Who is my neighbor?

The parable of The Good Samaritan is a familiar one. Even very young Catholics can recite the story and pick out the Samaritan as the hero. Have you ever noticed that when Jesus asked the scholar to identify the victim’s neighbor, the scholar does not say, “the Samaritan”? He is in shock that a Samaritan, the least expected of the three, was the good guy. So instead of identifying the man as a Samaritan, he replies that the neighbor is the one who acted with mercy. This, of course, is Jesus’ whole point. It doesn’t matter who we are, where we come from, or what we believe. What matters is what we do for one another.

What about the other two travelers? Perhaps they assumed “the victim was already dead” or “there was no doctor in the next town”. Humans are great at rationalizing. We can come up with a dozen reasons to explain our decisions. Yet the thoughts of the other travelers never made it into this story. In the telling of the parable, Jesus emphasizes what the other two travelers do—nothing.

So who is MY neighbor? It is the person who acts when seeing me in need, the person who puts my needs before his or her own, and the person who looks at me, not through me. Whose neighbor am I? Everyone for whom I can “go and do likewise”.