What it means to “neighbor”
The realization came with a sting.
The kind of sting you can’t shake. It’s been a few weeks and I still feel it.
That’s probably a good thing.
I’ve been reading a book by Steven Garber called Visions of Vocation. (If you haven’t read it already, please add it to your reading list; not a paid link.) In the earliest pages, the author challenged me to think differently about what it means to be a neighbor.
If you’re familiar with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, you’ll recall that Jesus tells the story as an answer a Pharisee’s question: “Who is my neighbor?” The question was posed in response to Jesus’ instruction to love God and love others as being the most important commandments for people of faith.
The parable teaches us how to identify our neighbor. A man is attacked—beaten, robbed, and left by the roadside to die. Two persons of faith, a priest and a caretaker of temple worship, fail to respond to the needs of the injured man. Another third man arrives on the scene: one who (indicated by his cultural identity as a Samaritan) doesn’t know God. This man stops and tends to the victim’s wounds and financially provides for his recovery at a nearby inn. Even though the victim isn’t known to any of the three passers-by, the Samaritan treats him as a neighbor by showing mercy.
I know I’ve behaved like the first two people in the parable who looked away from the victim’s needs and found a way to walk past him. To my shame, I’ve absolutely ignored needs I was fully capable of meeting because it was inconvenient, uncomfortable, or costly (even merely nominally costly). Thankfully, there have also been times when I’ve heeded the prompting of the Spirit (and my children) to pause and interact, providing relational and practical support.
In reading Garber’s book, I grew convicted that I’d allowed myself to miss Jesus’ message in the parable entirely. The expert in the law asked Jesus who his neighbor was because he “wanted to justify himself” (Luke 10:29). He was looking for a checklist to fulfill and feel good about. But Jesus was not telling him (or us) that bandaging wounds or giving money made us neighbors. Those are behaviors; outwardly visible actions that can be utterly devoid of genuine care and human concern.
To be clear, doing the right thing—responding generously and immediately to the needs we know of—is good. And we mustn’t “withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in [our] power to act” (Proverbs 3:27). Let’s continue to do so.
But Jesus wasn’t prescribing a set of tasks or behaviors to define what it means to be a neighbor; He was asking us to love. Love is what makes us neighbors. When we do something that—on the surface—a so-called neighbor would do without truly loving the person for whom we do it, our actions are hollow (1 Corinthians 13:1-3).
Let’s heed Jesus’ challenging invitation to truly love our fellow Image-bearers as neighbors. What that looks like in any given situation will vary. There’s no rubric to follow, no set of instructions to heed because it’s not a task list or set of behaviors. It’s first an inward posture: to love someone requires us to see them, to know them, and to depend on the guidance of the Holy Spirit to respond to them outwardly.
I admit I don’t always want “to see and know” those God puts in my path. People can be difficult (including me) and the needs can feel daunting in any number of ways. It’s unequivocally harder to love by seeing and knowing.
In that stark reality, I can merely say that I want to want to.