Dear Friends,
It’s worth reflecting for a moment on the question asked of our Lord in this Sunday’s Gospel: “Who is my neighbor?”
Our gospeller tells us that the person who asks this question, a lawyer (someone skilled in religious law in this case), asks it in order to “justify himself,” which is to say: our interlocutor already has an idea about just who his neighbor may be…and he wants to make sure he’s right.
Jesus’ response is the famous parable of the Good Samaritan in which, rather curiously, our Lord demonstrates that he’s not interested in directly answering the man’s question at all…because it’s premised on a misunderstanding. Now, Jesus and the religious lawyer have already agreed that loving God and loving one’s neighbor constitute the way to receive life in the Age to Come. But given our lawyer friend’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” it looks like love, for him, is a thing that’s done to another—mercy, compassion requires a subject and an object. “Neighbor,” so he seems to reason, denotes an object of my compassion that is proximate to me according to some geographic or familial or cultural or political standard of proximity (as opposed to God who is, presumably, the non-proximate object of my devotion). It’s quite likely that the preconceived idea of “neighbor” that our lawyer friend wants to test is predicated on one or more or all of these categories, particularly insofar as these categories suggest that his neighbor is an object of love that bears some resemblance (geographic, familial, cultural or political) to him.
Jesus’ objection to the premises of the lawyer’s question becomes clear as the parable unfolds. To love your neighbor as yourself is not about being kind or good or faithful to the appropriate proximate object. To love your neighbor as yourself is to de-center yourself, to recognize your center, your life, your wellbeing as centered in the life and wellbeing of another, whose likeness to you is immaterial at best and, at worst, a distraction from the realization of the other’s very real likeness to God; to love your neighbor as yourself is to understand that God, who is Love Itself, is the subject of all of our love, and that we are invited to participate in God’s own Being of Love by responding in love when we see Love alive in the life of another. To love your neighbor as yourself means being grounded in Love’s own Being recognizing and responding to that Being everywhere.
To be a neighbor is to be one who has been loved by Love into a person of love. The lawyer gets it eventually, in part because Jesus turns the lawyer’s question on its head. “Who is my neighbor?” is not as important a question as “How can I be a neighbor?” What characterizes a neighbor isn’t a social or geographical proximity, but a way of being-in-relationship by which one behaves in a loving way, a merciful way, a compassionate way, to anyone that might be met along life’s way. A neighbor is one whose love is rooted in God’s Love, rooted in the Love whose center—as many of the wise have said throughout the ages—is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.
May we, empowered by the Spirit of Love, obey our Lord’s command love as he loves us.
Under the Mercy,
Mark+
