In Luke 16:25-37, we see a conversation that begins with law and quickly moves to love. The same commentary as to the greatest commandments of the law, the summary of the whole obligations of obedience for believers, is given as well in Matthew 22:34-40 and Mark 12:28-34, where it should be noted that the law of love does not contradict obedience to commands (like the Sabbath, for example). An important question is then asked and answered in a way that is profound and also rather slippery. Let us therefore examine this passage, which is a greatly important one, in its two halves, and comment on both of these as best as possible, with the understanding that this examination will not be complete, and that this passage is popular enough to have received many excellent and worthwhile interpretations. With that said, let us begin our examination of Luke 16:25-37.

Luke 16:25-29 gives the first part of the conversation, where a lawyer attempts to justify himself as well as engage in a very common sort of conversation among the scribes and Pharisees concerning the greatest laws and to whom they applied. Luke 16:25-29 reads as follows: “And behold, a certain lawyer stood and tested Him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?” So he answered and said, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.'” And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.” But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

It is ironic, and an often unrecognized irony, that in a discussion about the law and to whom it applied, the account of this conversation between a lawyer and Jesus Christ began with the lawyer breaking a law of God. This is additionally ironic because the law that the lawyer broke is located in the same chapter of the Bible from the law that the lawyer cited as the greatest commandment from the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:5: You shall love the Eternal your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind.” Later on, in Deuteronomy 6:16-18, it reads: “You shall not tempt [or test] the Lord your God as you tempted Him in Massah. You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your god, His testimonies, and His statutes which He has commanded you. And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may be well with you, and that you may go in and possess the good land of which the Lord swore to your fathers.”

This is a profound irony in the life and preaching of Jesus Christ (who quoted this very law to Satan when our adversary tested our Lord and Savior in the wilderness (see Matthew 4:7, Luke 4:12), in that the very same scribes and Pharisees who so gloried in their knowledge of and obedience to the laws of God would profoundly ignore a very important law that forbade them from testing and tempting God in unbelief, trying to get Him to “prove” Himself at their beck and call. In the very same part of scripture where the greatest commandment is listed, requiring every thought and feeling to be brought into captivity to the commandments and laws of God, the reason for obedience to the Mosaic covenant is given–obedience to God’s laws is required for the people of Israel (and Judah) to possess and maintain their presence in the land that the Eternal our Father has given us. Disobedience to the laws and statutes of the Eternal will lead to captivity and estrangement from our beloved homeland.

But there is an additional irony here as well–the lawyer was not asking Jesus Christ about “Old Covenant” blessings and rewards (the physical blessings of health and wealth that are so frequently cited by those who disparage obedience to God’s laws by claiming they follow a “New Covenant” that absolves them of obedience to those parts of God’s law they find onerous and disagreeable). Instead, the lawyer was asking Jesus Christ what he needed to do to obtain eternal life. He was asking the basic question, “How now shall we live” if we are to inherit eternal life in the Kingdom of God. In short, this lawyer was seeking the eternal blessings of the New Covenant given to believers, and when He gave the summary statements of the obligation to obey God’s laws and commandments (all of them!) Jesus Christ did not tell him what many would expect, that those laws are or are about to become obsolete. Instead, Jesus Christ answered Him and told him, “Do this and you will live.” This means that if we want eternal life we must be obedient to God’s laws and testimonies and judgments as part of our basic obligations.

It is, of course, deeply ironic that the two greatest commandments themselves spring from the heart and soul of the Torah, demonstrating the deep importance of the Torah for God’s believers, during whatever time of history they happened to live. The gift of the Holy Spirit, given to a very small few in ancient Israel and to believers in general among all nations and peoples after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, has never negated obedience to God’s ways, which is necessary for us to acquire the character of God and of Jesus Christ, through the indwelling of Jesus Christ giving us the discernment and the strength to obey. Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 are right in the core of what it means to be a law-abiding citizen of the Kingdom of God, obligations which have always been true for believers and which will always remain for believers. There will be no unrepentant rebels who have hardened their hearts against the ways and laws of God who will receive eternal life–if we want to live forever in the family of God, we will all have to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, with all our strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves.

