Who is my neighbour?

The story we hear in today’s Gospel reading is a familiar one for many of us.

In fact the phrase Good Samaritan has become part of our language and is used to describe someone who is charitable and helpful.

Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan as an answer to a lawyer who asks the question: “Who is my neighbour?”

The story introduces us to a man without a name. The victim in the story remains anonymous, we are not told what he does for a living, we are not told whether he was travelling for business or whether he was a criminal escaping justice in Jerusalem and heading to Jericho to hide out.

We are not told whether he was rich or poor, whether he was respectable or scandalous, whether he was good or bad. We don’t know what race or religion he was. We are not told whether he was a robber who fell into the hands of other robbers who had double crossed him or whether he was completely innocent.

All we know is that he is a man.

A man who is robbed, beaten, stripped naked, abandoned and left on the road to die. We know that this man is someone who needs help; who won’t survive without someone stopping and intervening.

And this is a man who receives this rescue, this help, from a Good Samaritan. The Samaritans are racially mixed, half-Jew and half-Gentile. They and the Jews have different religious views and practices and at the time Jesus shared this story, Jews and Samaritans had no dealings with each other. Yet in Jesus’s story it is this Samaritan who is moved when he sees an anonymous man. It isn’t clear to him what religion this man follows but the Samaritan is moved enough to act, to show love, and to treat this anonymous man as he would himself want to be treated.

This man with no name receives mercy, grace and healing as a free gift. We are not told whether he is deserving of help or whether he has the means to ever repay the kindness he receives. But he receives it all the same.

This story of the Good Samaritan is familiar but like so many of the stories that Jesus told, it can reveal something deeper. On the surface we hear a story that tells us the importance of seeing all people – regardless of status, race, occupation or gender – as our neighbours and helping those we see in need.

But this story also reveals something about Jesus and His mission. In the Good Samaritan we see God. God who is full of love and compassion: who sees humanity – represented by this nameless man – in need of rescuing and is moved with pity. God sees fallen people, created in His image, but broken and damaged, enslaved by sinful desires and choices, ambushed by unfair life circumstances, victimized by the undeserved evil actions of others, by illness and tragedy.

God sees humanity near dead at the hands of the powers of darkness. And he doesn’t walk past. He chooses to come near.

He not only comes near, he puts himself in our place, in the place of the anonymous man in the story. He becomes humanity, born into a human body to experience what we experience. He places himself in the hands of those who want to murder him. He is stripped and beaten. He is abandoned and betrayed by his friends. He is left to die on a cross. He is passed by and overlooked by the religious rulers and the Roman state, who do not recognise him as Messiah and Law Giver.

Jesus suffers all this. Through Jesus, God rescues us from the power of darkness and transfers us into His kingdom, His family. We are cleaned and bandaged. Our sins are forgiven.

Loving us as himself and dying in our place so that we can share the inheritance of eternal life that comes from being a child of God.

Just like the man with no name in the story, we did nothing to deserve or earn this rescue. We did not and could not pay for our inheritance.

The story of the Good Samaritan is the story of God’s gracious gift of salvation to us, the undeserving. And it remains a challenging answer to the question: “Who is our neighbour?”. When we ask this question, perhaps, like the lawyer, we are hoping to find some justification for not being nice to the people we don’t like or who don’t like us, the colleague or relative that gets on our last nerve, Jesus’s answer to us remains the same. Humanity is our neighbour.

We know the right thing to do is to show love and grace to whoever we encounter, just like our heavenly Father who sends his rain on the deserving and the undeserving. Yet, do we go and do likewise?

We all fall short of fully obeying the Law; the glory of God. But I think an important step to help us is having the right perspective. When we see things like the lawyer in today’s Gospel reading, we try to find legal loopholes to avoid doing the right thing and to justify the areas we fall short.

If we see things like the priest and the levite, we can make the mistake of feeling justified in our church attendance, as if turning up faithfully each week excuses us from living what we hear, what we know to be right, the minute we step outside of these church doors. Like the priest and the levite we can pass by or bypass being a good neighbour in practice.

But if we see ourselves like that anonymous man. That person who – despite not deserving it, not being able to pay for it, not being able to save ourselves – was rescued nevertheless by Jesus. Then in gratitude to God’s mercy, in thankfulness for his grace, his love, his faithfulness and his forgiveness of us and our sins, we will be able to show other people the same undeserved mercy that we have received.

Like Paul we will joyfully give thanks to the Father, who has enabled us to share in the inheritance of the saints. We will lead lives worthy of the Lord, pleasing to God as He watches us, His children, representing His family well.

So this morning, let’s remember the word of truth, the Gospel we have heard. Jesus became our neighbour, our Good Samaritan. He loved us like He loved Himself, he came to our rescue, and he has shared His inheritance of eternal life with us. He wants us to be a neighbour to others. To all of humanity, created in His image.

Jesus wants us to see Him when we see our neighbour, just as He sees Himself in each human – to the extent that when we feed the hungry, when we visit the prisoner, when we welcome the stranger and give clothes to those who don’t have any, Jesus says that we are feeding, clothing and welcoming Him.

Jesus doesn’t want us to quibble over definitions of exactly who counts as our neighbour or exactly who is worthy of receiving our kindness and mercy. Instead He is challenging us to remember that we already know what is written.

We already know what is the right thing to do.

The word is not too hard or far away to access. It is near to us, in our mouths and hearts. We need to make the leap from knowing it in our hearts, from saying it with our mouths, from observing it in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that we read in the Gospels, We need to make the leap – asking the Holy Spirit to help and empower us - to respond to the Word in the way we live our lives everyday.

We know the right thing to do, so let’s GO and DO likewise.