And Who Is My Neighbor?

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”



It’s a very important question. Maybe the ultimate question in life!

As human beings we all seek happiness, fulfillment, hope, safety. But we also recognize that we are subject to the “changes and chances of this mortal life” which will have for each of us, at some unknown future point, a definite end. And we have a basic intuition of immortality—that this life is not all that there is. So we know that we need to prepare, in some way, for what comes after this life; to seek happiness, fulfillment, hope, safety that are eternal.

Our faith teaches us that we were created by God to share his immortal life—an immortality that was to encompass the body as well as the spirit. When sin separated us from the divine Source of this life, God purposed to redeem and restore us by establishing his covenant with us.

Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary, is the one through whom God fulfills these promises, and that even in death the souls of the faithful are alive in him and await a glorious resurrection when he returns.

This is all to say that the lawyer, whatever his motives, was asking the right question. And what’s more, he is asking it of the right person, the person who is himself the answer.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

But Jesus, knowing all things, perceived that this man’s heart in asking the question is not sincere. It is a test. He sets himself up to judge the Lord.

So Jesus, instead of answering, turns the question around, saying, in essence, “why, you’re the legal scholar here, I’m just a rabbi from Galilee.” But it’s a good power play too, because he’s again established his authority in this conversation. He cross-examines the lawyer, who, in his turn, gives the correct answer—the textbook answer, since anything else would necessarily expose him to critique. “You shall love the Lord your God . . . and your neighbor as yourself.”

Like the village rabbi quizzing a youngster on his catechism, Jesus gives the lawyer an “attaboy.” “You have answered right. Do this and you shall live.”

But think about that for a minute. Is this where we want to leave things? “Do this.” It’s not so easy, is it.

Some will say that Jesus came to provide for us a moral example, to demonstrate for us what a life of perfect love can be. But seeing his example and actually following it are two very different things.

If I approached a world-class pianist I admire—someone, say, like Nicolai Lugansky—and asked him to tell me how to play Rachmaninoff, he might be able to demonstrate a few advanced techniques or show how he tackles a difficult passage. But this kind of demonstration will not help me to actually do what Lugansky does. In theory, if I spent many years in focused study and practice, just maybe I might learn to play something half as well as he.

Our situation is actually worse. Imagine the previous example of the pianist, only let’s say that I had been born without the use of my arms. No amount of study, no instruction in technique could overcome this basic disability. And this is the real situation we are in when it comes to keeping God’s law perfectly. Jesus is the perfect man; we are moral paraplegics.

“Do this and you shall live” is not exactly the “attaboy” it might seem at first to be.

The lawyer is an intelligent man and he recognizes this on some level. So he asks a follow-up question, a clarification of sorts, to see if there might be some way of limiting the law to an interpretation that might feel less burdensome.

“And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus, as he often does, uses a parable, a pithy story, to get to the bottom of the issue. One of the wonderful things about the parables is the way they both reveal and conceal. They reveal the good news of the kingdom to those whose hearts are prepared to receive them, yet they conceal them from those who are disposed to reject them.

You all are probably familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan, but we tend to forget about important details. I will just mention a few key points.

First, the identity of the characters is a large part of what the parable is about.

The man lying in the road is not described other than as a victim who has come down from Jerusalem on the road to Jericho. He is presumably a Jew, but is not identified as a good man or bad. We just know he is lying naked, robbed, beaten, “half dead.”

The two passers-by are identified: they are respectable men of religion, associated in some way with the worship of Israel and thus with the fulfillment of the covenant God made with his people at Mt. Sinai. We could say that it is their responsibility to conduct themselves in a way that sets an example of living according to the law of God.

In identifying the fourth man as a Samaritan, Jesus seems to be going for shock value. Samaritans were not faithful to God’s covenant. They were the mixed offscourings of the Babylonian conquest and practiced a strange, syncretistic religion combining elements of Northern Kingdom Judaism and paganism. Such a man seems to be chosen specifically to set aside the question of right religion. But that, after all, wasn’t the question. It is the question of “who is my neighbor?” that is at issue here.

The Samaritan shows compassion for the half-dead victim, compassion in which the priest and Levite were lacking. In the parable he proves to be a truer “neighbor” to the victim than they were.

Thus Jesus sharpens the moral point. There are no loopholes in the law of loving one’s neighbor. Your neighbor is, simply, the man lying in your path. No abstract religious goal, no ideological framework, no supposedly higher purpose can absolve you of the duty to love your neighbor, your actual neighbor, the person lying before you in the street.

Love of neighbor is one of those values that is routinely abstracted from its Christian context and weaponized in our political discourse. The purpose of the “who is my neighbor” game is for one side to prove that the other side doesn’t care about the downtrodden the way they supposedly do—not to genuinely inquire how our resources can best be used in the service of the needy.

This game is why a person who plants a “Love Thy Neighbor—No Exceptions” sign in her front yard may also be found posting hateful rants against “Trump supporters” on social media—many of whom, after all, live in her neighborhood. The real point of the game is to justify one’s own behavior and capture the moral high ground for one’s team. By broadcasting the supposedly right opinions we absolve ourselves of our real moral duty, a much more difficult thing.

Leaving political games aside, this parable of the good Samaritan is very bad news for every one of us, if we understand it only on the moral level. We are not good at this, and we know it. Even the most compassionate and diligent of us falls far short of the mark Christ sets. The lawyer’s guilty intuition was correct.

But do not despair. This recognition should drive us to revisit the parable on another level. The spiritual meaning of the parable offers us the hope that the parable’s moral lesson intentionally conceals.

In the moral interpretation of the parable, we are given a choice: will we be like the fallen man’s countrymen who pass by on the other side, or will we be a true neighbor like the good Samaritan. But in the spiritual interpretation of the parable, we find that we, and all humankind, can only be identified with one character: the hapless, half-dead victim, already beyond the capacity for rational choice or moral action.

The man in the road is Adam, the representative figure of the whole human race. Expelled from the mountain of God, he has come down to Jericho, the accursed city of man, when he is set upon by the evil powers—sin and the devil. Death is close behind to finish him off.

The priest and the Levite represent the impotence of human works to save fallen man. We could say that social respectability and even right religion fail to help us. Some commentators identify these characters as the Law and the Prophets. They may show the way back to God, but they do not have in themselves what is needful to save us.

This may not sound like good news. But now, at this lowest place, where nature, society, and religion have all come to nought, enters the one man who has what we need: Jesus himself in the character of the Good Samaritan.

Jesus meets us where we are, in the midst of our human frailty and the ravages of sin. He does not wait for us to look for him or try to better ourselves, to become somehow worthy of his attention. He comes with compassion and begins to minister to fallen man. Oil and wine are the medicine of the sacraments: oil for healing, wine for cleansing.

After bandaging his wounds, the good Samaritan puts the man on his own beast. Christ, in his human flesh, assuming the burden of human sin and death. He carries him to a place where he can be cared for. The inn is the Church, where we are delivered into the care of God’s people.

On the next day, that is, after his resurrection, the Lord gives two coins to the innkeeper. Jesus provides to his Church, through the spiritual graces of his Word and Sacraments, all that is needed to heal and care for sinners, until he returns.

And so we find that, as the Church, we can join, like the innkeeper, in the work of our neighbor, the Good Samaritan.

The lawyer asked, “And who is my neighbor?” The spiritual interpretation of the parable reveals that Jesus is his and our true neighbor, because Jesus is the one who has acted in this way on our behalf. Only when we have received the help and healing grace of his salvation, can we in turn offer it to others: “Go, and do likewise.”