Luke 10: 21-36
This is the second of a series on the virtues.
The other day someone asked me, “What is love?” It’s an important question. The Bible teaches from beginning to end, “Love your neighbor,” so “what is love?” is a crucial question.
It’s not the one that the lawyer asks Jesus.
Instead he asks, “Who is my neighbor?”
The lawyer knows what love is. He knows it because it’s codified in the Torah, the Jewish Law: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love, from a Biblical perspective, is a call to empathy. It’s a call to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. Empathy, in the Judeo-Christian perspective, is at the very core of ethics. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” You treat people the way you yourself would wish to be treated in the same situation. At one level, that’s exactly the point of the story of the Good Samaritan. There’s a man, beaten nearly to death, lying in a ditch. Two people pass him and go to the other side of the road, because they are worried, not about the man, but about themselves. But the Samaritan sees a man suffering in a ditch, and puts himself in the suffering man’s shoes. He imagines what it must be like to be suffering and in need to that degree, and he puts himself in the man’s place and thinks, “If I were him, I would want and NEED someone to help me. So I’ll help him.” And that’s what he does.
Empathy is central to our faith as Christians. How do we know God loves us? It’s not simply because God saves or forgives us. It’s because God has empathized with us. God in Person has put God’s self in our human shoes and become one of us in Jesus Christ. There could be no greater act of empathy than God becoming human, suffering the joys and woes of human life, to the point of suffering a terrible death. God showed us what it means to do unto others as you would have them do unto you by doing it. God loved His Neighbor as Himself by loving us, by loving you and me, by experiencing our life and our death, our humanness.
There can be no greater act of empathy.
And because of this great act of divine empathy, we Christians can assert absolutely that God IS love.
Paul says in I Corinthians 13 that “Love never ends.” Love never ends because its source and its ultimate goal is God. Have you ever wondered why there’s life after death? It’s not as a reward for how good we are. We live eternally because God loves us, and God’s love is eternal. We live eternally because we love God, and it takes an eternity to love an eternal God. Love quite literally never ends.
Which brings us back to the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the Lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?”
The lawyer wants love to end. He wants love to have a boundary. There has to be somebody, somewhere in the world, that he doesn’t have to love.
That happens to us all. Deciding who to love, who to empathize with, in a world full of need is almost paralyzing. We all have our ways of making those choices. What I hope most of us do is recognize that everyone is worthy of love and empathy and sympathy, but simply choose based on personal interests and what touches us most deeply, what seems most pressing on us personally or at this time. Yesterday at presbytery we heard a report on the outreach that local churches are giving to West, TX, after their terrible explosion and fire. we help West not because they’re more worthy of our help but because you and i are limited, so we seek to make the best, most effective use of our resources, time, and talents. I hope we aren’t choosing based simply on, “I will only love those I can identify with.” because the Christian ethic is the other way around: we are to identify especially with those we’re tempted not to love.
Jesus tests the lawyer by challenging him to empathize with a Samaritan, who to the Lawyer would be the Enemy, or at least a person that most Jews at that time would have looked upon much as a Southerner might have looked upon an African American in the Jim Crow period. This is exactly the sort of person the Lawyer would have looked at as “NOT my neighbor.” But the Samaritan was his neighbor, and he was the Samaritan’s.
The question, “Who is my neighbor?” never ends in the parable Of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor is the Samaritan. The neighbor is the man in the ditch. The neighbors are the priest and scribe who pass the wounded man by and the bandits who beat him nearly to death. The neighbor is the innkeeper. And then Jesus turns to the Lawyer and says, “YOU are the neighbor.”
In 1989 Virginians and Tennesseans followed closely the news of the Pittston Coal Mine Strike. Miners were striking for the usual things—fair pay, better hours. The Company was extremely aggressive in their response. But the miners likewise were aggressive. There was a lot of violence on both sides.
But another group was added to the mix. A mixed group of non-violent Christians from all faiths and walks of life participated in the strike. They agreed with the goals of the striking miners, but not their methods. They initiated a series of Bible studies and workshops on non-violence. Many of them centered on this very story, the Good Samaritan.
One of the strikers, a miner for decades with years of history participating in violent response to the company, attended the Bible Studies with a lot of suspicion. He was ready to firebomb bridges to stop scab coal trucks, just as he’d always done. But the Bible Study leaders homed in on him and kept pushing him with the question: “Who is your neighbor?”
“Is the scab who’s working your job and breaking your picket line your neighbor? Is the truck driver whose tire you’re trying to burst with that Jackrock your neighbor? Is the manager of the mine your neighbor? Are the bigwigs, the president of the company and board members up in New York, are they your neighbor?”
And finally the miner said, “Help me. Help me to figure out how to love the president of the company as if he’s my neighbor.” (1)
It’s overwhelming to say, “I love everybody.” It’s too big, it’s almost unimaginable. Honestly, I doubt any of us other than Jesus will ever love everybody, until the Kingdom finally arrives. But we can love those with whom we have the most empathy. And more important, we are challenged to love those with whom we are least empathetic. It’s hard, and challenging, but that lies at the very core of Christian ethics, and of Christian faith—loving not only the most lovable, but even more important, the least lovable, too.
We do this because of the example set by the God we believe in, who became one of us, who loved even His enemies, and died and rose out of love for all humanity, both the best and the worst of us, without exception. We do this because we believe love never ends.
And because love never ends, the question, who is my neighbor? is a question that never ends, either. Amen.
(1) I cannot find the print source for this story. I attended a workshop on Christian non-violence at Washington & Lee University in 1993, at which Law professor Andrew McThenia, who was arrested during the strike, was the featured speaker, and this story was presented in a law review article which I have since lost.