The Good Samaritan: Who is My Neighbor?
Most of us carry a question we’d never say out loud: how far does loving people really have to go? It would be easier if someone told us exactly where our responsibility ends. Jesus won’t draw that line for us. He moves our attention from who deserves our love to the kind of person we’re becoming, and that shift shows up every ordinary day in how we treat the person we’d rather walk past.
The Text in Brief
An expert in the law asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. He already knows the answer is to love God with everything and to love your neighbor as yourself. So he looks for a way out and asks, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells him about a man who is robbed, beaten and left for dead. A priest and a Levite both cross to the other side of the road. The one who stops is a Samaritan. That word sounds like a compliment to us, but Jesus’ listeners would have heard it as close to an insult. Jesus never defines a neighbor. He asks who proved to be one, and then says, “Go and do likewise.”
Read Yourself Into the Story
Parables are meant to be stepped into, and it’s easy to stand with the lawyer, who knows the right answer and still wants a loophole.
A question to sit with: Where do knowing the right thing and meaning well quietly take the place of doing it?
Widen Your Circles
We all love in rings, with God and family near the center and each ring further out getting harder to love. Somewhere we draw a boundary and decide the people beyond it aren’t our concern. Jesus asks us to keep widening our love rather than guard that line.
Try this: Think honestly about who sits just outside your line, maybe a coworker, a neighbor or someone who sees the world very differently than you do. Pray for them by name this week and look for one small way to move toward them.
Remember the Side of the Road
Before we can be the Samaritan, we have to see ourselves as the man in the ditch, who couldn’t save himself. Jesus was beaten and abandoned on the cross so that we could be carried and cared for. We don’t show mercy to earn God’s acceptance. We show mercy because we’ve already been given it.
Try this: When someone is hard to love this week, pause and remember a time God met you when you had nothing to offer him.
Watch for the One in Front of You
Being a good neighbor rarely means a grand gesture. Most of the time it looks like an interruption to your plans, someone who needs you to stop and stay for a while.
For Your Group or Your Own Time
Whether you’re getting ready to lead a group or reading on your own, these questions are worth slowing down for. Let them move from your head into your week.
Why is it easier to know, explain and discuss God’s commands than to live them? Where are you most tempted to substitute biblical knowledge, religious activity or good intentions for actual love of God and others?
Why would Jesus’ choice of a Samaritan as the person who shows compassion have been so provocative to many Jewish listeners? Notice the Samaritan’s actions: he approaches the man, treats his wounds, transports him, provides lodging and pays for his care. What does this reveal about the kind of love Jesus commends?
Compare the lawyer’s question in verse 29 with Jesus’ question in verse 36. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus asks which person “proved to be a neighbor” to the wounded man. Why is that change in perspective so important? How does Jesus move the focus from identifying the people we are obligated to love to becoming people who show mercy?
How does this passage expose our tendency to justify ourselves through our morality, religious knowledge or acts of service? If we cannot love God and our neighbors as we should, why do we need more than a command to try harder? How does the mercy God has shown us in Jesus Christ free us to love others, not to earn God’s acceptance, but in grateful response to his grace?
How does Jesus’ saving work both expose our failure to love as we should and provide the grace we need to become people who love? How does seeing ourselves as people who have received mercy, not people who have earned God’s favor, change the way we respond to those who are difficult to love?
A Prayer for the Week
Jesus, thank you for stopping for me when I was helpless on the side of the road. Open my eyes to the people I’ve been crossing the road to avoid, and give me the courage to move toward them with the same mercy you’ve shown me. Amen.
Join Us Sunday
We’d love to see you this Sunday at Souderton meets at 9:00 and 10:30am, Quakertown meets at 9:30am as we keep learning what it looks like to follow Jesus and love the people he puts in our path.