Called and Sent · Stop 2
Who is your neighbor, and what does loving them actually mean?
A lawyer asked Jesus a trick question: who counts as my neighbor? Jesus answered with a story about a man beaten on the road and the stranger who stopped to help when everyone else walked past. The answer was bigger than the lawyer expected.
Start this stopNeighbor
The Good Samaritan story doesn't ask you to like your neighbor. It asks you to help them. The Samaritan didn't stop because the man was from his community. He stopped because the man was in front of him, and he was the one who could help.
For Lutherans, service to the neighbor isn't how we earn God's love. It's how God's love moves through us. We've been loved, fed, and forgiven, and so we love and feed and forgive. The flow goes outward.
That flow can carry you a long way. Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper in Mississippi who went to a voting rights meeting at a church and spent years working so Black citizens could vote at a time when doing so cost her nearly everything. She said she was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Her faith helped her act. She did.
You don't have to change the world. You start with the neighbor you can see: the classmate who eats alone, the grandparent who needs a call, the community that needs what you have. That's the calling.
Read it in your Bible
- Luke 10:30–37. Jesus tells about a man beaten and robbed on the road to Jericho. A priest and a Levite each walked past. A Samaritan stopped, cleaned the man's wounds, carried him to an inn, and paid for his care. Jesus asks which one was the real neighbor.
- Matthew 25:37–40. Jesus tells his followers that when the king welcomes them, they ask when they ever saw him hungry, thirsty, a stranger, or sick. The king says: whenever you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.
The Fifth and Eighth Commandments, from Luther's Small Catechism
You shall not murder. What does this mean? We should fear and love God that we may not hurt nor harm our neighbor in his body, but help and befriend him in every bodily need.
You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. What does this mean? We should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, or defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.
Words to know
- Samaritan. In Jesus' story, the outsider who stopped to help while the religious insiders walked past. The point is that the neighbor isn't always who we expect.
- Service. Helping the neighbor not to earn anything, but because God's love moves outward through you. Service from grace looks different from service to earn. You don't have to keep score.
- Mercy. What the Samaritan showed: care that costs something and doesn't ask what you deserve. The question isn't whether they deserve help. The question is whether you can give it.
- Justice. Working to change the conditions that leave neighbors beaten on the road in the first place. Mercy helps the person in front of you. Justice asks why so many people keep getting hurt in the same place.
- Least. The word Jesus used for the hungry, the sick, the stranger, the ones the world passes by. Jesus didn't say the least matter a little. He said what you do for them, you do for him.