A religious expert comes up to Jesus and asks what he must do to gain eternal life. “What do you think?” Jesus asks. The man replies, “I think you must love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself.” “You nailed it,” says Jesus. The expert quickly follows up, “But who exactly counts as my neighbor?”
Luke editorializes a bit, describing the man as a self-righteous prick trying to justify himself. Jesus volleys back with the story of the good Samaritan, asking “What kind of neighbor are you?” It is abundantly clear that the expert has asked the wrong question. Which is why it’s so unsettling that every time I read this story, I can’t get the question out of my head: “Yeah, yeah, Jesus, but seriously though—who am I really obligated to?”
In my defense, I’m usually not asking this question because I’m trying to avoid loving anyone in particular. It’s just that the unqualified command feels so overwhelming. I mean, I live in a city with millions of people. Every day on my drive to work, I pass dozens of people lying beside the road—the elderly man drinking coffee alone, the single mom sleeping while waiting for the bus, the gaunt young man begging for cash on the corner. I feel somehow both guilty and psychologically crushed by the scale of the need. There has to be a limit to my obligations, right? After all, I’m a finite person. I can’t possibly care for all of them.
There is fundamental truth to this observation, of course. Sometimes the road it is littered with injured people and the donkey’s back is already loaded to breaking and purse has been emptied miles ago. The good Samaritan isn’t God. He can’t singlehandedly lift everyone from every ditch in Palestine. The purpose of Jesus’ story is surely not to heap shame on the traveler whose donkey is already occupied with an injured body.
The real issue Jesus is flagging with this story is the way we address the problem of our limited capacity. We often seek to justify our passing, not with humble acknowledgment of our own fears or limitations, but rather with judgment cast upon the person in the ditch: “This one doesn’t really deserve my help” or “That one isn’t one of my people, part of my circle of responsibility.” We attempt to make neighbor-love more reasonable, more achievable, by assigning categories of worth or artificial spheres of obligation.
Jesus stakes a clear position in this story as well as in many of his other teachings: no one is categorically outside the circle of care. No foreigner. No heretic. No criminal. No enemy soldier. No anonymous stranger. Nobody. God’s compassion knows no qualifiers or exemptions. The injured man beside the road is well inside the relevant circle of neighbor-love no matter who he is or what the details of his story. The only relevant question is whether I have strength in my back, oil in my pack, room on the donkey.
That haunting question, “Who is my neighbor?” has been answered by Jesus definitively: everybody. The only boundaries, the only limits, attach to my own brokenness and finitude—never to the identity of the person in the ditch. In a world full of injured people, only the Spirit of God can tell us who exactly is ours to carry along this stretch of road. But God is already reaching toward every stranger at the bus stop, or on the corner, or by the road, crying, “Yes! Yes! More life! More mercy!”
