That Is The Question--October 8, 2024

That Is The Question--October 8, 2024

"Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. 'Teacher,' he said, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?' He said to him, 'What is written in the law? What do you read there?' He answered, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.' And he said to him, 'You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.' But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor?'" [Luke 10:25-29]

Hamlet was wrong.  

Sure, just about everybody in the English-speaking world knows the famous line Shakespeare gave him: "To be, or not to be--that is the question," but I'm convinced that "THE question" that really needs to be asked and wrestled with is a different one, posed by an expert in the law to Jesus: "And who is my neighbor?"  

Once we've decided "to be" and to go on living this life (a choice that we each make every morning when we put our feet on the floor), we are immediately faced with the question of how we relate to every other person who is living in the world, too. When all the melodramatic soliloquies are over and done, we are compelled to take real action related to the real people with whom we cross paths every day--and at that point, we have to deal with the question of who we really believe "counts" as our neighbor.

You probably know that this scene from Luke's gospel is the prelude for Jesus to tell the story we call the Good Samaritan (which we'll look at as the week unfolds), and that means you probably also know where this conversation is headed from the beginning.  But it's worth pausing for a moment to see all the explosive potential waiting to unleashed just in the question that the legal expert asks of Jesus.  He has moved from the Torah-101 level lessons that anybody could recite (everybody knew they were supposed to "Love God" and everybody had heard the commandment from Leviticus to "love your neighbor as yourself,") to the real beating heart of the matter.  After all, anybody can memorize a verse or two of God's commandments.  But living them out is harder work; it moves from the abstract and general to the real and tangible details of actual life.  It moves away from hypothetical human beings (who are never messy, complicated, or hard to love) to real ones, who are often all of those things at once. Asking the question--at least if we ask it honestly--includes the willingness to change our actions and attitudes toward people once we realize that they are among those God counts as our "neighbors."  And to be honest, sometimes people (even Respectable Religious People) don't want to have to make those changes... so we don't dare really ask, "Is this person my neighbor... in God's eyes?"

You know, on that point, maybe the question of this lawyer from Luke's Gospel isn't that different from Hamlet's famous, "To be or not to be..." After all, in Shakespeare's play, prince Hamlet is really asking that question as a way of asking himself if he is brave enough to do what has to be done if he chooses to stay alive--will he find the courage to confront his villainous uncle and get justice for his murdered father, or will he chicken out and look for an easier way, even if that just means giving up on life altogether?  In a sense, if you are the title character in the play Hamlet, once you ask the question, "To be, or not to be," you are starting already to unravel at a thread that will force you to find the nerve to live, to take action, and to do the scary thing.  Underneath Hamlet's question is really the inquiry, "Am I willing to muster the bravery it will take to do what I have to if I choose to be, rather than not to be?" You might have all the rationalizations and excuses in the world, but if you sincerely ask the question, it will put you on a path whose unavoidable conclusion is to face the thing you are scared of in spite of your fears and to not let yourself off the hook.  

I think that the legal expert's question puts us on a similar path of inevitability.  Once he poses the question, "Who is my neighbor?" he (and all of us along with him) will have to muster the bravery to accept the kind of answer Jesus points him toward--what if there is no "boundary," so to speak, dividing neighbor from stranger, or even neighbor from enemy? What if my "neighbor" turns out not to be a geographic category (as in, "A neighbor is someone who lives within a five-mile radius of your house," or " A neighbor has the same ZIP code as you,") but a theological category that points us toward anyone who crosses my path?  

Of course, I kind of get the sense that the lawyer in Luke doesn't want to accept that possibility.  He is hoping that his question will have a discrete, bounded answer of who is "in" and who is "out."  He wants Jesus to give him an answer like, "A neighbor is someone from your same ethnic group, or your same nationality, or your religious denomination, or who speaks your language."  He wants to know who he "has to" take care of, and conversely, who he does NOT have to care about.  And so long as there are limits--so long as he can rule some people "out"--he will know when he has done "enough" to get the necessary "points" to "inherit eternal life."  The lawyer thinks that is where his question is headed: with a check-list of what precise things he is expected to do for which precise people, in order to secure his requested payout of eternal life.  It's all very transactional, like God is some sort of cosmic Maker of Deals, rather than the Creator of the universe.

And that's why you know that the answer Jesus gives, in which a foreigner turns out to be the hero and "neighborliness" turns out to be about empathy rather than ethnicity, will blow apart the lawyer's question.  Anytime we ask, "And who counts as my neighbor, technically speaking?" with the intent to put limits on who I have to care about or whose suffering makes a claim on my life, we are going to be challenged and stretched by Jesus.  The moment the question forms in our minds, the moment we ask, "Shouldn't we take care of our own before we help anybody else?" Jesus compels us to see that in the Reign of God, everybody is part of "our own," because ALL of us belong to God. As soon as we ask, "And who is my neighbor?" we should be prepared for Jesus' response to demand a new kind of courage from us to regard everybody as a neighbor, and to have him dare us to love all people with the same care we would want to be shown to us. Once the question is spoken, we are already headed on a trajectory to come to terms with the fact that God doesn't see humanity in terms of "us" and "them" at all, but all of us as infinitely precious and made in the divine image. 

If we are brave enough to ask the question, will we be brave enough to take Jesus' answer seriously?

Lord Jesus, open wide our minds to think and see in the terms you set out for us, and give us the courage to live in the kind of love you have shown to us first.