Won't You Be My Neighbor?

July 13, 2025, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

We’ve all known “good Samaritans.” By that, I mean people who understand that everyone is their neighbor.

When I was in college in the early seventies, my philosophy professor was an extraordinary man named Peter Genco. Peter had a neatly trimmed black beard, perhaps so he would look more philosophical, and he was known for penetrating lectures that forced us students to think a little deeper. There was a rumor that his dissertation was accepted by his Ph.D committee as proof of the existence of God which, if so, you’d think would have attracted more attention in church circles.

But I remember Peter more for his neighborliness than his intellect. If anyone needed help, Peter was there for them. He showed up to help people pack to move, usually uninvited because no one dared ask the great man for help. I mentioned once that I needed to rent a U-Haul van to pick up a large table and he gave me the keys to his VW bus. If Peter was late for class, it was probably because he had stopped to help some poor motorist change a tire. (NOTE: This was 1970. Don’t try this today. The motorist will not assume your intentions are honorable.)

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is the Grant’s Tomb of canonical scripture. The General’s Napoleonic memorial on Riverside Drive is thought to be New York’s best known and least visited landmark. So, too, the Parable of the Good Samaritan may be Jesus’ best known and least followed lesson.

The parable is not for Christian minimalists who want to limit their Jesus experience to Facebook memes and simpleminded hymns. It is comforting to croon,

Every day with Jesus ... Is sweeter than the day before ... Every day with Jesus ... I love Him more and more ...

But the parable of the Good Samaritan is anything but comforting. It’s like having cold water splashed in our faces as we try to sleep in on Sunday morning. It forces us to encounter a more demanding Savior than the understanding sweetheart who dotingly rocks our cradle and never asks us to get up to do something.

The lawyer who first posed the question to Jesus was jolted awake by the answer. He was probably expecting a more technical analysis of the theoretical question, “Who is my neighbor?”

Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian pastor, theologian, and writer, put it this way:

When Jesus said love your neighbor, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbor. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something of the order of “A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one’s own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as the neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort of kind whatsoever.” 

As everyone knows, Jesus deliberately made a Samaritan the good guy because Samaritans represented everything his listeners feared and despised. The enmity between Judeans and Samaritans can be traced back to two of Jacob’s sons who sold their brother Joseph into slavery (Genesis 37:3-4) but hostilities intensified over the years because of racial, ethnic, and political animosities. 

When Jesus used a Samaritan as an avatar of neighborliness, it must have driven his audience crazy. It was also fair warning that the Christian life could make some distasteful demands on the faithful. 

Father David Kirk, founder of Emmaus House, collected dozens of parables, sermons and declarations of Jesus and put them together in a wonderful but now nearly out of print book called, Quotations from Chairman Jesus. 

Strung together in the style of Quotations from Chairman Mao, the little red book of the Chinese revolution, the words of Jesus looked as radical as they sounded when they were first uttered. In 1969, Kirk contextualized the Good Samaritan by making him a figure feared and hated by many: The Good Black Panther.

It was a brilliant conceit fifty years ago, but there aren’t many people who hate and fear Black Panthers now. Many of us remember the Panthers as social justice heroes.

Today, it takes a little more imagination to contextualize the Samaritan. Today, it could be the Good Tort Attorney, the Good Used Car Salesman, the Good Mafia Don. 

Good Samaritans come from many walks of life.

Some reach out to their neighbors because they see their need – and because they can.

Bruce Springsteen has stepped in to pay for the funeral expenses and compensation for the families of victims of the devastating Texas flash floods. 

MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow donated $3 million and hand wrote letters to the parents of 27 missing girls to see if there were other ways she can help.

Chef José Andres and World Central Kitchens are preparing thousands of meals for Texas flood victims.

And we can help, too, by supporting Lutheran World Relief, Church World Service, and other service organizations that are active in Texas and around the world.

Some reach out because they have the means to do it and the divine empathy to see the need.

Others reach out at the risk of their lives and livelihoods. 

Hermine “Miep” Gies was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family, and four other Dutch Jews from the Nazis in an annex above Otto Frank’s business premises during World War II. 

Thousands of courageous Catholic priests risked their lives to sign baptismal certificates for Jews to obscure their identities from the Gestapo.

Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer left a safe position at Union Theological Seminary to return to his native Germany to stand against the Nazis, and paid with his life.

In our present time in which empathy is considered by some to be a “woke” weakness, thousands are reaching out to neighbors protect them from ICE arrests. Bishop Alberto Rojas of the San Bernardino Diocese has issued a dispensation from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass for Catholics fearing immigration raids. Pope Leo XIV has condemned the byzantine and often cruel immigration laws in Europe and the U.S. and has asked diocesan priests to accompany immigrants who are going before immigration courts to seek legal permission to resume a path to residency and citizenship.

For many, the parable of the Good Samaritan is an unpleasant reminder that every day with Jesus has many challenges. Every day with Jesus may also include a sour aftertaste if we have to mingle our human weaknesses and prejudices with the purity of God’s unconditional love for all God’s creatures. Whenever someone we don’t even know is in need, it can be damned inconvenient to stop to see if we can help. If the person in need turns out to be someone we will never see again, it becomes all too easy to walk on by.

But good neighbors do not walk on by, and in many cases these good neighbors may be people we despise.

The Christian life is sometimes too complicated to face when we wander from our feel-good hymns and cocoonish happy places.

So who is my neighbor anyway?

As Professor Franz Leenhardt of the University of Geneva has argued: “One cannot define one’s neighbor; one can only be a neighbor.”

According to Jennifer S Wyant of the Candler School of Theology, the lawyer’s question should not have been, “Who is my neighbor,” but, “How do I love my neighbor?”

Some interpreters have felt that in doing this, Jesus does not actually answer the man’s question, but I would argue that he intentionally subverts the question. In his answer, he tells the lawyer that his question was the wrong one. The question should not have been “Who is my neighbor?” The question should have been “How do I love my neighbor?” And in his answer, Jesus teaches that one is a neighbor by going above and beyond in caring for those in need. The act of neighboring, like love, does not have a limit.

But Jesus pushes even further, Wyant writes. “This parable dismantles the very notion of boundaries, exposing the false divisions we draw between “us” and “them.” The Samaritan and the Jew were divided by history, culture, and theology, yet Jesus declares that their obligation to love supersedes all of it. In doing so, this story confronts the sin of racism for what it is: an attempt to carve out exceptions to God’s command to love, to create boundaries where none should be. The Kingdom of God allows no such divisions, and neither do the scriptures, which call us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

“And so, like the lawyer, we are left not with the question ‘Who is my neighbor?’ but with the much harder one: 

‘Will I choose to be a neighbor?’”