“Love your neighbour as yourself.”
As kids in Sunday school, it was the golden rule taught with a flannelgraph. It’s the phrase painted on wooden signs that adorn the walls of our homes. It’s graffitied on brick walls in the downtown streets of our city.
Even for those who haven’t grown up in church, the familiar sentiment to treat others as you’d like to be treated is agreed to be the gold standard of being a human—it’s the number one rule! But does it really mean anything substantial? Or is it just feel-good fluff?
Here’s a test. If I were to ask you what it means to love your neighbour tangibly and practically, what would your answer be? Who comes to your mind when you hear the word neighbour?
Maybe you think of your friends and family who you love dearly. Or the retired couple across the street who you wave to before your morning commute.
Perhaps you think of the more difficult ones to love—like that one mom on the parent-teacher advisory board who disagrees with all your ideas. Or the coworker that you always seem to clash with.
You’re not the first person to wonder who your neighbour actually is and what it means to love them. In fact, it’s an age-old question that’s addressed directly in Scripture, answered by the one who invented the phrase in the first place —God.
To find out who our neighbour is and what it means to actually love them in a true, real and practical sense, let’s take a look at the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.
Let’s meet the Good Samaritan
“How do I inherit eternal life?” asks a Pharisee, known to be an expert in the law. He’s testing Jesus, the way Pharisees often did.
Jesus reverses the question and asks the Pharisee what the law says—referring to the commandments God gave to Moses in the Old Testament.
The expert responds that you must first, love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And second, love your neighbour as yourself. He’s referring to Leviticus 19:18. Jesus says he’s answered correctly. But the law expert is not satisfied.
“Well, who is my neighbour?” he asks. So, in typical Jesus-fashion, He uses a story to illustrate His answer.
He tells the story of a Jewish man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho. It’s about an 8-hour walk today, according to Google Maps.
On his way, he is attacked by robbers. They take everything from him, including all his clothes. They beat him up and leave him half dead on the side of the road.
Then, three surprising things happened: A priest—a leader of the church, one who should know all the “right” ways to treat people—sees the man on his side of the road. He notices, turns up his nose and walks to the other side of the road. The same way you cross to the other sidewalk when you see a dead bird.
Second, a Levite man—that is, someone who was a priest’s assistant—walks up and sees him. Surely if the priest is too busy to stop and help, his assistant will, we think.
Wrong.
In the same fashion, the Levite turns his head and then crosses to the other side of the street. Nothing to see here, he thinks. Then, a Samaritan approaches the man.
At the time, the Jews did not think highly of the Samaritans. They considered them to be social and religious outsiders.
First, the Samaritan man saw the man who was abandoned to die at the side of the road.
Then the Bible says he felt pity for him. The Greek word that Jesus used for what the Samaritan felt toward the man is “splagma”. It translates to “compassion,” but in Greek, it means “pity from your deepest soul.”
Lastly, the Samaritan man is moved to action. He goes to the man and bandages his wounds after pouring oil and wine to clean them. Recognizing his weak state, he places him on his own donkey, finding a nearby inn that costs him two denarii—a wage that would typically take two days of work to earn.
He asks the innkeeper to care for the man while he is gone, offering to cover any additional expenses he has upon his return. His compassion is costly.
After his poignant story, Jesus reposes the question to the Pharisee: Of the three men, which one was a neighbour to the hurt man? Seemingly defeated, the Pharisee responds, “The one who had mercy on him,” unable to even utter the word “Samaritan” in his answer.
The end of the story is Jesus’ invitation for the man, and for us today: Go and do likewise.
So, who is your neighbour?
The first bit of wisdom we can glean from this story is Jesus’ illustration of who our neighbour really is.
In his book Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just, Timothy Keller narrows our focus on the broadness of Jesus’ definition of neighbour in this parable.
“By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need—regardless of race, politics, class, and religion—is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.”
– Timothy Keller
Anyone at all in need.
The Samaritan man did not ask one question of the hurt man—not where he was from, not what he believed in, not who he was voting for or how much money he had. He saw a need, and he acted, no questions asked.
According to Jesus, neighbourliness doesn’t have walls, barriers or barricades. It is an open-wide gate, encompassing anyone we see, meet or walk past on our life journey. Simply put, our neighbour is someone God places in our lives to show love to, whether on our own street or across the world.
