“Hello, neighbor.”
Back in 1968, an ordinary man named Fred uttered those two words into a camera at a small regional TV studio called the Eastern Educational Television Network. Little did he know that, for the next 33 years, those words would shape the lives of viewers in profound ways.
See, when Fred started out, he was just a bit frustrated with the world he lived in. During his senior year at Rollins College, where he was earning a bachelor’s degree in music, he initially wanted to enter seminary after graduating. He had a deep desire for helping people, particularly at the intersection of their emotional and spiritual health. But one day, while visiting his parents’ house, he encountered this new-fangled invention: TV. Back then it was only black and white. As he watched, he was stunned by two things. First, the remarkable potential of this invention: it was a tool that could be used to proclaim messages to millions at the click of a button. Second, the ugliness of what he actually saw on TV. The programs and shows he saw, particularly the ones for children, seemed mindless. It was as if this amazing new tool was only being used to create hypnotized, robotic watchers. Can you imagine? Mindless TV that turned you into a binge-watching zombie? What would the world look like?
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So Fred decided to get into TV. He figured that someone had to use this medium to help people become better humans, not just duller humans. He entered the industry of local television with the hope of creating children’s programming focused on specific themes to cultivate their emotional and spiritual well-being. In an interview later on, he reflected on his experience this way:
“I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there’s some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen.”
He started in TV in 1951, at the bottom of the totem pole, and his ideas were regularly shot down by the network department heads: they thought people wanted to watch TV precisely because it was mindless; people wanted to escape real life! But Fred stuck with it. Finally, eleven years after he started, he was given a small network slot for his children’s program. Then, during six more long, arduous years, the show grew, and parents and children alike flocked to watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on Pittsburgh local TV. Eventually it was picked up nationally, and it became a staple of American television for more than three decades.
And it wasn’t just some feel-good, sentimental show. Fred built episodes around themes like divorce, disabilities, ending segregation, discipline, and social interactions. In a world where people were becoming increasingly divided, hostile, and lonely, Fred’s show was helping children navigate that world. Eventually he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, and his theological and spiritual themes regularly connected with the content on his show. This became his ministry.
And his influence can hardly be overstated. Psychologists have produced study after study showing that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—in its emphasis on social and emotional learning—strengthened decision-making, planning and motivation, positive social interactions, conflict management, academic performance, and children’s abilities to recognize, understand, express, and regulate their feelings.
Do you see what happened here? An ordinary man, living in an ordinary hometown of Pittsburgh, with an ordinary music degree from an ordinary college, looked around his community and his world and asked, “How can I be a good neighbor to these people? How can I use my time and energy to help people flourish?” He didn’t start out with a ton of money. He didn’t start out with a master plan, “a catalytic movement for revival,” as many Christian organizations often like to say today. He started out with a simple question: How can I love my neighbor?
A World In Need of More Good Neighbors
We live in a time that is in desperate need of more good neighbors. This is certainly true on TV: according to a 2019 study, the lack of a Mr. Rogers replacement show for kids as they grow has produced a generation of college students that are less empathetic and more narcissistic than any previous generation.
But it’s not entirely their fault. Our technology and our world have largely produced this in many of us. We are a “selfie” culture: not only because we take more images of ourselves than at any time in world history, but because for decades we have been taught that pursuing and fulfilling our own desires, making ourselves feel happy, is the primary goal of life. We are consumeristic to the end of self, not sacrificial to the end of others. As theologian Walter Brueggemann put it,
“The culture flows from the assumption that the accumulation of commodities will make us safe and happy.”
And it’s not working. Our “selfie” culture only leads us to deeper levels of loneliness, isolation, and division. We are in the midst of a mental health crisis in our time. More than 50% of Americans in their twenties say they feel persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. Antidepressant use has risen by more than 35% in the last six years alone. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General — America’s doctor — says that the most pressing health concern in the U.S. today is not cancer, or diabetes, or smoking, or opioid use. It’s loneliness. As sociologist Robert Putnam put it in a keynote address at Harvard’s Mental Health Awareness Week: “Most Americans watch Friends instead of making friends.”