It is at this point that the lawyer asks the question that dominates this passage, nearly to the exclusion of all other concerns. The lawyer asks Jesus Christ who his neighbor is. This is a much more contentious question than it might appear, and much more profound than we often think it to be, despite the great attention this question and this passage have received in the Christian world. It would appear that the Jews, like many Christians today, argued a lot about who their neighbor was. After all, there were many laws whose obedience was related to neighbors. For example, three of the ten commandments refer to one’s neighbor either directly or indirectly. The fourth commandment tells us that we are forbidden from working on the Sabbath, not only we ourselves, but our sins and daughters, our male and female servants, our animals, or even the stranger who is within our (city) gates. It is not by coincidence that those who obey the Sabbath often engage in serious questioning about who is within our gates–it is the same question as “who is our neighbor?” Two of the commandments deal with this concern directly–the ninth commandment forbids us from bearing false witness against our neighbor, and the tenth commandment forbids us from coveting anything belongs to our neighbor.

But who is our neighbor? Muslims, for example, do not believe there is any obligation to tell the truth to unbelievers. Especially pious Jews (and Christians) might wonder whether evildoers or people of different ethnic groups were neighbors. After all, if one is poor and does not think the rich are one’s neighbors (or vice versa), it is then acceptable to covet what they have–whether it is the rich panting after the dust of the poor so that they may exploit them all the more fully (even more so if those poor are of different ethnicities and cultures that we may feel no affinity toward or understanding of), or whether it is the poor seeking to steal from the wealth of the rich for income redistribution. This covetousness, leading to theft, is a sin against our neighbor. But we often deny those neighborly protections to those whom we fear or hate, and this is at least as true nowadays as it was in the days of Jesus Christ.

I think about this question of who is my neighbor often, and the issue is frequently in subtle ways brought into reflection in one way or another. There is a supermarket near the apartment where I live, and I have recycled my aluminum cans there among the bums who profit (albeit in small and carefully limited amounts) from the waste of our affluent society. As one goes to the east and to the north of where I live, one finds fairly tough and seedy neighborhoods, which are not at all unfamiliar to me, given the rather rough neighborhoods I have tended to live in. The bums and other denizens of these working class areas are my neighbors–as odd and different as I might seem to them. However, I am also a neighbor to a mall, and so the shoppers (and storekeepers) of the mall are also my neighbors, as different as our concerns may be. Likewise, to the east of where I live lies Mt. Scott, upon which the very wealthy suburb of Happy Valley lies, a town filled with mostly large homes of mostly upper middle class people. And they are my neighbors too, irrespective of my vastly more modest means when compared to theirs. And plenty of other people are my neighbors too–the people I come across in my travels around the Portland area, or much further afield, or the former students I converse with all the way in Thailand, or my similarly distant family and scattered friends. All of them are my neighbors, and I am am the neighbor of all of them as well. Everyone who I have ever met or may ever meet in the future is my neighbor, regardless of where they live, or even what period of time they have lived in. Throughout the whole course of human history or the whole span of human habitation, we are all neighbors.

This is a profound question for our culture in particular because we do not act like neighbors. By and large, people prefer to live with others like themselves. Our neighborhoods are often full of cookie-cutter residences, whether they are working class apartments, or middle class suburbs, or mini-mansions sprinkled around immaculately green golf courses. We gain great comfort in an unsettling world by spending our time with people who are similar. We gather news from sources that agree with our worldview, we go to congregations where people agree to increasingly exact levels on questions of doctrine and practice, we associate by and large with people of like mind, and we like to live around people who look like us, think like us, drive the same kind of cars we do, are about the same age, with the same possessions and concerns and opinions. We may think we are daring because we like to try different types of food, but that is as daring as most people are within their worlds. Especially among those who have the means, there has been in recent decades a growing desire to escape cities where there may need to be daily (or frequent) encounters with poor people or those who look (and talk) differently, leading to the decline of our cities as people flee to the suburbs or even to the exurbs for cheaper homes beyond that. Quite simply, there are many people we do not want to be neighbors to, if we can possibly afford otherwise. The same question that haunted the mind of the lawyer, who sought to justify himself by denying that some people were his neighbors, haunts us as well in our lives and practice.

And what was Jesus Christ’s answer to this question? He answered the question, as I like to do, with a story. The story, of course, is the familiar story of the Good Samaritan, in Luke 16:30-37: “Then Jesus answered and said: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a certain priest came down that road. And when he saw him, he passed on the other side. Likewise a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion. So he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and he set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said to him, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you.’ So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?” And he said, “He who showed mercy on him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Many people have noted that the lawyer refused even to utter the word Samaritan given the unexpected hero of Jesus’ story. The Samaritans were a hated people to the Jews for two reasons–they were of a mongrel heritage (perhaps today we would call them mestizo or mulatto), the product of the mixture between Israelites and heathen peoples who had been brought into the land by the Assyrians centuries before. Likewise, their religious beliefs were a syncretistic blend between biblical religion and the heathen customs of the nations where they came from. The feelings between the Jews and the Samaritans could be easily compared in our modern world to the feelings between conservative Southern theonomists proud of their racial and religious purity and their feelings of the mestizo Latin American Roman Catholics of a mixed racial and religious heritage (for Catholics are nothing if not impure in their religious practices borrowed from the heathen nations they have encountered). It is easy to mock the Jews of Jesus’ time for being unloving and arrogant. But those of us who live in glass houses should not start stone throwing contests. Those of us who are nativists who look down on others for reasons of class or ethnic origin are no better than the uptight Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ time who received their deserved reminder of how they fell short of showing love to their neighbors.

