By Guest Columnist Spencer Sullivan, Pastor, Pelahatchie Baptist
There is an old Chinese proverb that says: “A good neighbor is a found treasure.” Since Melanie and I married, our family has lived in four countries and in fifteen different houses. We’ve moved a lot and therefore have had many neighbors. Thankfully, I cannot remember many difficult situations with neighbors, regardless of country or neighborhood. In fact, while overseas, a good neighbor once helped us handle a difficult situation that we didn’t know how to navigate culturally. Good neighbors are truly like found treasure and I am grateful for the good neighbors that I have here in Pelahatchie. Just before sharing one of His most famous parables, Jesus was asked the question: “Who is my neighbor?” Before asking this question, Jesus and this Jewish religious leader were having a discussion about how one can inherit eternal life. The religious leader suggested that one must keep the two greatest commandments: “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.” Jesus commended the man and agreed, but only with the condition that one keeps these commandments perfectly (which no one can). The Jewish man trying to justify himself led to the question: “Who is my neighbor?” In other words, he wanted to know just who exactly must he love as much as he loved himself? Jesus answered the question with the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you aren’t familiar, I invite you to read it. (Luke 10:30-37)
This parable is so famous that in our culture when we witness a person demonstrating unusual kindness to a stranger, we commonly refer to him or her as a Good Samaritan. But to fully appreciate what this Samaritan did for the Jewish man that was beaten and left for dead, one must understand the relationship between Samaritans and Jews. I don’t have the space to provide a detailed description, but the racial and religious tension between these two people groups rival anything that we see in our world today. They despised one another with deeply embedded animosity and bitterness toward one another.
In the parable, after the Jewish man is mugged and beaten within an inch of his life, both a Jewish priest and a Jewish Levite (assistant to the priest) both passed him by separately. The shock moment of the story is that a Samaritan didn’t pass him by, but instead went directly to him in his time of extreme need. Jesus tells us that he used his own provisions, his own animal, and his own money to ensure he received the care he needed. All this for a man from a people group that naturally he was supposed to hate. While the priest and Levite went out of their way to avoid him, he went out of his way to care for him. I love what John MacArthur wrote concerning the Samaritan’s actions: “His heart was so full of love that when someone came across his path with a desperate need he was able to meet, he did everything he could possibly do. There was never a question or hesitation. In other words, the Samaritan never stopped to ask what the lawyer had asked: “And who is my neighbor?” The far more important question is, “Whose neighbor am I?”
The obvious application of this story is to understand that disciples of Christ are to show this kind of love to everyone, not just people that we justify as ‘our neighbors’ or ‘our people’. But there is more. When this conversation took place, Jesus understood that no one was or is able to keep these commandments perfectly. What the religious leader didn’t know as he was talking with Jesus is that the Good Samaritan was actually meant to represent Jesus Himself. As sinners who consistently rebel and reject God’s commandments and design, we make ourselves enemies of God. And yet, He loves us anyway, He came to us directly, and He shed His own blood to absorb God’s wrath upon sin so that we can be gloriously saved. The beaten man well understood his desperate need for help and yet so many of us have no clue of our desperate need for Jesus. I encourage you to love all people like the Good Samaritan, but I also urge you to consider your need for Jesus.
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