Disclaimer: You'll notice my next 3 posts are all on the same day... I promise I didn't fall off the wagon that quickly! I was out of town all weekend with a bunch of crazy teenagers and had no wi-fi and quite literally, no time... so I'm catching up today. :)
This lesson on Loving Others focused on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Here are my two favorite quotes...
A scribe asked Jesus how to gain eternal life. Jesus, ever the good teacher, asked him what the Torah teaches. After proving to Jesus that he understood the Jesus Creed, that the two central commands of God’s Torah were to love God and love others, that scribe asked Jesus another question. This time, though, the scribe revealed that he was not yet ready for the revolutionary nature of the Jesus Creed he had so glibly coughed up. He asked Jesus, probably with a little sniff of snobbery, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). Jesus answered with the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37). That clever parable revealed that the real question was not “Who is my neighbor?”—a question that permits one to create boundary lines—but “To whom should I be neighborly?”
This tendency of ours to create 'boundaries' walls us in to our own comfortable world and we start to label those outside of our walls and stereotype them according to those labels... rich, poor, black, white, mexican, homeless, disabled, handicapped, crazy, gay, straight, christian, athiest, muslim, and on and on.... McKnight says that Jesus was challenging the attitude of the Jews at the time who only treated Jews as their 'neighbors.' They were, and we are, great at taking care of their own, but Jesus calls us to take down the boundaries and love ALL of our neighbors.
Neighbor-love, as Jesus teaches it and practices it, crosses those boundaries because it responds to needs, not labels. Two of the biggest challenges of living the Jesus Creed are these: learning to see and hear the needs of the one who happens to be my neighbor and learning to discern when and how to respond.
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