Pentecost 5 – 2025
Luke 10:25-37
Marian Free
In the name of God whose love knows no constraints. Amen.
I don’t know about you, but at the moment I am overwhelmed by the state of the world, and I feel utterly powerless to intervene or to make any difference at all. Gaza, of course, is the most demanding of our attention, but not us let forget Ukraine, South Sudan and all the other nations involved in on-going conflict or civil war. Then there is the changing geopolitical situation and the potential economic consequence of the US tariffs and aid cuts. All over the world innocent people are suffering the effects of climate change and the increasing unpredictability of the weather. Here in Australia the people of Northern Rivers have experienced once in a lifetime flood twice in two years. They barely have time to recover before they have to begin again. (And that in a wealthy first world country. Imagine trying to re-build one’s life and livelihood in a nation without the resources to which we have access.) I find myself paralysed with indecision. What difference can I make? Will my small contributions help at all?
I’m not even sure how to pray. In the first instance, I do not have the words to use. Secondly, I am not at all sure that my prayers, however fervent, have made a difference.
It is tempting to throw up my hands and leave it all to God. It is equally tempting to narrow my focus, to decide who and what is most deserving of my help or to justify inaction because not being able to do it all I find myself not doing enough.
In order to rationalise my inaction, I find myself thinking about how different the world today is from Jesus’ world and wonder if some of Jesus’ instructions simply don’t translate into the 21st century. In the first century, there was no social service, there were (at least for those of Jesus’ faith) clear guidelines about responsibility for family, for widows and orphans. Smaller communities meant that people were more aware of other people’s business, and they would probably have known the background of the person who begged them for a small coin or two. Without modern forms of communication very few would have known the state of the world beyond their village or region.
In contrast, today in Australia we have social welfare (even if it is inadequate), six-foot fences separate us from our neighbours and in cities that number millions there is a limit to how much we can know about the circumstances of others. The internet and social media mean that we know about disasters all over the world almost as soon as they happen.
The question: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ is even more pressing than it was two thousand years ago. I see my physical neighbours only when I make an effort or pass them on the street. It is generally impossible to know how I can be a neighbour to them.
Jesus’ answer to the lawyer’s question is important, but so too is the question, and the intent of the one asking. We are told that the lawyer is seeking to justify himself. He knows the answer to his first question “What must I do?” – he is a lawyer after all. He asks the second question because he wants to limit and confine the extent to which he has to follow the law. He wants to narrow down what it means ‘to love his neighbour as himself.’
No doubt the lawyer, and no doubt those who have gathered around fully expect Jesus to limit neighbourliness to fellow Jews. After all, they are the chosen.
Jesus however does at least two unexpected things in his story of the man who was a neighbour. Instead of giving a definition of neighbour, Jesus tells a story of neighbourliness. He subverts the expectation that it will be the good, pious Jews on their way to Jerusalem who will offer assistance to the wounded man, and he gives the starring role to a rank outsider, an enemy, a person considered unclean according to Jewish law! The example of neighbourliness is the person least expected.
The Samaritan did not consider political or social implications of helping a Jew, he did not withhold his help because of the deep enmity between his people and theirs, and he did not stop to consider his capacity to help. (What would he do if the inn keeper charged him more than he could afford?)
Jesus doesn’t directly answer the lawyer’s question. He doesn’t say that the Samaritan is the neighbour who should be loved. What Jesus does is to confront the lawyer with what it means to be a neighbour. Using the despised Samaritan as the example, Jesus makes it clear that there are no boundaries to “neighbour”. Shocking as it might be to Jesus’ audience, it is the outsider who demonstrates that being a neighbour doesn’t consider the race, religion, or economic status of the other.
Love of neighbour cannot be limited or reduced to a simple formula because the definition of ‘neighbour’ has no bounds. God’s love, and therefore our love does not discriminate between worthy and unworthy, insider or outsider, but is extended to all humanity.
The problems in the world are overwhelming, but we are not to be discouraged. We will do well if remain open-minded and open-hearted, sympathetic towards the suffering of the good, the bad and the deserving and the undeserving, the familiar and the unfamiliar and if we do all we can to alleviate that suffering through direct support, through volunteering, through political and social action and through prayer.
In this increasingly divided and fractious world. Who is my neighbour? might be the question most demanding of an answer.
Swallowsrest 