Everything (In) Between: Neighbors & Strangers
This year’s Lenten worship series invites us to go beyond black and white binaries. The series amplifies Jesus’ invitation to move away from paralyzing polarities that obscure, instead of clarify, the reality we face.
These dualistic binaries and polarities at first glance may seem to simplify our lives, but they can easily keep us from grappling with the deeper truth into which Christ is calling us.
This morning we consider the alleged polarity between neighbor and stranger. Let’s dig in.
As we are presented with Luke’s text, the parable of the Good Samaritan is placed within another story. It’s a story within a story. A teacher of the law stands up to test Jesus. He asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Characteristically, Jesus turns the question back to the one who would put him to the test, asking what is written in the law.
The lawyer gives what may have been a rather commonplace summary:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.
This is a good answer as far as it goes, but then the teacher of the law must press the fine point of the law -- who is my neighbor?
But what passion is energizing him in this moment? It may seem that his passion is being clear about the law, or even to show Jesus up with his own scholarship, but there is a deeper, more fundamental passion to which the text alerts us:
Luke tells us that he presses Jesus on this point to justify himself. To justify himself. The lawyer is looking to set a boundary to the concept of neighbor to limit the extent of his obligation. His passion is to be on the right side of the law. If his obligation is unlimited, then he will never be able to justify himself. There will always be something more. He can’t stand that idea.
Another way to put this is to say that he is asking the question from a place of anxiety. His anxiety about eternal life, his anxiety about judgment. His anxiety about being somehow “bad.”
Jesus, on the other hand, simply talks about life. If you love God and neighbor, you will live. You will live.
So before we even begin to look at the parable, let’s step back and reframe the question in our own minds.
Now this takes us to what for me is a deeper and more important understanding of just how we ask for, and hear, Jesus’ guidance and teaching.
We’ve noticed in the last several weeks how challenging Jesus’ teachings can be. But why are they challenging? Well, a big reason is that we want to fit Jesus’ teaching into our goals, our plans, and our understandings of the world. And that just doesn’t work.
If our framework for operating in the world is to protect ourselves and our loved ones, to maintain our status and self-image, to be comfortable and content, then loving our enemy, forgiving those who wrong us, giving up our possessions or our claim to our time is not going to fit into that operating framework.
We would prefer Jesus’ instructions to overlay our operating framework, not undermine it.
But Jesus is not usually giving us advice as to how to fit better in the world’s framework. Instead, Jesus is inviting us into a different framework, namely the Kingdom of God or Kindom of God, or the realm of God. Or, we might even say, the kingdom of heaven on earth.
The lawyer wants Jesus to help him justify himself. Instead, Jesus is asking him to let go of himself and his felt need to justify himself. To get out of himself. Jesus invites him to hear with the ears of life. To hear with the ears of life. These ears of life are the ones Jesus refers to when he says in other passages, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”
Parables, by their very nature, can allow us to hear. They are often designed to get around our pre-formed judgments and assumptions so that we can hear with the ears of life, the ears of the Kingdom of God. Parables sometimes set out to ambush our preconceptions.
Of course, the parable of the Good Samaritan is so familiar to many of us that it is hard to hear with new ears. But here’s a little thought experiment that may help us. Rabbi Sharon Brous writes:
My friend goes to a church of Caribbean immigrants in downtown Los Angeles. One day his pastor preached: Say you’re walking in downtown LA, or Chicago, or New York. A naked man runs in front of you on the sidewalk, screaming and cursing. What do you do? Most of us, of course, briskly cross the street. That guy’s unwell, we think.
But say you live in a tiny town of maybe fifty households. You’re walking around one day when a naked man runs in front of you on the sidewalk, screaming and cursing. And because you live in a tiny town, you know this man … it’s Henry. Last week, you just happen to know, there was a terrible tragedy, and fire burned Henry’s house to the ground, leaving him with nothing. What do you do? “Henry,” you say, “come with me, friend. You need a warm meal and a safe place to stay.”
Rabbi Brous continues:
What does it take to shift our collective consciousness from stranger who is unwell to Henry, my neighbor, created in God’s own image?…
The challenge is to imagine a fundamentally different reality: a world in which we recognize and fight for each other’s dignity. A world in which we … train our hearts to see even the people others might render invisible. A world in which we recognize that we—images of the Divine—are all bound up in the bond of life with one another. And our hardest and holiest work is not to look away. [https://cac.org/daily-meditations/knowing-our-neighbors/]
The polarity between neighbor and stranger is not in the person who needs help. It is in the context in which we encounter one another in our own situations and stories.
As has often been noted – one of the significant twists in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is that the identity of the hero is the one with the alien, stranger, and enemy identity, not the one who was beaten and abandoned on the side of the road.
So how do we, as Rabbi Brous asks, “train our hearts to see even the people others might render invisible?”