And the result is that our world is alarmingly divided. We’re farther apart from one another than we’ve been in decades. The Global Peace Index is a comprehensive survey of 163 countries, using about two dozen data points related to peace: homicides per 100,000 people, political turmoil or unrest, violent crime, wars nations are involved in, and so forth. From this data, they produce a score that ranks countries from most peaceful to least peaceful. Out of the 163 countries researched, the U.S. ranks 131st. We are smack in the middle of countries actually involved in civil wars, segregation, and rampant human trafficking.
But here’s the silver lining: we’re got elections coming up! So that means all these issues will be solved come November…
Our politics, our TV, our medications, our therapeutic, selfie culture, our social media—they’re all working together to push us further from our neighbors, further from our communities, further from healthy shared life together.
And it’s leading many of us to ask an important question, one I’ve heard many friends asking me lately: How do we show up in that sort of world? How can we be vehicles of life and healing in a world of death and decay?
Why “Neighboring”
See, many of us are drawn to faith in the first place because we’ve experienced the abundant life that Jesus said He’d bring into the world through His Kingdom: the peace of God in prayer, the healing power of Christ’s forgiveness, the Spirit’s maturing work in us, the generous giving of ourselves away to the marginalized, a radically loving community that supports and celebrates and grieves and prays with one another. All of those experiences have changed our lives. And they’ve instilled in us a loving desire to share those same eternal joys with our family or friends or coworkers or baristas or whoever else. But how? How do we invite people to experience the life we’ve been transformed by, especially when our expressions of faith are so quickly met with awkwardness or hostility or just indifference in a post-Christian time?
As it turns out, this isn’t a new challenge or a new question. Jesus Himself was surrounded by and met with hostility all over His ministry. His earliest followers faced regular marginalization and persecution. And in the midst of all of this, Scripture points to a practice that transcends time and trend, a practice that paves the path for each of us to embody Jesus’s love and grace in our own time. It’s the radical and ordinary practice of neighboring.
And so, in this new series of posts, I’m totally ripping off the late, great Fred Rogers and calling it Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Now, when I use the term “neighboring,” I want to be clear about what I mean. I’m not talking about what we as Americans typically picture: just living next to someone, saying “hi” when you happen to get home at the same time, and complaining when someone else’s Christmas lights are a little too bright. According to Jesus and the Scriptures, neighboring is a practice that expresses the welcome of God to all people through tangible acts of love, ideally through giving food, shelter, and relationship. Alongside this series, I’ve also created a resource with tools designed to help you show up as a neighbor in your own community. Between the series and the resource, I hope you’ll see that neighboring isn’t just the best way to show a skeptical, post-Christian world what authentic Jesus-following looks like; it’s ultimately the best way we can point toward a Kingdom where all are welcomed as God’s beloved children, and where real peace can begin arrive in our world
So, to kick things off, let’s turn to Luke 10:25-37.
25 An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27 He answered, “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.” 28 And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
29 But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and took off, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came upon him, and when he saw him he was moved with compassion. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, treating them with oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him, and when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Some Context
“A family reunites after the action of a Good Samaritan.”
“A Good Samaritan donates thousands of blankets to a local hospital.”
“A Good Samaritan pays for a month’s worth of groceries for a family in need.”
Search Google and you’ll find thousands of headlines just like those, because in our culture, whether we’re religious or not, we love those two words. We love a story of a Good Samaritan.
And usually, when we use the phrase, we place the emphasis on the increased moral capacity of the person doing the random act of kindness. So you’ve got some guy named Jeff, and Jeff is just a great dude, and he finds himself in a situation where he can help someone, and so he does—and then we elevate Jeff. We interview Jeff, we write news stories about Jeff, Jeff is the GOAT. And if everyone would just buck up and be better and look more like Jeff, then we’d really solve the problems of our world. We use Jesus’s Good Samaritan story as an inspiring example that spurs us to fix our world by our own human moral willpower.
