06.01 Who is my neighbor?
I. WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR? THE story of the good Samaritan is one of our Lord’s greatest and most typical parables. It is so simple that a child can read its meaning; yet it is in truth a treatise on practical ethics more profound in thought and more powerful in effect than any other in the world. Is it too much to say that in these few verses there is contained the essential truth of man’s relations with his fellow men? Our very familiarity with the parable blinds us to the greatness of its mingled simplicity and depth and let us add to the greatness of the claim which it makes upon us. We can only gather one or two lessons from its store.
Consider the deep principle of human conduct we might almost call it the philosophy of life which the parable contains. We discover the clue to it when we notice that the parable does not answer the lawyer’s question. The question was, “Who is my neighbour?” The parable tells what it is to be neighbourly. It seems to be a case of logical non sequitur. In fact, it is a case of the truth which is deeper than logic. Our Lord could not teach the truth by answering the question. For the question itself was wrong; it revealed a wrong temperament of mind. It was facing not truth but the fundamental error; to follow it therefore would have been to lose the truth. The lawyer, steeped in all the traditions and instincts of his class, wanted our Lord to give him a clear and precise definition of his neighbour; to mark him out, and set him apart from the general mass of mankind. But definition means limitation. If our Lord had said, “This man is your neighbour,” the inference in the lawyer’s mind would have been, “Then that other is not my neighbour; I need not concern myself with him; I can pass him by.” But this conclusion would have been the very error which Jesus came to banish. He could only put the man right by declining to answer the question; by taking him to a wholly different standpoint, and making him start there, namely “Be in your own spirit neighbourly, and then every man will be your neighbour.”
It is worth while to pause here to notice the light which our Lord’s method of dealing with the question of the lawyer throws on what may often be our Lord’s method of dealing with the questions which we ask now. In our religious and moral difficulties we throw out some question as a sort of challenge, persuading ourselves that it is really decisive. Often it remains unanswered. We are disappointed, discomfited.
Under such failure of their self-chosen test questions, men often give up their faith or surrender their moral struggle. But, apart from the petulance, the impetuosity, or the effort to “justify oneself” which a little honest self-scrutiny would often discover in our questions, and. which are sufficient to deprive them of any right to an answer God’s wisdom may see that they spring from a wrong attitude of mind, that they are not facing the line of truth, and therefore refuse to answer them. But all the while in some other way, at the moment perhaps not discerned, He may be leading us to the truth. While our mind remains a blank as to that particular difficulty which we thought of such crucial importance, He may be bringing some other truth before us, or shaping our lives by some special experience, so that after a time we shall find, perhaps without knowing how, that that old question has been answered in some other way, or has been proved futile or superfluous. Often when we have been discussing their difficulties with some impetuous boy or some eager but ignorant workingman, we have realized how hopeless it would be to answer their clamant questions without correcting their assumptions or returning to first principles. It would be well for ourselves to see here an analogy with the light in which our own impatient questions must be viewed by the patient wisdom of God and a reason why they so often seem to go unanswered.
TAGS: [Parables]