Across My Path

There was once a man who heard a mini-sermon on compassion: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He felt a little uncomfortable with that statement and he wanted to get rid of those pesky little barbs of conscience. So he asked the Preacher, “Who is my neighbor?” And the Preacher replied with the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35).

By definition, a “neighbor” is one who is near. The man who lay helpless along the Jericho road, robbed and beaten, became the Samaritan’s neighbor when their paths “crossed” and the Samaritan’s ears heard his moan and his eyes fell on him and saw his need.

Maybe the story of the Good Samaritan teaches, among other things, that first and foremost the people we need to love as our own selves and empathize with and reach out to and give to and sacrifice for are the people that personally cross our paths on our daily walk. These are, in the strictest sense, our neighbors. They’re our responsibility, as God leads us.

Why is it so tempting to mimic the Levite’s response and cross to the other side of the road – to get far enough away that they are no longer my neighbor? Three reasons come to mind:

I’m desensitized. I don’t feel their pain. I’ve watched enough pain on TV, I’ve said “No” enough times to my conscience, I’ve got priorities more pressing than compassion, I’m distracted by other concerns, I’m too focused on the past or the future to pay attention to who’s laying alongside my road.

I’m selfish. I don’t want to feel their pain. I’ve already felt enough of my own. I don’t want to feel any more myself, and I don’t want to share anyone else’s.

I’m passive. I don’t want to do anything about their pain. If you twist my arm or wring my conscience, I will act. Otherwise, I’m for doing what I’ve always done on this trip to Jericho – staying to the time schedule, sticking to the MO as usual, not getting involved in messy and open-ended situations.

I don’t mean to say that every need that crosses our path is a call to action. We must be Spirit-directed. Spirit-sensitized. Spirit-quickened. (I also don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t get involved in global needs – we should.) But if we begin each day with a declaration of love for and commitment to God and our neighbor, we’ll be more sensitized to both of them. And as we walk through the territory God has mapped out for us that day, the priest and the Levite and the man in the ditch will all know that we are Christians… by our love.