Love Your Neighbor

Love Your Neighbor

We may learn quite a bit about how to answer the famous question, "How then shall we live?", by understanding Jesus in His original context, as a First Century Jewish Rabbi.  Placing Jesus in His historical and cultural context may or may not change your theology -- your beliefs about WHO God is -- but it will certainly take the black and white words of the Biblical text and render them into vivid Technicolor®.

When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, he was being asked to do what contemporary rabbis were often being asked to do: teach me how to live in a way that pleases God and ensures me a place in the world to come.

Anyone who has read the story knows how Jesus answered: love God with all your heart, soul, and might (from Deuteronomy) and love your "neighbor" as you love yourself.  His interlocutor, either a wily lawyer or an inquisitive teacher of the Torah (depending on your predetermined biases about the pharisees), asked Jesus who should be regarded as neighbor.

It seems an odd question.  To our ears, our neighbors live next door or around us.  Of course, we know who our neighbors are.  They are the ones who lend a helping hand or who borrow tools or who come to our cookouts.  Some we like, some we don't.  But we do not need to know who they are, do we?

The cultural stew into which this question was cast makes this a more interesting topic.

The translation of the Jewish Bible being read at the time of Jesus was a Greek translation of the text called the Septuagint.  The Septuagint uses the Greek word “plesíos”, which is derived from “pélas”, a word which means near or close.  The Hebrew text of Leviticus 19 has the word “rey’akha”, which is most often translated as “friend” or “companion.”  This is obviously a different connotation than neighbor, which is someone who lives near you.

So what do we make of this?

The Jewish sages are pretty clear about the implications: Leviticus 19:8 commands the faithful Jew to love his fellow Jews, and only them.  Not so fast.  Jewish teaching on the command in Torah is more nuanced and includes both narrow and expansive interpretations of who our neighbor is.

Which brings us to Jesus and his questioner.  He asked Jesus who is his neighbor, and Jesus tells one of his most famous parables: the story which has come to be known as the good Samaritan. 

Anyone who’s read outside the text knows that the Samaritans and the Jews in Israel inhabited a mutual hatred society.  To the Jew, Samaritans were half-bred pagans whose forefathers abandoned the faith years before, and with the abandonment, abandoned the spark of divinity which lay within every human.  In other words, Samaritans were animals to most Jews, less than human and worthy of contempt.  Some commentators have suggested that a member of either community wandering alone through the land of the other was likely to be the victim of murder.

It is therefore more than remarkable that Jesus chose as his model neighbor a member of the most-hated class of people.  Moreover, Jesus tells us he was more neighbor than the others.

How then shall we live?  We shall live by loving those among us who are the most un-lovable.