Who Is My Neighbor?
Fear Not - Part 2
Sunday, February 28, 2021
Luke 10:25-37, Exodus 1:7-14, Genesis 1:26-27
He answered, “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.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Luke 10:27-29
He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.
Exodus 1:9-12
Our story today on the Good Samaritan has become so familiar to our ears that we sometimes struggle to identify ourselves with anyone but the Samaritan himself. Just like the legal expert to whom Jesus was telling this story, we are quick to justify ourselves by our acts of kindness for others and never imagining that we could be so callous as to simply walk by a person lying on the side of the road without at least calling the police or an ambulance for help.
Perhaps then it is best to go back to where this story begins, and that is with the lawyer himself, the one who asks Jesus the question that inspired such a story. His first and primary concern in verse 25 is a question of his own salvation. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds with a summation of the law of Moses and what has become known as “the greatest commandment”, to love God and to love your neighbor. It’s not nearly as complicated as we so often make it, but the lawyer is not fully satisfied. He wants to read the fine print on the contract to make sure certain this promise of eternal life is guaranteed. Like any good researcher, he wants Jesus to more clearly define his terms and so he asks, “Who is my neighbor?”
The implication here is that the man assumes there are some people who don’t fall under the “neighbor” umbrella. We know from Jesus’ parable that such an assumption is false and that everyone must be treated as a neighbor, but for now the lawyer is still looking for loopholes. We don’t know why he assumes that some may not be identified as neighbors, nor do we know who or what groups of people he specifically had in mind who might not qualify. Was he trying to validate his own poor treatment of people whom he didn’t consider neighbors? Was he making sure he knew exactly who he is “required to love” so that he also knows who he can exclude? In any case, as Jim Wallis notes, the tone of his question is not one of “expanding the reach of loving his neighbor, but of restricting it.”
If we jump back to Exodus 1 we find a large scale example of what it means to exclude others from the category of neighbor. A new king arises in Egypt who does not know Joseph or all of the blessings brought upon them by the descendants of Abraham who now lived within their national borders. These Hebrew immigrants were growing stronger and more numerous every day and prospering in the land there ancestors had come to during the famine. Geographically, they had become neighbors to Pharaoh and the Egyptian people. Culturally, religiously and racially they were “other.” They were different. And as has been the case in nearly every culture throughout history, we are taught to fear what is “other”.
Rather than finding ways to work with this immigrant population, Pharaoh worried that they might rise up and join their enemies in a war against Egypt. Though there is no basis to this concern, Pharaoh acted swiftly to prevent his worst nightmare from coming true. He enslaved the Hebrew people and set them to work building his great Egyptian cities. Furthermore, he tried to have their male children killed at birth so their community as a whole would weaken in the generation to come.
Why treat their neighbors so badly with no provocation? Why assume the Hebrew people would have been a threat rather than an ally? There is only one reason, and it is the same reason which underlies the lawyers question to Jesus and the cold indifference of the priest and the Levite who walked past the dying man on the street in Jesus’ story. The reason is fear.
Our society also teaches us to be afraid of immigrants. Politicians and media outlets paint many foreigners, particularly of Latino or Muslim origin, as terrorists, thugs, rapists, drug dealers, and any other image they can conjure up to stir up the citizens against them. Black people peacefully protesting for better treatment are immediately clumped in among the relatively smaller number of rioters and looters in their midst while white nationalists carrying guns into federal buildings and waving Nazi flags are seen as patriots defending their rights. Regardless of where you stand on these issues, the disparity of how groups of people are treated in our nation cannot be denied. The hypocrisy is so blatant that many have become blind to it because we have come to see it as normal.
This differentiation of “the other” driven by our fear of those who are different has led to countless horrors throughout history, from the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt to the martyrdom of the early Christians under paranoid Roman emperors. And history shows that we have not learned from our mistakes. The same “fear of other” stands at the root of the Crusades, the Salem Witch Hunts, the Holocaust and even the attacks of September 11th. When fear of other becomes the cultural norm, atrocities like slavery and even genocide become almost heroic, as though we are saving our own people from a fate worse than death by destroying the others and keeping them at a distance.
We can not solve all of the tragic outgrowths of societal fear in one Sunday morning, but we can start by examining our own fear of others.
Who are you afraid of and why? What assumptions have you made about those people that cause you to keep them at arms length or ignore their pain and struggle? Where do those assumptions come from? What would it look like to build a real relationship with someone radically different than you? What fears would you have to let go of in order to truly hear their story without a critical or judgmental eye?
We may not actively hate those who are different to the point of wanting to do harm as Pharaoh did, but it is likely our fear of others has led to a far more subtle and equally dangerous response… indifference. The priest and the Levite did not actually harm the man on the side of the road, but neither did they care enough to help.
Pope Francis describes the tragic result of indifference driven by our underlying fear or distrust of others.
We end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.
If you struggle to answer the questions about who you may be afraid of, you might start by asking who you have become indifferent too. What groups of people do you tune out when they show up on the news? Who do you drive by on the street with a glance of disdain or a mental remark about how they should be doing something better to improve their situation? When issues of racism or injustice come up, do you listen with an open heart of compassion, or do you roll your eyes and sigh as if to say, “here we go again.”
I wonder how we would honestly respond of Jesus had been that dying man on the side of the road. Would it have made any difference? If we saw him carrying his cross up the hill, bloodied and battered beyond recognition, would we step in to help him carry it or would we avert our eyes and assume he was just another among countless criminals whose public suffering and crucifixion would bring us and the rest of the mob some form of sick pleasure.
Don’t let your fear of the “other” strip you of compassion. Don’t let your discomfort with someone’s difference lead you to indifference. Remember, “Whatever you did for the least of these,” Jesus says, “you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40).
Listen to this week’s sermon here:
Video of the complete worship service available at http://asburyumc-huntersville.com/live