Christians seem to spend a lot of time lately declaring that we don’t have to care about certain groups of people. It’s been most obvious these past few weeks with refugees coming to our border. We don’t have responsibility, the argument goes, for people who are fleeing violence in their own countries. We don’t have responsibility, they say, for parents who have their children taken away from them. We don’t have responsibility for families forced to live in cages.

“Who is My Neighbor?”

Denying responsibility for others isn’t new. Even in Jesus’s own day, people even tried to convince him that there were people they didn’t have to care for. In Luke 10:25-37, a lawyer who decides to test the limits of Jesus’s mercy.

As the story goes, the lawyer asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:25). When Jesus asks him what the Torah requires, he responds, “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” (10:27).

Combining a commandment from Deuteronomy 6:5 with one from Leviticus 19:18, the lawyer summarizes the teaching of Torah quite beautifully. Jesus responds simply, “Do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:28).

But the lawyer, like many Christians today, isn’t satisfied. The word “neighbor” isn’t very precise. So the lawyer presses Jesus further—“And who is my neighbor?” (10:29).

What the lawyer really wants to know is “Who is not my neighbor?” That is, he wants to know the limits of neighborliness. Where is the division between neighbor and not-neighbor? The lawyer wants to know who is beyond the limits of his responsibility. Whose need is he free to ignore?

The Parable of the Unidentifiable Man

As his way, Jesus responds to the question with a parable. This particular parable, sometimes called the Parable of the Good Samaritan, concerns a man who is beaten and robbed while walking along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.

Stripped of his clothes, the man has no clear markers of identity. Those passing by on the side of the road can’t tell who he is. They have no way of classifying him as neighbor or as not-neighbor.

The first two to pass by the man are a priest and a Levite (if priests are the rock stars of the Temple, the Levites are their roadies). Apparently concluding that they don’t have responsibility for the injured man, they pass by on the other side of the road. They believe they have responsibility only for those that identifiably belong to their own community. Since they don’t know who the man is, he isn’t a neighbor deserving their compassion.

The third traveler along the road is a Samaritan, a foreigner from the region of Samaria just north of Judea. Like the priest and Levite before him, the Samaritan likewise has no way of knowing who the man is. He doesn’t know whether they belong to the same community. Yet he stops to tend to care for the injured, binding his wounds and taking him to an inn where he pays for the man’s medical care.

There is No “Not My Neighbor”

After telling thus parable, Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which one was a neighbor to the man?” The lawyer replies, “The one who showed him mercy” (10:37). Jesus commands him, “Go and do likewise.”

While this parable is sometimes interpreted to mean something like “even Samaritans are our neighbors,” that is not at all the point of the parable. Jesus is in fact up to something much more profound.

Notice what Jesus has done. The lawyer has asked him a question—“Who is my neighbor?” The answer is a command, “Go and show mercy.” Jesus rejects the question, “Who is my neighbor?” He denies the assertion that there are some people who are within our sphere of concern and others who remain outside of it. It is illegitimate to question who is and is not our neighbor.

Rather than asking who is and is not our neighbor, our task as Christians is to be a neighbor to anyone who is need. It doesn’t matter if they are our neighbor. Our responsibility is to be their neighbor by showing mercy to everyone who needs it. There is no us and them. There is only mercy.

We don’t get to ask who deserves mercy. We don’t get to ask who is owed mercy. We only get to ask who is in need—and our only responsibility is to show them mercy. That’s it.

Even someone like the Samaritan, who isn’t even bound by the Torah, knows that. Why do we have so much trouble understanding it?