And, to be clear, that’s not all bad: anything that contributes to human flourishing is beautiful and good. But our familiarity with this story actually often robs us of seeing its deeper significance.
See, the truth is that Jesus is not just giving us some nice moral fable meant to make us feel good and fix the world by our willpower. Instead, in this story Jesus is radically undermining everything his culture believed about who their neighbors were and what it looked like to be a neighbor. The people who originally heard this didn’t hear a feel-good, inspiring story: they heard a radical, offensive, boundary-breaking tale that challenged all their preconceptions, judgments, and assumptions. And as it turns out, this story retains that same radical effect in our culture today, if we’re willing to see it with new eyes.
The story kicks off with a lawyer, but not the sort of lawyer we picture today. He’s a teacher of the Torah, the Jewish law, more like a seminary professor than a courtroom attorney. And right away we learn that this lawyer stands up to “test” or “trap” Jesus.
“Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Now that is a curious question. This man has studied the Scriptures for years; he has them memorized; and teachers of his time already had commonly repeated summary statements that answered this exact question at that time. He’s not really asking honestly. This is a test. He’s sort of the “Scripture police,” wanting to see if Jesus’ theology is really up to snuff.
And Jesus catches on to this ulterior motive. So He doesn’t just give a simple answer; He pulls a common move for Jewish rabbis. He responds to a question with a question.
“What is written in the law,” He replies. “What do you read there?”
In other words, “What does the Bible say, and what is your interpretation of it?”
And the lawyer, without missing a beat, answers with quotes from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, a common summary of the law in that time:
“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.”
And now it becomes obvious: the lawyer was never searching for an answer. He had the answer the whole time. And Jesus affirms him without hesitation: that’s it! Just do that, and you’re good to go! Love God with every fiber of your being, and love your neighbor—the person to your right and left—as yourself, and you will experience life and life to the full, all that God has made you for.
And the lawyer went on his way and did just that, inspired by this moral teaching, and inherited eternal life by fulfilling the command perfectly…and that’s how the story ends.
Except it isn’t. The lawyer keeps going with the conversation, even after he’s gotten his answer. Why? We actually see his motivation clearly in the passage:
“He wanted to justify himself.”
I’m sure none of us know what that’s like…
So he asks Jesus a follow up question, “Well, who is my neighbor?” Ah—now we’re seeing the truth more clearly. He’s looking for a loophole. He’s asking Jesus to define the limits of his love. Define who I have to love, so this is actually achievable. Because surely Jesus can’t mean he has to love everyone. Surely He can’t mean he has to love his enemy. Surely He can’t mean he has to love the morally corrupt.
See, this lawyer enters the conversation knowing that there are some people he has either failed to love, or people he doesn’t want to love, or people he doesn’t think are deserving of love, and so he’s looking for a loophole.
And while it’s easy to look down our nose at the lawyer here, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we all look for love loopholes in our own lives. We don’t want to love…
The guy next door who throws loud parties until 2 a.m.
The coworker who’s just impossible to work with.
The family member who manages to say one subtly racist thing at every gathering.
The person whose political beliefs are just insane.
The vaxxers.
The anti-vaxxers.
The drunk experiencing homelessness.
The filthy rich.
The immigrant.
See, we all, like the lawyer, love the idea of loving humanity. It’s just those pesky humans that keep getting in the way.
So the lawyer’s cards are now on the table: he’s testing Jesus, and he’s looking for a loophole. And in classic Jesus fashion, when asked a straightforward question, He starts telling a story—a story that radically breaks open all of our categories of who a neighbor is and what it means to be a neighbor to others.
The Story
“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half-dead.”
“A man.” Anonymous. No identity to validate or invalidate whether he deserves love or not. We don’t know what he has done. We don’t know his immigration status. We don’t know how much melanin is in his skin. We don’t know who he voted for in the last election. We don’t know if he’s an outright scumbag. We only know he is a man. Jesus is implicitly answering the lawyer’s question right off the bat: our neighbor is anyone in need, no caveats.