Training our hearts to see, like training our ears to hear, is no small endeavor. Even to imagine ourselves in the story of distressed Henry set in the small village imagines us as having to focus our attention and activity with some significant energy. To imagine how we begin to approach persons in the context of a city that is constructed to almost guarantee that everyone on the street is practically a stranger to each other – or on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, full of vulnerable travelers who were not neighbors at home – and robbers who were – is even more difficult.
Perhaps we feel ourselves retreating to that place of self-justifying anxiety where we want to put boundaries on who we will count as a neighbor.
So let’s come at the neighbor/stranger polarity from a different direction.
One strand of response to the parable of the Good Samaritan is that while it’s great to take care of the stranger left for dead on the side of the road, what really needs to be done is to improve the road for everyone and get rid of the danger of robbers.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is one of those who offers this reflection. Disapprovingly, Dr. King says,
There is no suggestion that the Samaritan sought to investigate the lack of police protection on the Jericho Road. Nor did he appeal to any public officials to set out after the robbers and clean up the Jericho road. Here was the weakness of the good Samaritan. He was concerned merely with temporary relief, not with thorough reconstruction. He sought to sooth the effects of evil, without going back to uproot the causes. [https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/one-sided-approach-good-samaritan]
I don’t think this tack really matches the parable’s moment, but it may lead us to this thought: perhaps we need to begin our consideration not in the dramatic crisis situation, but in the ordinary, everyday situations in which we find ourselves.
In Jesus’ day most people – and indeed for most people of most of human history – interacted with the same couple of hundred people their whole lives. Strangers were unusual. Strangers were “strange.”
Nowadays, however, we interact with strangers all the time: at the store, in our workplaces, at medical facilities, in the car, online, in the newspaper and on television. We are confronted by stranger after stranger. On top of that, more and more of us encounter more and more people of various ethnic backgrounds, clothing styles, and various features of personal adornment.
It might be helpful to simply acknowledge that for many of us, interacting with strangers, let alone trying to be neighbors with strangers, can be stressful. And that’s ok.
So perhaps a major task as a response to this parable, is to do what we can to foster a sense of neighborhood, of trust, of acceptance, and community. Perhaps the most helpful stance we can adopt is to be open to encounter the image of God in those we meet in our words, our deeds, and our expectations.
That openness gives the image of God in the other person the opportunity to shine forth and not hide. Neighbors are as much created as they are discovered, and they are created in encounters in which we remember the image of God that is us, which resonates with the image of God that is them.
Or, as a kind of shorthand: The task is to live with Mr. Rogers’ ongoing invitation: won’t you be my neighbor?
In this way we build a stronger, more durable, network of connection so that we create a social context that is more like the village of fifty households than like the anonymizing city or the violent Jericho road.
And church – by the way – is one of the best structures we have for doing that. Here we build a shared network of love and care that then reaches out, turning strangers into neighbors – before the moment of crisis.
And, finally, perhaps it will help us to return to the two commandments themselves.
“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.”
We can get tied up in legalistically parsing out the dichotomy of neighbor vs. stranger. But in the larger cosmic story, the larger story of love that encompasses neighbor and stranger and everything in between, we receive a vision of the bigger picture. Love is actually all one and not parsed between love for God, love for ourselves, and love for our neighbor and love for the stranger. It’s about allowing that one love to flow freely in our receiving and in our passing it on.
Richard Rohr connects it all this way:
The only way I know how to teach anyone to love God, and how I myself seek to love God, is to love what God loves, which is everything and everyone, including you and including me! “We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19). “If we love one another, God remains in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12). Then we love with God’s infinite love that can always flow through us. We’re able to love people and things for themselves and in themselves—and not for what they do for us. That takes both work and surrender. As we get ourselves out of the way, there is a slow but real expansion of consciousness. We’re not the central reference point anymore. We love in greater and greater circles until we can finally do what Jesus did: love and forgive even our enemies.
Most of us were given the impression that we had to be totally selfless, and when we couldn’t achieve that, many of us gave up altogether. One of John Duns Scotus’ most helpful teachings is that Christian morality at its best seeks “a harmony of goodness.” We harmonize and balance necessary self-care with a constant expansion beyond ourselves to loving others. …
Imagining and working toward this harmony keeps us from seeking impossible, private, and heroic ideals. Now the possibility of love is potentially right in front of us and always concrete. Love is no longer a theory or a heroic ideal. Love is seeking the good of as many as possible.
That is the path that leads us away from our anxieties of self-justification. Leads us away from the paralyzing polarities that deflect us from the deeper cosmic reality of God’s creation. Leads us out of the binary framework of us vs. them.
“Love is seeking the good of as many as possible.”
That, my friends, is the path to life. The life into which Jesus invites us every moment.