No Walls, No Borders, No Exceptions

by David Baer | published: Tuesday, January 31, 2017, 4:31 PM

One time a lawyer asked Jesus to tell him what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” But it seems the man got stuck on the word neighbor. According to the Great Commandment, a neighbor is someone who deserves to be treated on an equal footing and loved in equal measure with oneself. But this is difficult! Surely there must be limits, the man thought. There must be some place I can draw a circle and say, “The people inside I will love as myself. They are my neighbors. Everyone else is a stranger, and I don’t need to love them as I love myself.”

So he asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Maybe he thought Jesus would say, “Your family” or “your village” or “the Jewish nation.” Those are understandable boundaries. At the edge of one of these groups, perhaps, the duty to love others as oneself might come to an end.

But Jesus doesn’t give him a boundary, a limit to the commandment to love.  Instead he tells a story, where a hated, feared Samaritan is the one who stops to care for a victim of robbery and violence. The Samaritan does this at risk to himself—he doesn’t know where the robbers are, or even that this isn’t a trap. He does this for someone he has no affinity with—someone who is not a member of his family or village or nation. (In fact, in Jesus’ story, the priest and the Levite, who at least were fellow Jews, left the victim for dead.) Jesus asks the lawyer a question of his own, not “Who is my neighbor?” but “Who acted as a neighbor?”

The lawyer answers correctly: “The one who showed him mercy.” “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.

I wonder what boundaries we feel tempted to draw as we define our neighborhood, the scope of those we are commanded to love. Is it family? Community? Nation? Or, as with the Good Samaritan, ought the presence of need itself be enough for us to recognize a neighbor?

Jesus won’t allow us to build walls or draw borders that put others outside our duty to love them as ourselves. The good news of Jesus is that in spite of our sin and unworthiness, God loves and chooses us. God only asks that we turn and lavish the same grace and generosity on others—deserving or not, “one of us” or not, safe or not.

In the push and pull of our life as members of a family, residents of a community, and citizens of a nation, it is easy to confuse the claims of these particular affinities for Christian principles.  As followers of Jesus, it will be important to not to fall prey to such confusion. A gift as precious as the love we have received from God in Christ deserves no less than this: Love God, love your neighbor as yourself—no walls, no borders, no exceptions.

This item appeared in the Tuesday Tidings, the weekly e-newsletter sent to the congregation.