How is My Neighbor?

The scriptures referred to are Luke 10:25-37.

It's been a crappy couple of years, hasn't it? The pandemic, which is still not quite over, has killed more than 6 million people worldwide, 1/6 of those in the US alone. And of the 500 million who got it and survived nearly half—49%—are struggling with long Covid, which strongly resembles ME/CFS, 4 months after their “recovery.” Considering the million who died and more than 200 million who have long Covid that might explain all the people not coming back to work.

In addition, mass shootings are now a regular feature of the news, with an average of more than 1 each day. We've had over 300 in the first 6 months of this year so far. A mass shooting is defined as one in which 4 or more people die. Far more frequent are suicides by firearms which make up more than half of the 45,000 gun deaths in this country annually.

Meanwhile, California is on fire, the Colorado River which provides water to the southwestern US is drying up, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising and global warming is an undeniable fact.

My point is we are all suffering. And if we aren't at present, others are. The question is: how will we respond?

The original question in our gospel is: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” It's asked by an expert in the law, the Torah. And Jesus does something typical. He responds to the question with a question. In the gospels Jesus is asked 183 questions. He only answers 3. However, he asks 301 questions. Jesus obviously favors the Socratic method of teaching.

In this case Jesus asks, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” And since the person making the inquiry is an expert in that area, it's a fair question. And he makes a good answer: “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.”

You will notice that unlike in Matthew and Mark, in Luke it is the lawyer who says this, not Jesus. There are 2 possible explanations for this. First, the idea that, out of the 613 commandments in the Torah, there must be one or more that are absolutely key was not a new one. Indeed, the first commandment given here is part of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-5), the Jewish confession of faith, said daily in their prayers and on every Sabbath in the synagogue. So it is not surprising that either Jesus or any other pious Jew would choose it as the primary commandment. And the second commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself from Leviticus 19:18, is not a startling choice either. In fact you can see the first 4 of the Ten Commandments as being ways of showing your love for God and the remaining 6 as ways to show your love for your neighbor. Indeed in Matthew 22:40, Jesus says that all of the Law and the prophets are dependent on these two commandments. That is, they are derived from them. Ultimately the whole Bible is concerned with how we act towards God and how we act towards other human beings.

Which brings us to the second possibility for the lawyer choosing these two commandments: he could have heard Jesus say it before and is merely repeating it to get Jesus to agree. Again, the lawyer could have come up with these commandments independently but his follow-up question to Jesus makes this sound like this was a set-up. After Jesus commends his answer, we are told that the man asks his next question, “And who is my neighbor?”, in order to justify himself. How?

You could interpret the word “neighbor” in a narrow way. It could mean your fellow countryman, or fellow religious believer or simply the person living next door to you. And that leaves you open to treat people outside that narrow definition of neighbor badly. The Nazis could justify themselves as being good to their fellow “Aryan” Germans. But since they didn't consider the Jews, or gypsies, or Slavs or a lot of other people as being human, much less neighbors, they could do whatever they wanted to them. We see this in racists and nationalists and even certain so-called “Christians” who are good to their own kind but not to other people. The lawyer was probably thinking that as long as he treated his fellow Jews well, he was in the clear. He deserved eternal life.

But there is also a narrow way of defining the right way to act towards others. Most of the Ten Commandments are negative: do not have other gods, do not make idols, do not misuse God's name, do not murder, do not have sex with someone other than your spouse, do not steal, do not give false testimony against your neighbor, do not put your desire on what your neighbor has. Aside from keeping the Sabbath and honoring your parents, everything else is about refraining from bad actions and intentions. And indeed when asked to summarize the law, the great rabbi Hillel said, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary.” Notice that his version of the Golden Rule is also negative. It is akin to the part of the oath doctors and nurses take which goes “First, do no harm.” Which is a good start for any ethical system.

But if not followed up by positive commandments, it could lead to benign neglect. Or outright neglect. If you see a person suffering but you don't add to it by murdering him or stealing from him or doing him further harm, you could say that technically you did not violate the Ten Commandments. There isn't a specific obligation there to help him.

Except that is just how most people act. On You Tube, in a segment from the ABC show What Would You Do? they had stunt people fall and lie seemingly unconscious on the pavement. When it was an attractive well-dressed woman, people responded in seconds. When it was an apparently homeless guy, it took minutes before anyone even called 911. And when it was a homeless guy clutching a beer, 88 people just walked by.

Sadly in real life, it's often worse. A homeless man was attacked on a busy sidewalk and hit his head and it took 19 minutes for anyone to do something about it. And when an elderly woman rolled off her chair onto the floor in an ER waiting room, it took 45 minutes for nursing personnel— who were aware of her lying there—to go to help her. In both of those cases, it was too late. And of course we all saw what happened recently when police stood around outside a school for more than an hour rather than go after a gunman or rescue wounded and traumatized children. And the Supreme Court has previously ruled that police are under no legal obligation to help people. These cops did, however, arrest a mother who tried to enter the school to rescue her children. Once she talked police into uncuffing her, she jumped a fence and got her kids. But then her children were more than neighbors to her.

To combat this limited idea of who is our neighbor and what constitutes loving them, Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan. And rather than going into the reason as to why the priest and the Levite didn't help the man who was beaten and left for dead—which as we have seen was not at all out of the ordinary—let's look at the focus of the story: the man who helped.

First off, Jesus explodes the idea that your neighbor has to have any connection to you. The injured man is presumably a Jew like the priest and Levite. The Samaritan is not. He would be considered a half-breed heretic by Jesus' audience. In fact the lawyer will not even mention what he is when Jesus asks who was a neighbor to the victim. He simply says, “The one who showed him mercy.” Which, oddly enough, is more relevant. Being a neighbor has nothing to do with race or religion or any other relationship to the other person, or even how you feel about him. It has to do with how you act: with mercy.

