My Enemy My Neighbor

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish Biblical Scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School, calls Jesus’s interrogator the Malevolent Lawyer.* His malevolence is clear from his first question of Jesus: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Do? Inherit? Those two verbs don’t go together. An inheritance is a gift, especially from the giver of eternal life, which the lawyer would have jumped all over Jesus if he’d answered the question. But Jesus responds to this question with another question — You tell me Lawyer. And the lawyer answers correctly, linking together passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Jesus wasn’t unique among Jews in understanding that love of God and love of neighbor are part and parcel of the same Love.

But this Lawyer won’t give up trying to stump the Teacher: “And who is my neighbor?” In her excellent book on Jesus’s parables, Levine writes that the Lawyer’s real question is — Who is not my neighbor? Who can I get away with not showing compassion for? Jesus’s answer, given though the parable is: No one.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Jesus says nothing about what sort of man this is. As Jesus tells his story, we can assume that the man is returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But aside from that, he’s a human being onto whom any identity can be projected. Too often we want to think of ourselves as the Good Samaritan initiating the charity. Jesus wants us to see ourselves in the man who, “fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” So the question in this story is as much who is going to help me as who am I going to help.

Another mistaken interpretation of this parable has been to assume that the Priest and Levite feared becoming ritually unclean by touching someone who might be about to die or was already dead, thus being unable to perform their liturgical duties in Jerusalem. But Levine notes they too were “going down” the same road from Jerusalem as the man, where they had already performed their duties. She also makes it clear that in the Law of Israel, saving a life or honoring the dead with burial always takes precedence over being clean or unclean. Jesus’s Jewish listeners would have been highly offended at a priest and Levite leaving someone to die.

What would have turned their offense into gasps of shock was Jesus telling them who does stop for this half dead man: a Samaritan. I cannot emphasize enough how much the Jews and Samaritans hated each other. Basically, the Samaritans considered themselves more direct descendants of Jacob than the post-exile Jews or Judeans. The Judeans considered the Samaritans at best half-breeds who had mixed with outsiders brought in by the same Assyrians who had committed genocide against the Israelites living there. If not for the Romans enforcing peace between the neighboring peoples, they would have been at war with each other.

So imagine yourself as a Jew bleeding, in searing pain, wondering if you lose consciousness will you ever wake up, and then you see the one person having compassion on you, and from his hairstyle or his clothing you recognize him as a Samaritan. Will you accept him as your neighbor loving you as he loves himself. On the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, that Samaritan would likely presume that you’re a Jew. And yet his compassion, literally “movement in the bowels,” informed by his knowledge of the law of love, of God and of neighbor; allows him to break though the wall of historic hatred between Jew and Samaritan, to brake the cycle of violence. (Note the difference.)

Notice that the Jewish Lawyer can’t even bring himself to say the “S” word when Jesus asks, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Uh, the one who showed him mercy. Well then, Jesus concludes — Go and do likewise — just like your hated enemy the Samaritan.

If our neighbor is the person to whom we can show compassion, it can’t be someone we see and hear on a TV or computer screen. Our neighbor is the person we find next to us. So we have no right to decide whether one person next to us is our neighbor and another person isn’t, whatever grievances however justified we might have with that person, or they might have with us. According to our Lord, not just our Teacher, we only live by getting to know the people next to us face to face, and by loving our neighbors heart to heart, even when on the surface they look like our enemies. Go, do likewise, and you will live.

____________________

* Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, HarperCollins, 2014

July 13th, 2025

5th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10

The Rev. David Kendrick