Who is my neighbour?

Luke now presents a series of parables and incidents in the life of our Lord which none of the other Gospel writers mention. One much-loved parable is this one - about the Good Samaritan.

Our Lord faces, yet again, a hostile, or at any rate a leading, question; one which was designed to put Him on the spot rather than to find out the real answer. How often He had to endure the ‘contradiction of sinners against himself’! A lawyer, no doubt full of his own good deeds and fixated with a religion of works rather than of faith, as so many still are today, asked our Lord what one has to do to inherit eternal life. Our Lord’s reply, though correct as an interpretation of the law, dissatisfied the lawyer. Feeling that he may have fallen down on loving his neighbour, he comes back to the Lord with the technical question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ v. 29. Jewish teaching of the day was that a Jew had to be neighbourly only to a fellow Jew. Samaritans and Gentiles were beyond the pale.

In reply, our Lord tells of a man who was in desperate need, having fallen among thieves who had stripped him, robbed him, and injured him, leaving him to die. Two Jews, both of them highly religious, good-living, God-fearing men, who should have shown him kindness, failed to do so. Instead, it was a Samaritan, an avowed antagonist to the Jews (for ‘the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans’), who came to his rescue, met his physical needs as much as he could, and then provided for the care he could not manage. We fail to appreciate the shock with which this parable was received by those who heard it. Years ago a version of this parable was put out in a more modern setting in Africa, where a member of the Tswana tribe was presented as the man fallen by the wayside, and a Bushman, a member of the despised San people, was portrayed as the Samaritan, to the consternation of all. That was most offensive!

Our Lord did not in answer show who our neighbours are, so much as to whom we should be neighbour. Kindness should know neither racial, nor tribal, nor social barriers. We are to be neighbours to all, even to our enemies. After all, where would we be if our Lord had not shown immense kindness to us?