Luke 10:25-37
’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, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Luke 10:27)
In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the lawyer asks Jesus a question we all wrestle with:
Who is my neighbor?
After all, it is part of the call given to us in the second greatest commandment to “Love thy neighbor.”
The problem lies not in the question, but in our reason for asking. Similar to the lawyer, we seek to minimize God’s standards for our lives in order to make it more manageable. We create boundaries and loopholes, and we are endless in our excuse making.
Jesus sees past our laziness and the ways we try to limit Him in our lives. Notice how Jesus never directly answers the man’s question of who, but instead He answers the question of how.
In fact, in the end, Jesus refers to a neighbor as the Samaritan who shows the man in the ditch mercy. The answer had nothing to do with demographic or geography, but was based on need and action.
Every day we each have our own set of encounters with people in a ditch. Who has God placed on your path? Who needs your help?