“Jerusalem to Jericho” is a journey of about 18 miles, and it’s a steep drop from roughly 2,500 feet above sea level to about 800 feet below. It’s desertous and hot, with lots of blind twists and turns. It’s a perfect place to get jumped by robbers. In fact, this sort of thing was so common in Jesus’s day that the road earned a nickname: the Way of Blood.
So it’s no surprise this man gets attacked. In fact, the audience listening would have likely thought this man was foolish, traveling alone on the Way of Blood. What an idiot! He’s brought this upon himself!
Then two men pass by: a priest and a Levite. Both are religious professionals, like the lawyer to whom Jesus is speaking, and both of their actions are described the same way: they went down the road, they saw him, and then they passed by on the other side.
An important note not to overlook: Jesus makes clear that they saw him. This isn’t a five-lane highway: it’s a narrow, winding path. Some scholars think that in order to pass by, these men would have literally needed to step over or around the man bleeding out before them. As it turns out, even the Bible affirms that religious people are often the bad guys.
And once again, it’s really easy for us, two millennia later on the other side of the world, to look down our noses at these two men. But it’s important to remember their backstory. This priest and Levite are likely coming down from their work in the Temple in Jerusalem. At this time in history, they would often work in two-week rotations, and many of them lived in Jericho, a few miles away. So at the end of their two weeks, they would walk this road carrying the pay for their work, and not via direct deposit or cash. They were often paid with the tithes and offerings of people at the Temple, which came in the form of animal and grain offerings. They were paid in food. Now, if you read the Torah, there are all sorts of rules about food sanitation designed to maintain a level of health and cleanliness for the people, and according to those laws, if any of your food came into contact with someone or something unclean—like a man bleeding out on the side of the road—all of your food would need to be thrown out.
So just imagine you’re the priest or the Levite. You just got off your two-week shift and you are dead tired. You’re on a long and dangerous road home through a bad neighborhood, and you just want to get through as quickly as you can and get back to your loved ones. You come across yet another person in need who’s likely already too far gone anyways, and this is after you’ve already been helping people in need for the last two weeks in your work—just think about the compassion fatigue! And then, even if you stop to help, you not only likely forfeit all of the food for you and your family, but you also put yourself at risk of being robbed and beaten and killed, because the robbers could be around any corner. To help the man, these two would need to be willing to put their own well-being and the well-being of their families on the line for the sake of the other.
Suddenly it’s harder to look down our noses at these two men. We’ve all ignored our neighbor in need for far less than these two did. We’ve all played the mental justification game in order to step over those in need around us:
“Well, they made the poor choice that led to this consequence.”
“I’ve already given so much this week.”
“They’re just going to take advantage of me.”
“My effort won’t really make a difference.”
“I’ve already got my own stuff to take care of.”
These two aren’t just caricatures of hypocritical religion. They’re, in many ways, us.
Then, in verse 33, Jesus introduces a third man into the story: a Samaritan. And because we’ve so often used that title positively in our culture, we’re actually at a disadvantage to understanding what Jesus is doing here: the Samaritan’s entry is a huge plot twist. See, in Israel’s history, Samaritans were utterly hated. They were originally part of the nation of Israel, but after the nation of Assyria conquered Israel, the Samaritans intermarried with them, adopted all sorts of corrupt worship practices, and took on heretical theological beliefs. Centuries of violence between the groups predated Jesus. Jews saw Samaritans as half-breed heretics; Samaritans saw Jews as racist and cruel.
And what does Jesus do with the Samaritan in the story for a Jewish audience? He makes him the hero. The enemy, the other, the outsider is the hero of the story.
So this Samaritan comes upon the man and sees him, but rather than passing by, he has “pity” on him. The word in the Greek is splagchnizomai, which isn’t just fun to say. The root of the word refers to the internal organs. It is, quite literally, to be moved so thoroughly that you can feel it in the pit of your stomach. He feels the suffering so deeply that it makes him sick.
