“Neighbor means neighbor.” That’s been my mantra as I’ve thought and written about what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. The reason I’ve focused on the concreteness of our neighbors is because we tend to go first to the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). In that famous story Jesus responds to the question posed by the Jewish lawyer, “Who is my neighbor?” by explaining that a neighbor can be anyone, even someone reprehensible, such as a despised Samaritan.
But there is a problem with focusing only on the story of the Good Samaritan when thinking about our neighbors. The problem is that we tend to generalize the concept of neighbor so much that we completely forget the real people next door and down the street. We volunteer at the food bank. We tutor disadvantaged children. We hand out sandwiches to the homeless. We do all kinds of really great things. But in the process, we can completely ignore the most concrete iterations of neighbor right next to us.
This tendency to overgeneralize neighbor and then ignore our flesh and blood neighbors is similar to the problem we have with pressing needs in our churches: we go to the neediest in our communities and forget that we have a covenant obligation to the neediest in our congregations first (Galatians 6:10).
So as I conclude this series on loving our neighbors, I want to remind us all that the goal here is balance. On the one hand, we want to love our actual neighbors whom we see every day on our block or in our apartment complex. And we want to love them “as ourselves.” But on the other hand, we also want to extend our love to anyone we come into contact with who is in dire need. For that person, too, is our neighbor.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
_______________________________________________________________
Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
_______________________________________________________________
