I think the central question for Christians today, especially White American Christians, is whether we will love our neighbor or not.
Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and to renewed calls for racial justice have placed choices before Christians. While some seem newly invested with love of their neighbors, many American Christians disturbingly have asserted a self-centered freedom putting others at risk of disease, asking like Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Many individuals and pastors and even Seminary Presidents have chosen to assert their cultural superiority rather truly take account of how they have been involved with racism.
White American Christians have particular challenges of neighbor love to meet, but Christians worldwide are met with the teeming diversity of humanity and violent fractures in communities and nations. There are many wells to draw from given 2000 years of theology in manifold cultures and streams of Christianity, some which lock us into conflict or isolation, turning the stranger into a target, fool, or enemy; but other sources lead us into the humble way of Christ and his teaching of love for the neighbor, who is, no matter their religion or other identities, someone we can learn from and listen to and with whom we can find a way to live in peace together on this good earth. This is not an Arrogant Faith or Power hungry Faith but a Neighbor Faith.
Neighbor Faith happens when Christians remember Jesus’s teaching that loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself go together. This was how Jesus summed up the Law of his tradition, and perhaps can help us sum up the best of two millennia of Christian theology.
Further extending the lessons he learned in his own Jewish tradition, Jesus recognized the neighbor not just as the person next door or the person like him but saw the neighbor as the person with different needs and different culture. Those marginalized, pushed to the edges or regarded as the enemy, those strangers were also neighbors.
In the Parable of the Samaritan, Jesus extends the understanding of the neighbor. The way that Jesus sets up this story causes the listener to expect that the neighbor is the man on the side of the road in need of help. A person to be pitied. Jesus sets up the listener to put themselves on the pedestal, above the neighbor. To expect that they will be the hero of this story, the one who stops to help.
Then along come the Priest and Levite, from sacred orders and families. Religious authorities, vested with power and highly educated. Yet they fail the neighbor test. Why? We don’t entirely know. A common Christian interpretation has argued that they felt held back by Jewish laws about purity and not touching dead bodies. But Jewish scholars have countered that this is incorrect (and an example of Christian anti-semitism) and the law provided guidance to help those in need in such a situation. So why did the Priest and Levite not stop? The problem seems not to be strict observance but rather that they did not remember how their tradition taught them to serve this neighbor. Christians may ask in the same vein: are we remembering to love our neighbor?
So who came along the road next? Scholar Amy Jill Levine notes that in Jesus’ day, there was a common trinitarian formulation of Priest, Levite, and Israelite. So the lawyer to whom Jesus was telling this story and others listening may have expected the hero to be an ordinary Israelite. But still “one of us” for Jesus and his audience.
This is when Jesus begins to turn things upside down by introducing a stranger, the Samaritan. The Samaritans and Jews shared a heritage and much of their religious laws and stories. Yet, Samaritans worshipped on the wrong mountain, not in Jerusalem, but at Mount Gerizim. They were the wrong kind of religious. (And to be fair, the Samaritans shared this enmity; it was mutual).
The Samaritan embodies sustained concern as he crosses the road to the injured man, dresses his wounds, puts him up on his own animal, takes him to an inn and cares for him. Then, upon leaving, he leaves a significant sum for the innkeeper to use to take care of the man and promises to return.
Finally, Jesus completes the turn in the story to full upside down when he asks, “Which of these do you think was the neighbor?” Jesus has not only challenged the lawyer’s notion of who a neighbor is, he has turned the question on its head. The lawyer wanted to know who the neighbor was he is supposed to love. Perhaps an object of his pity. A target for patronizing love. Jesus challenges instead by redirecting his attention: who is the neighbor you can learn from? Who is not your target but your teacher?
The lawyer is forced to reply, reluctantly, “The one who showed mercy.” He could not even say the Samaritan’s name, but recognizes Jesus’ lesson: just as there are neighbors who may need our help, there are neighbors who will help us, who may even be the “wrong kind of religious.” Go and do likewise, Jesus tells him and tells us: be a neighbor like them.
Will we love our neighbor, Christians? Will we let our neighbors of different denominations, of different races and ethnicities, of different religions, of no religion, teach us how to be good neighbors? Joining together in this kind of Neighbor Faith may be the most powerful witness and impactful unity Christians can achieve in these harrowing days.
Matt Hartley 