And this compassion moves him to do precisely what the priest and Levite failed to do: he puts his own well-being on the line for the sake of the other. Look at all the lengths the Samaritan goes to in order to ensure this man is cared for:
He comes near to the man, putting his own life at risk, since the robbers may still be nearby.
He pours oil and wine on his wounds and bandages them — some scholars think this man was a traveling merchant who made his living off selling oil and wine, meaning he’s actively harming his own livelihood to care for the man.
He lifts him up onto his own animal — in that time, it was the position of a slave to walk alongside the animal of someone in a higher class. He takes a lower position for himself to elevate the other.
He gives two denarii to the innkeeper. Innkeepers were famous for being swindlers in the ancient world, but beyond that, two denarii would have been about two weeks’ worth of pay.
He tells the innkeeper to load anything else on his tab, charging the innkeeper with covering any further cost to care for the man, and promising to cover the balance himself.
The Samaritan is putting his own life on the line and placing the needs of his neighbor before his own. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it:
“I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”
And then, finally, at the end of the story, Jesus poses a question back to the lawyer: “Which of these, do you think, was a neighbor to the man?” Notice the lawyer’s response: “The one who showed him mercy.” He can’t even bring himself to say “the Samaritan.” That’s how deep this hatred went — you can imagine him, through gritted teeth, being forced to acknowledge not only that his sworn enemy is his neighbor whom he should love, but furthermore that this enemy is also capable of love greater than even his own. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus tells him.
Gone is the sweet moral example that makes us feel good. This is a radical, paradigm-shifting, utterly convicting story that speaks to each one of us, proclaiming not only who our neighbor is, but what it really means to love our neighbor as ourselves. It ultimately gives us a foundation for our own radical neighboring, teaching us three things about it. Neighboring is:
Universal, not selective.
Particular, not abstract.
Dedicated to dying, not convenient.
What This Teaches Us About Neighboring
It is universal, not selective. For Jesus, the range of definition for “neighbor” is the same as the range of definition for “human.” All humans equal neighbors. The power of this command is in its simplicity: there’s no caveat, no qualifier, no fine print. It doesn’t allow me to choose who I love. Instead it opens me up to love even those I don’t want to. Your neighbor stretches even all the way to the Samaritan, to the person whose name you can’t say, whose presence fills you with anxiety or anger, whose actions do not in any way deserve love. As G.K. Chesterton put it,
“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
And that truth is just as radically countercultural for us in the U.S. today. We are all being taught selective neighboring. Love others…so long as they agree with you. Love others…so long as they don’t say anything offensive. Love others…so long as they’re in your political or social tribe.
We are a people in desperate need of this sort of universal neighboring. We are in desperate need of people who see every person, including the nasty coworker and the political enemy and the man on the corner, as the object of God’s love. We are in desperate need of people who see every person as designed to be the conduit of God’s love to all others. We are in desperate need of people who see every person.
Now, many of us understand this idea, but the truth is that it often still remains a little abstract for us. If we’re being honest, what most of us think about when we hear “love your neighbor” is just being nice in public, not cutting people off in traffic, and tipping well. And those are all good things: keep doing them. But part of the radical nature of this story is that it doesn’t allow neighboring to remain abstract. It also reminds us that neighboring is…
Particular, not abstract. In the story of the Samaritan, the neighbor is the one he literally walks by on his morning commute. The same is true for us. The neighbor is the person on your right and on your left. It’s the person across the street. It’s the person you see every day. So often we hear the command to “love your neighbor” and don’t take it literally. We apply it to the ambiguous “other” out there, but overlook the person who lives in the house or condo or apartment or dorm room next door.
Just as a thought experiment: picture in your mind’s eye the people who live to your right, to your left, and across the way from you. Bring that man or woman or family or student to mind. If you have no idea who they are…feel lots of guilt and shame at this moment…only kidding, but truly: today is a good day to start getting to know them.
Imagine the faces of those people, and now consider this question: what if, when Jesus said to love your neighbor, He meant to love those specific people? Not just to know their names and what they do for work or what they study, but to know their passions, their hopes and dreams, their hardships, to seek their well-being through tangible acts of love, even when it comes at our expense.
