My neighbour in the flesh

I spent frantic school holidays with my family traipsing to other side of the globe, visiting London, Paris, and the south-east of France. Part of this journey was to seek a sense of place as described by the author Kate Mosse, writer of Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Winter ghosts. We visited such towns as Carcassonne, Limoux, Rennes-les-Bains and Rennes-le-Chateau and visualized Mosse’s characters moving through the streetscapes. Being there put flesh and substance on our imaginations.

Luke (10:25 – 37) tells of the lawyer who asks what must he do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him, What is written in the law? To which the lawyer responds, You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself. But who is our neighbour? And to put flesh and substance on this question, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan.

We know that in telling this parable that the most effective way to answer the lawyer was to use the environment in which he lived and the people who surrounded him. For the lawyer this parable was a salutary lesson about living out the law of love everyday. It is equally salutary for us: are you a priest, a Levite or a Samaritan? The priest and the Levite had good excuses, certainly reasonable by the standards of the community of that time. But their excuses didn’t pass muster with Jesus then, and they still don’t pass muster today. Jesus doesn’t hesitate in requiring all those who love the law to care deeply for everyone who is our neighbour, to act justly, and to follow it through to the end.

There is a salutary lesson here too for the Australian government and its response to refugees. In our own community, how welcoming are we to the refugees already settled in our city? How open are we to the outsider, the unusual, the straggler, or anyone who challenges our idea of ‘neighbour’. There are no simplistic answers, of course, to an issue of global importance, but in the end, we must exercise our option for the poor and dispossessed wherever they may be processed. And this we must do every day. As the psalmist (Ps 18:9) reminds us, The precepts of the Lord give joy to the heart. That’s the pay off, for everyone.