Love (or Chase) Thy Neighbor

Izzy.......STOP!........its, "Love thy neighbor"............not, "Chase thy neighbor"!

Seriously, I've been rather bothered by something lately. I don't wish to elaborate much about it, but it is related to the concept of "Love Thy Neighbor". I feel we missed the boat big time recently; we had an opportunity to offer significant assistance to a family impacted by the tornados and flooding.......and, we didn't do it. I, actually, had not the authority to give the help; I could only offer my opinion, which was ignored.

At any rate........its been bothering me some, and yesterday, by coincidence, a random e-mail arrived from Paraclete Press, containing the following excerpt from the book 4o Days Living the Jesus Creed by Scot McKnight. It definitely was something I needed to read right at that moment. I pray for "eyes that see" and "ears that hear", and the prompting to actually make a move to help my neighbor, instead of just talking about it.

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Day 3 Loving Others
"You shall love your neighbor as yourself."-Mark 12:31Loving others is a great idea until "Mr. or Ms. Other" happens to be a person you don't like. If we are honest with ourselves, the exhortation to "love your neighbor as yourself" slides quickly into a decision to love someone we like or someone just like us. So, for example, in the world of Jesus, loving God naturally meant doing the Torah. Doing the Torah involved maintaining some firm boundary lines between the holy and the profane, the Israelite and the Gentile, the clean and the unclean. So, the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself became for (too) many persons little more than loving one's holy, Israelite, clean neighbors. The profane, Gentile, and unclean person was erased from the dictionary definition of "neighbor." Jesus redefined the word neighbor.We might say that Jesus' primary sparring partners, the Pharisees, practiced a "love of Torah" that created boundary lines between neighbors and non-neighbors. Jesus turned that Pharisee expression around and believed in a "Torah of love" that crossed boundaries by redefining the word "neighbor." And to make loving one's neighbor central to life, Jesus picked up the central moral creed of his Jewish world, the Shema, and amended it. He added "love your neighbor as yourself" to the Shema, which urged Israelites to recite daily these words: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength." Jesus' amendment created a moral creed that summoned Israel to love God and to love their neighbors as themselves.A scribe asked Jesus how to gain eternal life. Jesus, ever the good teacher, asked him what the Torah teaches. After proving to Jesus that he understood the Jesus Creed, that the two central commands of God's Torah were to love God and love others, that scribe asked Jesus another question. This time, though, the scribe revealed that he was not yet ready for the revolutionary nature of the Jesus Creed he had so glibly coughed up. He asked Jesus, probably with a little sniff of snobbery, "Who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29). Jesus answered with the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37). That clever parable revealed that the real question was not "Who is my neighbor?"-a question that permits one to create boundary lines-but "To whom should I be neighborly?" The Jesus Creed calls us to neighbor-love-regardless of who the neighbor might be.Be Prepared for the UnpredictableYou cannot determine in advance to whom you will need to act in neighbor-love. Neither can you determine what kind of love you will show. I have joked for years that my education prepared me best to exit my front door on Saturday mornings, to summon my neighbors into my front yard as I stand on the porch, and then to give them a short exposition of a passage from the Greek New Testament. The only problem is that no one would come! We all like to do what we are good at, but my neighbors need something other than what I have to offer in explaining the New Testament.To discern what prompts neighbor-love, we need to develop eyes that see and ears that hear needs. Sometimes our neighbors need us to mow grass or shovel snow or bring in the mail or look after a dog. They might need us to take them to pick up their car, or they might request a lift to the doctor's office. What neighbor-love does is never predictable. Often neighbor-love interrupts our schedule, annoying us more than we care to admit, and calls us to abandon our plans. But our eyes will reveal and our ears will hear the needs of our neighbors if we learn to live the Jesus Creed.Respond to Needs, Not LabelsIn Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite, who both knew and observed their Torah, saw the man sprawled out on the path and thought he was dead. A corpse was impure, and the Torah taught priests not to defile themselves with corpse impurity unless the dead person was their nearest kin (Leviticus 21:1-4). So they passed him by. In effect, then, the priest and the Levite were doing what the Torah said. But that wasn't enough for Jesus. Someone as desperate as a man abandoned on the road had a need, and needs come before labels and purity laws. This corpse was labeled "unclean," and the priest and the Levite, in Jesus' comic parable, respond to the label instead of the need. The Samaritan, who in stereotyped categories shouldn't have been the one to respond, responded to the need and ignored the label.We are like the priest and the Levite far more often than we care to admit. We may choose not to stop our journey to respond to persons because of their ethnicity, their economic status, their clothing, their age, or their body piercings or tattoos. Sometimes we respond negatively to an immigrant's accent or country of origin, or we may fall prey to stereotypes about such persons. Sometimes we walk away from persons because of their disease or their rumored sins. Neighbor-love, as Jesus teaches it and practices it, crosses those boundaries because it responds to needs, not labels.Two of the biggest challenges of living the Jesus Creed are these: learning to see and hear the needs of the one who happens to be my neighbor and learning to discern when and how to respond. These are the challenges of the Jesus Creed to neighbor-love.Jesus' word is to us: "Go and do likewise."