Who Is My Neighbor and Who Is My Good Samaritan?
John Fischer

I received an email from one of our readers who was concerned about her small group Bible study that was turning out to be markedly prejudiced against minorities -- blaming certain social problems on whole people groups, and assigning wrongs to them by nature of their ethnicity. When she tried to get them to entertain another point of view, she failed. So she asked if I could help her amass some facts about these particular minorities that would disprove her group's assertions.

I wrote her back that the only fact that really applied here was that her Bible Study group was in direct violation of the one and only commandment Jesus gave us: that we should love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, and love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

When Jesus gave this as the one commandment that summed up all ten (Luke 10:25-37), he was responding to an expert in Jewish law who was testing Him. After Jesus stated what we now call the Great Commandment, the expert pressed Him further, “And who is my neighbor?” It is then that Jesus told the well-known story of the Good Samaritan. You know it, I'm sure, but looking at this story from a prejudiced standpoint is quite revealing.

A man was attacked by thieves and left beside the road. A Jewish priest saw him and passed by on the other side. Then another did the same. Finally a Samaritan man came by and had compassion on him, treated his wounds, put him on his donkey and took him to the next town where he got him a room and left money for the innkeeper to care for him until he was well enough to go on his way.

Now the Jews detested Samaritans. They saw them as “dogs” and not even worth being counted as human, so when Jesus asked, after telling this story: “Who of the three was a good neighbor?” the expert had to swallow his pride and his prejudice just to utter the word "Samaritan" in a favorable context. Imagine Jesus using a member of a group you detest as a good example, and an illustration of what you know you might not do yourself in a similar situation, and you get a sense for what this must have been like.

So there are two questions today for a particular Bible study group I know of, and for all of us: 1) who is my neighbor, and 2) who would Jesus pick for the Samaritan in my story?

PDL