verify your address, and it draws a line around your neighborhood on a map. Everyone inside the line shows up in your feed, posting about lost dogs and good plumbers. A family three streets over may belong to someone else’s.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Lines help people live together. They tell us whose problem the fallen tree is and when we’ve done our part.

The legal expert in this passage wanted that kind of clarity. A few verses before the story begins, he asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life. When Jesus asked what the law said, he answered well: love God with everything you have (Deuteronomy 6:5), and love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). Then he asked Jesus to draw the line. “And who is my neighbor?” Every line has two sides, though. Behind his question was another one. Who isn’t my neighbor? Who can I leave on the side of the road?

It was a fair thing to ask. In Leviticus 19:18, the neighbor is one of “your people,” a fellow Israelite. Sixteen verses later, the same chapter tells Israel to love the foreigner living among them as themselves (Leviticus 19:34). Scripture itself drew the line in more than one place.

Jesus answered with a man no one could sort. He never says who the man was or where he was from. The robbers took his clothes, and in the ancient world clothing told strangers where you came from and where you stood. They left him near death and unable to speak, and speech could mark a person as surely as clothing. The book of Judges tells of soldiers who picked out their enemies by how they pronounced a single word, shibboleth (Judges 12:6). The man on the Jericho road had neither clothes nor voice. Nobody passing by could tell whether he was one of their own. He was a hurt man by the road, and that was all anyone could know.

Most of us carry a map like the app’s in our heads, and we draw it fast. We go by the car in the driveway, the sign in the yard, the voice on the phone. Often we’ve decided whether someone is our concern before we know their name. Jesus takes all of that away and leaves only the need.

Then he makes the rescuer a Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans both worshiped the God of Israel and honored the books of Moses, but they had been bitter rivals for centuries over where God should be worshiped, in Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim in Samaria. More than a century before Jesus, a Jewish army destroyed the Samaritan temple on that mountain. No wonder the legal expert can’t bring himself to say “the Samaritan.” He says, “The one who demonstrated mercy.” The man he would have placed on the far side of the line is the one who kept the commandment he had just recited.

Jesus ends by asking which of the three was a neighbor to the wounded man. To answer, the legal expert has to see the story from where that man lay. When you’re desperate, you don’t get to pick who helps you. Sooner or later most of us end up by the side of some road, in a hospital bed, after a layoff, or in a grief that won’t lift. Help may come from someone we had left off our map.

The legal expert came wanting to know where his duty ended. Jesus never gave him that line. He told him about a wounded stranger and the Samaritan who stopped, and then said, “Go and do likewise.”

Our minds sort people out of habit, often faster than we notice. This week, practice a second look. When you catch yourself labeling someone, stop and take one slow breath. As you breathe in, pray, “Lord, let me see.” As you breathe out, pray, “as you see.” Then look at that person again, without the label. And when you find yourself in the ditch, let yourself be helped. Receiving grace from an unexpected hand is its own kind of prayer.