The nitty-gritty how-to of being a good, loving neighbour
To understand why Jesus illustrated the Samaritan man as the one being a good neighbour to his neighbour in need, we need to break down his why. What did the Samaritan man do specifically to be the biblical poster child of a good neighbour?
He saw. He felt. He moved.
Rather than seeing and walking away, or perhaps seeing, feeling and ignoring, the Samaritan moved through three essential neighbourly stages that offered costly, gritty compassion to the one he saw in need.
Let’s look at these stages more closely:
1. A good, loving neighbour sees the needs around them.
Just like the Good Samaritan, we need to allow ourselves to see the people around us and their needs. We need to resist the temptation to put on blinders and keep walking like the priest and Levite in the story.
Our others-centred posture can be towards those we see each day in our homes, our neighbourhoods, our schools, our workplaces or our other activities.
It can also be towards those we see on a national or global scale—on our televisions, our phone screens or our travels. We need to allow our eyes to look beyond ourselves and expand to the lives and needs happening outside our own.
2. A good, loving neighbour feels empathy for what they see.
Jesus says that the Samaritan man “felt pity” (NIV) for the man at the side of the road. Other translations say he “felt compassion” (NLT) or that “his heart went out to him” (MSG).
A good neighbour stops and thinks about the needs before their eyes. To take it a step further, a good, loving neighbour lets their guard down and allows themselves to feel lament what their neighbour is going through.
In her blog post, “What Do You Do With All Of This Grief?” writer Ann Voskamp beautifully shares that if we allow our hearts to be moved by the needs of others, God’s heart moves, too.
“If we deeply care about justice, justice in our streets, in our churches, in our schools, in our communities, in our world, we will keep making spaces for deep lament in our hearts, because when our hearts are moved to lament, the very heart of God is moved toward all of us.”
– Ann Voskamp
Just like we put on fresh socks each day, the Bible encourages us to put on compassionate hearts (Colossians 3:12) and to allow our hearts to be moved to lament. Empathy and compassion are to be to the Jesus-follower as necessary as the clothes on our backs before we step out the door each day.
3. A good, loving neighbour moves with compassion towards the need.
The Samaritan man let his compassion move him into action. He didn’t let his empathy sit idle. He immediately used it to fuel his action in the direction of the one he saw in need.
Just the same, a good, loving neighbour allows their feelings to move them toward their neighbour. To look for solutions and be the one to provide them. Whether it’s bandages for the bruised, food for the hungry, a listening ear for the lonely or a prayer for the hopeless, a good neighbour sees a need and moves towards it. They use their time, talents and resources to pursue wholeness in the life of the other.
This is not to say that we need to cause ourselves deep distress over the needs of everyone. No one person has the capacity to take on the world’s pain, and this can cause burnout or compassion fatigue.
Instead, we can ask the Holy Spirit to reveal who He is putting in our path to show tangible love to, just as the Good Samaritan stopped to be a loving neighbour to the man he saw on his path. We can ask God to show us who He’s calling us to love today.
A prayer for the good neighbour
Seeing, feeling for and moving towards those in need—we can’t do any of it alone. And we’re not meant to. God has promised to be with us as we strive to follow Him in this messy task. He calls us to neither fear nor dread where we’ve been called, but to be strong and courageous. He’s promised to go with us and never leave us (Deuteronomy 31:6).
He’s also given us a community, for such a time as this, to walk with us and encourage us. At Compassion, we would love to be a part of that community, walking with you on your journey to being an even better, more loving neighbour. We’re already a community of over 90,000 people in Canada, and we’d love for you to join us in moving with compassion toward the needs of our neighbours.
Can we pray for you today, neighbour?
Jesus, thank You for showing us what it looks like to be a good, loving neighbour. Thank You for modelling compassion on the move through Your life and through Your teachings like the story of the Good Samaritan. Help us to have the eyes to see the need around us. Help us to have the capacity to feel compassion and the courage to move toward our neighbours with open hands.
May this holy calling to be a loving neighbour bring our souls deep joy, peace and fulfillment. May You equip us with all we need to live each day for the good of others, seeking to be Your hands and feet in our homes, our neighbourhoods, our country and our world.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