Secondly, Jesus blows up the idea that loving is merely not being harmful to someone. Love means actively helping them. It means doing what you can to make them better. As the Paul McCartney song says, it's a short step from “Live and let live” to “Live and let die.” Studies show that, as damaging as abuse is to children, what does the most damage is neglect. Love is not a luxury but a need. It's not enough simply not to harm people. That's only the first step. To love someone is to make their well-being a top priority.

So what does the good Samaritan do to show his love for his neighbor? First he goes to him. He doesn't act as a bystander. He doesn't send thoughts and prayers. He makes a move. In first aid classes, they recognize that the hardest thing to get people to do is to get them involved. Once someone goes to the person in distress, others are more likely to join in. We were actually taught to go to the person having an apparent heart attack and then start pointing at bystanders and telling them, “You: call 911! You: do you know CPR? What about you?” Once you act, others will, too.

And, sure enough, the next thing the Samaritan does is give first aid. He cleans the wounds with oil and wine, the antiseptics of the day, and bandages them. Every person, and especially every Christian, should take first aid classes. They are offered for free by the Red Cross and others. I just took a refresher in Marathon offered by the Islamorada fire chief. As a nurse I need to get my first aid and CPR certification renewed and every time I do I learn something new that first responders have come up with. And it's come in handy, especially with the number of car wrecks and bicyclists hit by cars I've stopped to attend to here in the Keys. And I've never been alone in helping the injured. There are always off-duty cops and firefighters and nurses who stop and help.

There are other kinds of first aid, though. As I mentioned earlier, suicide is a major problem today. One person dies by suicide every 11 minutes and the number of people who think about it or attempt it is even higher. It is among the top 9 leading causes of death for people from ages 10 to 64. It is the second leading cause of death between the ages of 10 and 14 and between the ages of 25 and 34. It is higher than average for non-Hispanic Native Americans as well as for older white men. Veterans, people who live in rural areas and people in physically demanding jobs like construction and mining and emotionally demanding jobs like doctors and police officers have higher suicide rates. LGBTQ youth also are at a higher risk for suicide. And there is suicide first aid, ways of helping a person who is thinking of killing themselves. It consists of listening to and not arguing with them about their feelings but finding out if they have a plan and the means to kill themselves, and then getting them to agree to a safety plan that specifies who will do what and when in regards to getting them help. Again there are courses you can take. And you can find the steps to take online.

Next the Samaritan gets additional help by putting the man on his animal and taking him to an inn. Today we would call 911 and an ambulance would come and take him to a hospital. But that wasn't a possibility in 1^st century Judea. So after giving first aid, instead of saying, “That's all I can do for you,” the Samaritan remains pro-active. He takes the man to an inn and takes care of the injured man himself. He no doubt gets him water and something to eat. He makes him as comfortable as he can. He watches over him. Unlike what you see on TV or in movies, anyone who has gone unconscious, even for a few seconds, is not all right if they awaken. They could relapse and die from an intracranial bleed. They should go to the hospital. But without that option, the Samaritan watches the man overnight so he doesn't die on him.

The next day the Samaritan, who has to go, gives the innkeeper the equivalent of 2 days' wages and tells him to take care of the man. And he promises to pay him back if he spends more. The Samaritan takes the cost of helping the man recover upon himself. And most industrialized countries do make sure everyone gets healthcare. Unfortunately more than 20,000 people die each year in the US because they lack health insurance. That's an average of 1 death every 24 minutes. The death rate for the uninsured is 18.4%, nearly double the 9.6% death rate of the insured.

The Samaritan shows his love by actively doing what he can to help restore the well-being of a stranger in distress whom he merely came upon. He does specific practical things and he does them despite the cost to himself in time, effort and even money. He wasn't a doctor nor had he taken a first aid course. He did what he could with what he had. He is Jesus' example of what loving your neighbor looks like and what every Christian should do.

We have greater resources today. We have hospitals and ambulances and Trauma Star to whisk people away to Ryder Trauma Center in Miami. And I think that makes us complacent and unable to see what we still lack. The US spends nearly twice the percentage of its GDP on healthcare as the average country in the 35 member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And yet the US comes in last in the top 11 high-income countries in health outcomes. We have the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy at age 60. Our rate of preventable deaths is more than double that of Switzerland. You would think the richest country in the world, which is also the most religious country among wealthy nations, would do better.

Paul said that the “thorn in his flesh” that afflicted him was to keep him humble and to realize how dependent he was on God's strength. (2 Corinthians 12:7-9) And I think the healthy and well-off find it easy to ignore those who are suffering because they doing fine—at present. In that What Would You Do? segment, 88 people pass by what looks like a homeless man lying on the ground unconscious and clutching a beer. The 89^th person is Linda Hamilton, a black homeless woman walking with a crutch. She sees the prone man and stops and pleads for people to call 911. She picks up and throws away the beer can and calls the man “Billy,” personalizing him. And the 26^th person to come by after Linda stopped to help does respond to her pleas and call 911. It took a woman who knew what it was to suffer to show compassion to another person suffering.

C.S. Lewis said, “Pain insists on being listened to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Perhaps what we have been going through is our “thorn in the flesh.” Perhaps in the pains we have been suffering God is shouting, “LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR. THEY'RE HURTING TOO.” Are we listening? Are we really, finally going to love our neighbor as we do ourselves? How many times does Jesus need to ask the question?