It is interesting as well, and worthy of comment, that what makes someone a neighbor is not their proximity to someone but their behavior. But, as has already been mentioned above, those who lack fellow feeling toward others will tend to create distance with others because they do not wish to perform their Christian obligations of love and service and generosity. This was true with the priest and Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan and it is certainly true of us today. Whether we are creating emotional distance with others to justify a certain coldness and lack of love toward them, or we turn emotional distance into physical distance, as often seems to be the case, it amounts to the same problem. The priest and Levite, we should remember, did not even want to walk on the same side of the road as the wounded man, but deliberately walked on the other side of the road to pass him by, perhaps with a shudder and a resolution to put that horrid sight and that poor man out of their mind as soon as possible.

What went through the minds of the priest and the Levite, those who were commanded by God to serve as models of love and outgoing concern for others for the entire nation of Israel? The Levites were to receive the tithe, and the priests the tithe of the tithe, in exchange for their service in the temple and in the local communities, where they were to teach and practice God’s ways to the people of Israel and Judah. It was their job to inspect houses for mold and inspect people who were recovering from leprosy (which made people outcasts in those times, given the Bible’s focus on quarantine as a way to avoid the outbreak of communicable diseases. Perhaps the priest and the Levite thought that if they helped his man (whom they may have thought already dead, and beyond help anyway), they would be ritually impure and unable to do their vastly more useful (and public) service in the temple at Jerusalem for all of Israel, all for the sake of a man who was immoral (clearly he suffered because he was being judged by God for some sin, so he deserved what he had coming to him, and it would be impious to help someone God had so obviously judged for some wickedness, perhaps for the evil of falling among thieves in the first place). The same rationalizations that could have gone through the minds of the priest and Levite are the same rationalizations that keep people from helping their brother today.

Fortunately, there are people who have the same love and concern that the Samaritan had. The Samaritan did not see an evildoer who deserved his suffering, rather he saw someone who needed care, and he provided that care to the best of his ability. He put oil and wine on the wounds (two substances of considerable importance in worship, and which served to clean and dress the wounds and protect the poor wounded man from infection). He put the wounded man on his animal and walked it to the inn (and there is only one known inn between Jericho and Jerusalem, and it is not a large one either, known as the Inn of the Good Samaritan). Inns during the time of Jesus Christ had a bad reputation, as innkeepers were thought to cheat their customers and be greedy thieves, but here the Good Samaritan again shows faith in his maligned fellow man, giving the innkeeper two day’s worth of wages, which would pay for about 24 days of room and board at the inn, considerable time to recover for the poor man, and promising to repay any additional charges the innkeeper incurred in taking care of the man. That is remarkable generosity, and the Good Samaritan (and those who behave likewise) are well worthy of the praise given to such kindness in scripture.

As this passage has been commented upon rather heavily, it is not my intention to provide a twist of the arm or an attempt to coerce others to be generous in our material possessions. Just today, for example, I received a request in the mail for generosity in such a matter that I will not be able to fulfill given my own rather straightened conditions. That said, it is vastly more important that we be generous in spirit to our fellow man, because it is generosity of spirit that allows for us to be generous as we are able in material goods. We must first recognize that everyone is our neighbor, and the suffering and abuse and exploitation of anyone is an attack on everyone and on the common dignity and honor that we are all do as beings created in the image and likeness of God Himself. When we see others who are suffering or in misfortune, we must not attempt to distance ourselves physically or emotionally from that suffering in order to feel above it, or to believe that we deserve the blessings we have while others deserve to suffer for some sin or weakness. For, truth be told, all of us are flawed people, and none of us deserve to be blessed–such blessings as any of us have are the result of the unmerited grace of God through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. By opening our hearts to those who suffer, we demonstrate our recognition that everyone else is our equal as a potential son or daughter of God along with us, and that realization of common humanity and of common existence in a world full of undeserved blessings and undeserved suffering allows us to love others as our neighbors, whomever they may be. And if we remember to love God with all of our being and love every other human being as ourselves, we too will enjoy a life eternal with Jesus Christ and with the rest of the family of God.