Who is my neighbor?

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, July 13,2025 (Proper 10): Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

Today’s Gospel reading is one of the most familiar readings in the Bible. Many of us were introduced to it as children, with a focus on the Good Samaritan who helped the man in the ditch. This part of the story is so much part of our culture that we refer generically to “good Samaritans”, and there are Good Samaritan laws that protect people who voluntarily assist people in need. It’s safe to say I don’t have to explain the story.

But the focus on the Samaritan loses sight of the two questions that frame the story. The lawyer, anxious about his salvation, has properly said that the commandments were “to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” But he then asks Jesus the question: who is my neighbor? Jesus tells the parable, and ends with another question, “which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?“

The first question, who is my neighbor? assumes a neighbor is a fixed thing: we now talk about our neighbors as the people who live immediately near us. But Jesus’s question makes being a neighbor an action, not a status. Being a neighbor comes from how we act as neighbors, not from where we live.

We can understand some of the most divisive political debates right now as debates about who is my neighbor. Are immigrants are neighbors? Are some immigrants neighbors and others not? If they are our neighbors, what does it mean to be a neighbor to them? Or to frame it differently, how are we neighbors? And to whom are we neighbors?

I know I am not always the good Samaritan neighbor. I have walked by people on the street more times than I have responded to them. I suspect I am not alone in this. The yellow bags gave us a particular way to help, but it’s not always clear that the bag is what is needed. I often wonder: do they want help? What can I do to help? What happens if I try to help and cannot provide the help that is actually needed? It can feel overwhelming.

But one of the things that I often forget when I am reading this parable is the perspective of the man in the ditch, left for dead. What happens when we are the neighbor who needs help? Because here’s the thing: the Samaritan was the last person he wanted to help him. The Samaritans were a despised minority. The people who should have helped him, the priest and the Levite, walked past on the other side of the road.

Years ago a priest I knew talked about how when she was asking God for help, she generally had clear ideas about who she wanted to be “Jesus” for her. And inevitably the person who actually showed up for whatever she needed was not that person, and was a person she did not want involved. When you need help, what does it feel like when you are helped by people you don’t like? How do we accept those who are neighbors to us even though we do not like them, or respect them? What if we think that they have done things that are actively evil?

The good Samaritan is a reminder that not only do we not choose who helps us when we need help, but that people are complicated. Our desire to have simple categories of good and bad falls apart all the time. When Jesus asks who was a neighbor to the man in the ditch, the lawyer understands that it was the person who showed mercy. We all need to constantly remind ourselves that the answer to “who is my neighbor” is an action, not a state of being.

“Go and do likewise” is Jesus’s command. May we each find more ways to be neighbors to those those who need help.