Who is My Neighbor

The Parable of The Good Samaritan is one of the most well known gospel stories in the Bible. The story (Luke 10:25-37) tells of a man who is savagely beaten and robbed while going from Jerusalem to Jericho and given up for dead in a ditch. A priest and a Levite pass by without helping him. But a Samaritan stops and cares for him, taking him to an inn where the Samaritan pays for his care and then some. The parable's overarching theme teaches that enemies can have compassion for enemies; compassion has no boundaries, and that judging people on the basis of our perception of differences is contrary to the Jesus' message.

So who were the Samaritans? We are told that while they were Israelites and descendants of Abraham they broke with traditional "tribal" lineage and were considered outcasts and enemies of the Judeans. In addition, they chose to worship at a central temple on Mt. Gerizim, rejecting the temple in Jerusalem as the cornerstone of the faith. So, in this parable in which Jesus' audience would have expected a Jew to be the hero of the story, they were likely shocked to hear that it was the Samaritan instead. Only by understanding this pivotal paradox does the powerful message of this parable serve as a lesson for the audience then and for us today. 

Scripture scholar James Martin defines a parable as a “metaphor or a simile drawn from nature or common life arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application in order to tease it into active thought.” He goes on to say that “parables are poetic explanations of spiritual concepts impossible to fully comprehend literally. For example the reign of God is far too rich to be encompassed by any one definition, no matter how theologically accurate. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a man from a hated ethnic group was ultimately revealed to Jewish listeners as the good guy who cares for the stranger. As with this parable, many run counter to the expectations of the audience and therefore are subversive to conventional wisdom.” (Martin, p200).

The lesson in this parable emanates from an answer the lawyer's question posed to Jesus: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"  By referring to the Law, Jesus refers the man to an authority they both would accept as truth, the Old Testament. In essence, He is asking the lawyer, what does Scripture say about this and how does he interpret it? 

The lawyer answers correctly, "...love thy neighbor as thyself," and Jesus acknowledges that he has given an orthodox answer but he doesn’t stop there. As an educated man the lawyer realized that he could not possibly keep this law, nor would he have necessarily wanted to. There would always be people in his life that he could not love. Thus, in an effort to limit the law’s parameters, he asks the question “who is my neighbor?” The word “neighbor” in the Greek means “someone who is near,” and in the Hebrew it means “someone that you have an association with.” This allows for a limited interpretation of neighbor as fellow Jew and would have excluded Samaritans, Romans, and other foreigners. Jesus uses the parable of the Good Samaritan to correct the lawyer’s limited definition of “neighbor” and corresponding duty to his neighbor. (Martin p200)

This Gospel reminds us that we are to set aside our prejudice and show love and compassion for our “neighbor.” And our neighbor is anyone we encounter as we are all creatures of the Creator and we are to love all of mankind as Jesus taught.