According to Jesus, the primary way we experience the Kingdom of God—that is, the vehicle through which we know and proclaim abundant joy and peace and love in our lives—is through the radical neighboring of our actual, particular neighbors.
Which means that a central place we can participate in the Kingdom is a place so ordinary we often overlook it: our immediate neighborhood. The place where we live! The Samaritan didn’t need to travel far and wide to love his neighbor: he simply had eyes to see what was right in front of him and how he could use his own resources for the sake of the other.
Oftentimes the best tool for bringing Kingdom healing and life to our world isn’t a sermon, or a Bible study, or a worship service: it’s our home. It’s our condo. It’s our apartment. It’s our dorm room. It’s our table. These spaces are outposts of the Kingdom of God, tangible expressions of love of neighbor that mend division, heal wounds, and welcome the outsider and the other.
In fact, the next story that follows immediately after this one in the Gospel of Luke seems to point at this exact thing. The text says, in verse 38, that Jesus and His disciples “went on their way,” and upon entering a certain village, were welcomed into the home of a woman named Martha. That story is worth studying on its own—go give it a read—but for now, it’s worth noting the connection Luke seems to be making between these two stories: in the Samaritan passage, Jesus tells a story about a traveler on a road who is in need and who experiences a tangible act of love. Then, immediately afterward, Jesus actually becomes a traveler on a road who is in need and who experiences a tangible act of love.
What Luke seems to be connecting is this: loving your neighbor as yourself means loving the person who is right in front of you, and that will often mean using your home and your table as a vehicle of the Kingdom of God.
And the truth is, in our hyper-individualized, consumeristic American culture, that’s actually a radical claim. Because for most of us, our home is not a place we think of as a Kingdom outpost that we open up in sacrificial love for our neighbor. For most of us, home is a retreat, a place where we actually close ourselves off from the world, where we hide from the world: we eat, drink, relax, binge Netflix, lay on a comfy couch and scroll through social media. None of those things are bad in and of themselves, but they often create a pattern of closed-off-ness toward our immediate neighbors.
There’s a famous proverb that expresses this: a man’s home is his castle. Have you seen a castle? It has walls, a moat, cannons, and guns, all designed to kill you. Castles don’t want outsiders to come in. And in America, most of us consider our homes to be castles: fortified walls to keep outsiders away.
But what if we were to see our homes differently? What if we saw them not as retreats or castles closed off from the world, but as Kingdom outposts in the world? What if our tables were not just blocks of wood, but physical spaces upon which we could extend God’s tangible love to the hurting, the broken, the outsider, and the other?
And when I use those terms, I don’t just mean people who are bleeding out on the roadside, though we should definitely care for those people too. The truth is that there are people we interact with every day who are deeply hurting, deeply lonely, deeply disconnected. Every day you come across people on the roadside, people who are hurting and in need of the love of God, and the best thing you have to give them is a space where they know they are beloved. A space where they know they belong. A space where healing can happen. That is the oil, the wine, the bandage to the wounds of our world.
This has always been how Christians have lived at their best: when they have practiced particular neighboring, radical hospitality, as their calling card. In the book of Acts, the church ensured that their generosity was so consistent that wherever they went, people ceased to be in need, and Christians “found favor in the eyes of all the people.” During the famines of the fourth century in the Middle East, an early Christian pastor and theologian named Basil established a space where nurses and physicians could treat sick patients, study disease, and find cures—one of our first hospitals. Not long after, the theologian John Chrysostom set up and encouraged his church to establish “Christ rooms” in their homes: empty rooms dedicated to providing space for any who needed them. He wrote:
“Therefore set aside a room in your house to which Christ may come; say, ‘This is Christ’s room; this is set apart for him.’ Even if it is very simple, he will not disdain it. Christ goes about ‘naked and a stranger’; he needs shelter: do not hesitate to give it to him. Do not be lacking in compassion.”
