It seemed so simple. The local politicians/theologians asked Jesus for the most important commandment. They knew the answer. Jesus supplied it—you shall love the Lord your God.
But he was not finished. There was a second commandment equal to the first. They were companions. You couldn’t really do one without the other.
You shall love your neighbor.
Maybe there is an out, here, the politicians thought. So they asked a question assuming they knew the answer. Who is our neighbor?
They thought, we can draw a circle. There would be people like us inside the circle, and people like them outside the circle.
Who is our neighbor?
Jesus told a story. It is famous today even among people who have no thought of actually following Jesus. Even today knowing the end of the story, there are people who think they know the answer.
The story goes that someone was desperately in need of a good neighbor. Jesus picked his characters with great intention. Two people that his questioners thought would be in the circle were not so neighborly in the story.
Which character in the story was a neighbor? Jesus picked a person from the most despised social group he could find—a Samaritan.
Jesus blasted all the circles away. There are no circles around groups inside our neighborhood and outside our neighborhood. Even the despised are our neighbors.
Let us consider—who is the despised outcast of today that Jesus would pick as the hero of his story?
Ironically, followers of Jesus were the despised outcasts in the Roman world for centuries. The movement grew because those despised followers of Jesus acted like the Samaritan—binding the wounds caused by upheavals such as the Antonine Plague of 165-66. People said, “I want what they have.”
The question for us today, right this minute, where do we fit in the story? Are we the religious people who were not neighbors? Do we identify with the Samaritan who was?
Answering this honestly can change your life—for the better.
Faith Venture 
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