Neighborliness

A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down that road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. Likewise a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight. He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn, and cared for him. (Luke 10.30-34)

When the first census in the United States was taken in 1790, only two cities had more than 20,000 people. New York had the largest population with 33,000. By 1920, a dozen cities had passed the half-million mark, three of which–New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia–had a million people. Certainly, with cities growing in population, both the landscape and people’s lives were changing.

Sociologists are quick to point out that the concept of “neighborliness” changed as cities sprang up and grew, a departure from the ways of previous generations in the country and a difference from the situation of people in rural communities. As one historian summed up the change, “A city’s size itself conferred anonymity on its residents. Individuals could decide with whom to associate and how to behave.”

Soon enough, the front porch–itself a means of interacting with neighbors as they walked by on the sidewalks–was exchanged for the back patio, barricaded and hidden away, ensuring privacy and allowing distance between people on the same city block. Now, not knowing your neighbors was becoming the norm, as clear a reversal from the way things used to be as one can imagine.

Consequences followed as the tentacles of anonymity reached further into the lives of city dwellers, with crime and loneliness and isolation unleashing torrents of societal ills that still plague the corporate body, no good answers in sight, no quick remedies to the separations and divisions that are now part and parcel of people’s lives.

All of this is important in light of the question that we hear Rabbi Jesus ask one of his challengers, this time a scholar of the law who, as Luke tells us in this passage, “stood up to test Jesus.” The Galilean Rabbi, seemingly unperturbed by yet another person out to disprove his teachings, tells a story that concludes with this question to the lawyer, “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”

The story that Rabbi Jesus tells has become known as the story of the Good Samaritan, one of the most well-known of the parables that the Rabbi told, perhaps second only to the story of the Prodigal Son, a parable that has entered our lexicon, giving us the word a good samaritan, referring to a person who assists someone, usually a stranger, who is in dire straits of one kind or another. 

The good samaritan, as shown by its namesake in the gospel, bends over backwards to help someone, giving aid, providing comfort, and answering the needs of another. In other words, showing neighborliness in an age when neighbors, more likely than not, are anonymous strangers and where, for the most part, are now seen simply as people who live on the same street, no association shared except an accidental street sign.

As with most of the Galilean’s stories, the punch to the gut comes at the end, a surprise awaiting the listener who thinks he or she knows where the story is going, but who is suddenly shocked to learn that this story has a twist, the lesson or moral found in the unexpected turn of events. So, when Rabbi Jesus starts his story, telling the sad tale of a man waylaid on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho and left for dead on the side of the road, everyone hearing it expects to find the hero who comes to the rescue at the end to be a nice Jewish man.

Even when two other Jews–both of them priests who work in the temple–walk past the wounded man without offering assistance, the listener still expects the third person to be a Jew, less hurried, less harried, who will stop and help. But the one who shows mercy is the opposite, a Samaritan, the sworn enemy of the Jews, a blood feud between the two that went back centuries keeping them on opposite sides of the fence, the last person on earth expected to lend a hand.

The Samaritan, the one who did not see an enemy, but a neighbor, reverses the bad deeds of the highway robbers who threw the man in the ditch, leaving him to die, while they left with his clothes and with his money. Whereas they robbed him of everything, the Samaritan provides first aid, takes him to the hospital, pays the bill, and says he’ll return to pick him up. 

And in that clever twist in the story Rabbi Jesus shows he has no use for fences, not in our minds where we bracket people, not in our generosity where we deem some deserving and others undeserving, not in our backyards where we draw boundaries between us and them, between ours and theirs. In short, his story would have us look, not at the fence we’ve erected, but at the neighbor on the other side of the fence, a person who is in need of something that we can and should give.

This is quintessential Rabbi Jesus, who never met a fence he liked, because its sole purpose is to divide us from one another, to put us on opposite sides, or to have us believe our identity is rooted in our differences from one another. It may have been the American poet Robert Frost who wrote the line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” but it was Rabbi Jesus who owned the idea.

In a world hellbent on building walls, Rabbi Jesus spoke about tearing down the walls, seeing them as artificial dividers that turned people into enemies. So he sat down at table with sinner, a breach of etiquette that would have sent Miss Manners for the smelling salts; he healed lepers with his bare hands, not keeping a safe distance from them as did everybody else; he considered some of his best friends to be tax-collectors and call girls, social pariahs that were excluded from polite company. 

Much like Carrie Nation who attacked saloons with a hatchet, Rabbi Jesus tried everything in his power to bring down fences wherever he found them, not using an ax so much as parables that proved axioms to be pigheaded, such as the belief that fences make good neighbors. Forcing the lawyer to admit that the one who “was neighbor to him who fell among the robbers,” was “he who showed mercy on him,” he demonstrated it was downright wrong to think a Samaritan couldn’t do a right thing in his life, even if the lawyer couldn’t bring himself to mouth the word “Samaritan” at the end of the story, clear proof he still isn’t a good neighbor himself.

As a matter of fact, not all that much has changed from those times to these times, the inclination and decision to draw imaginary lines in the sand between us and them still as strong–if not stronger–as the state lines between Jews and Samaritans in Rabbi Jesus’ time. Barricaded behind our fences, we’re blind to the cries of others, especially if they don’t look, talk, or act like us. 

A woman down on her luck named Gloria was at a low point in her life, seeing more darkness than light anywhere in sight, and, standing atop a bridge overpass, considered casting her body over the edge, finding no good reason to keep on living in a world in which she couldn’t find a home. As she teetered on the edge, a car passed by and a passenger leaned out the window and yelled at her, “Just jump already!”

Our original sin, persistent and prevalent, is to fail to see as God sees. And how does God see? He sees a world without borders, people without skin colors, cities without high income and low income neighborhoods. Not a fence in sight, like the wide open prairies of the Midwest back in the day before barbed wire was the first thing a person put on his land. What God always sees is inclusion, not exclusion. 

St. Francis of Assisi, who came as close as anybody to seeing the way God sees, spoke of the city of love. “No one lives outside the walls of this sacred place,” he wrote. “Differences exist, but not in the city of love. The priest and the prostitute–they weigh the same.” It is in that city of love, that community of neighbors, that Rabbi Jesus calls us to live.

Once, Father Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries in South Los Angeles, took two ex-gang members with him to Chicago to give some talks. The pair were in the sixth month of their eighteen month long program. As Father Boyle drove to the airport, he felt the stony silence in the car, realizing only then that the two were from rival gangs. 

As he said, “Fresh out of prison, the racial divide was also pronounced. I braced myself for a very long five-day trip.” However, with each day and with continued interaction, the barrier between the two enemies slowly came down, brick by brick. So much so that, as they were driving home from the airport, Manuel leaned forward from the back seat and said to Father Boyle, “You know what the best part of this trip was?”

Not waiting for Father Boyle to answer, Manuel grabbed the arm of the other young man, Todd, and said, “Getting to know him.” Father Boyle turned around and Todd smiled and nodded in agreement. The fences were down. No longer rivals, they were fast becoming friends. Even Neighbors, in the best sense of the word.

Rabbi Jesus said to the scholar of the law, “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

–Jeremy Myers