And in the middle of the twentieth century, Francis Schaeffer started L’Abri communities in France, designed to welcome spiritual wanderers looking for a place where their questions could be explored and answered, and where they could experience authentic love and care. L’Abri communities are now scattered all around the world.
Over and over again, Christians have done their best work through ordinary, simple neighboring that uses their particular gifts to love those in their particular time and place. This story is a call to Christians in all times and places to do the same. As pastor Jon Tyson asks: “What would the church’s love look like if it showed up dozens of times a week in small but profound ways: cooked meals, prayers prayed, songs sung, Scripture studied, games played, parties thrown, tears shed, reconciliation practiced, resources given? What if our homes stopped being the places we hid from the world but havens to which the world comes for healing?”
This is what the church is to be. This is what the Kingdom is to be: the place where, as Psalm 68 puts it, “God sets the solitary in families.”
So radical neighboring is universal, not selective. It is particular, not ambiguous. And finally, it is…
Dedicated to Dying
See, the thing that enables the Samaritan to do what he does isn’t some greater moral code, or some elevated moral capacity. In fact, the priest and the Levite both had great moral codes and moral capacities. The only thing that differentiates the Samaritan here is his willingness to identify with the outcast, with the downtrodden, with the lowly, and give his life for their sake.
See, this Samaritan is an outcast dealing with another outcast—a loser in his culture ministering to another loser. That’s precisely what the priest and Levite are missing: they are stuck within their own safe religious self-justifications, and therefore could in no way see themselves in this dying man. But the Samaritan has no such problem, because he already is the loser and the outcast.
The Samaritan becomes a true neighbor because he sees himself in the one who is dying. Contrary to doing the right thing out of increased moral effort, he recognizes his own deadness, as a moral and social inferior, and that deadness leads him to put his life on the line. The Samaritan is different from the priest and the Levite not because he is more morally upstanding, but because he is willing to embrace the death of himself for the sake of another. He is dedicated to dying.
And this is only hammered home by all the things he’s willing to give up: he goes to irrational, reckless lengths with the oil and the wine, with the elevation of the man onto his donkey, and with the innkeeper and the money. This is exorbitant, over the top, and absurd: he is giving every part of himself away so that this man on the roadside might not die.
Now, when I see this, it starts to look like someone else I’ve heard about. Who else humbled Himself, taking the position of a servant to love those who were dying? Who was Himself the social and religious outcast—a no-name day laborer from Nazareth, born to a woman out of wedlock? Who was moved by compassion to the needy in His midst? Who was willing to die for those who were dying, so that He might carry them to true life? This is Jesus. We have all been mired in our own sickness unto death, our own sin and brokenness leaving us on a roadside with no help from moralistic religion. And we have been saved by a lowly social outcast who made Himself like us, dying Himself, scooping us up toward life and healing, and leaving death on the roadside where it belongs.
And when we recognize that reality—when we allow it to truly sink into our souls— suddenly we become people who can see ourselves in our roadside neighbors and move toward them. Our radical neighboring is not born out of some elevated moral capacity. It is born out of the recognition that we, too, have been outcasts who were saved by an outcast. We, too, are dying people saved by a dying Lord. And so we, too, can, by the power of the Spirit of Christ in and through us, become people who dedicate ourselves to dying for the sake of our neighbors; people who give our lives away because we know that our lives are a gift to begin with, and that our dying for others is precisely where we find our life, our Christ.
Conclusion
So as we close out this opening piece, I’d like to leave you with the words of scholar Rosaria Butterfield, whose story we will cite later in this series:
“Radically ordinary hospitality — those who live it see strangers as neighbors and neighbors as family of God. They recoil at reducing a person to a category or a label. They see God’s image reflected in the eyes of every human being on earth… Those who live out radically ordinary hospitality see their homes not as theirs at all but as God’s gift to use for the furtherance of his kingdom. They open doors; they seek out the underprivileged. They know that the gospel comes with a house key.”
This week and this year, might we become a people of radical neighboring—a community of universal and particular love, determined to die for the sake of others.
That is, might we go and do likewise.