Text: Luke 10:25-37 - The Good Samaritan
In the context of: prayer week Pray for your neighbours (sermon outline)
In this week, we reflect together on the question "Who is my neighbour?" A question posed to Jesus two thousand years ago, and one that sounds urgent again today in our multicultural society. The story of the Good Samaritan breaks through expectations and makes us look differently at the reality around us. It invites us not only to pray for our neighbours, but to actually become a neighbour.
In many Dutch cities, contact between neighbours is becoming less and less. At the same time, we live in neighbourhoods where people from dozens of different countries and cultures live together. How can we as Christians build bridges instead of walls? How do we become true neighbours to people from other cultures, refugees and all the other neighbours in our neighbourhoods?
The lawgiver who asks Jesus the question already knows the answer to the first question: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself." But then comes the follow-up question that complicates everything: "Who is my neighbour?" It is an attempt to delineate love, to draw clear boundaries. And in fact, we still ask the same kinds of questions today: who should I help, how often, and what if they keep making the same mistake? Which neighbours am I responsible for?
Jesus does not answer this question with a definition, but tells a story that turns all expectations upside down. He deliberately introduces a Samaritan as the hero of his story. For the listeners, this must have been unthinkable. They expected a Jew, but get a Samaritan. This is unthought of, they could not have imagined.
If you were a Christian in the city at all, you might make sure you encountered certain neighbourhoods as little as possible in your life. And if you encountered them, you walked around them with a bow. There is all kinds of history between different communities in our society. Who are your Samaritans? Who do you turn your nose up at, walk around with a bow? Which neighbourhoods do you avoid, which people do you not speak to?
In the story, we see three different reactions to the same scene. A priest and a Levite pass by, see the wounded man and pass by. Their behaviour does not even seem so crazy. They followed the rules, avoided risks, protected themselves. But then the Samaritan passes by, sees and takes pity. The Samaritan's pity breaks the line of the story. Pity, you can't turn that on or off. Pity happens to you, it happens in you.
Think of the stories we hear this week during "Praying for Neighbours." People who saw their lives transformed through prayer after years of pain and loneliness. People from other cultures building bridges to their own communities and reaching out to others who are otherwise hard to access. People who saw God's hand in their lives and are now serving others. They all allowed themselves to be touched by compassion and went to work with it.
The Samaritan in the story does not stop at pity. He acts. He tends to the wounds, takes the man to an inn, pays for his care and promises to return. It is the combination of seeing, feeling and acting that makes charity a charity. It is not just having compassion, but doing something with it.
But what difference then? How much? It is easy to fall back into the delimiting questions. They are the same kind of questions as "Who is my neighbour?" They try to delimit love, and they cannot. Jesus refuses to delimit the obligations of love. In the projects we learn about this week, we see what that means practically. People who commit their lives to their neighbourhood. People who start praying even more fervently for their neighbourhood after setbacks. People who don't stop at words but actually help others.
This story seems to set an impossible bar. We are never going to succeed in being neighbourly to all the residents of our city in this way. But perhaps we can take this story as an encouragement to be boundlessly gracious, and take off our limit of love. We can start with one neighbour, one gesture, one prayer.
At the same time, this story also pulls us off our high horse, pushes us face-first into reality. We are not just the listener to this story, but perhaps also that man who travelled from Jerusalem to Jericho and was robbed. Robbed, to a greater or lesser extent, of your ideals, your health, energy, your valuable relationships. And there you lie by the side of your life's road, disabled, powerless. Who will help you?
Perhaps a deeper lesson here is that we can only truly be a neighbour as Jesus intended, when we have allowed ourselves to be cared for by Jesus. That our lives are given new perspective, saved, by the grace and love he gives. Just as people discover that they are not alone with Jesus. Just as people learn that God remains with them even in difficult circumstances. Just as people choose to leave their old lives behind for a new life with Christ.
Jesus reverses the original question. The answer to "Who is my neighbour?" comes not from our heads, but from our hearts. Once our hearts get involved, we start asking ourselves for whom we can be a neighbour. And that starts with prayer. This week, we consciously pray for our neighbours - people from other cultures, refugees, all the different communities in our city. We pray not from a distance, but from commitment.
Prayer opens our hearts and eyes. It helps us look differently at the people in our street, our neighbourhood, our city. When we pray for our neighbour from another culture, we no longer see him as "that stranger" but as someone for whom God cares. When we pray for the woman with headscarf at the bus stop, we no longer see her as a threat but as someone who might be lonely. Prayer turns statistics into persons, prejudices into encounters.
In this new week, the focus is therefore on the question: for whom can you be a neighbour and therefore a sign of life of God's new world? Start by praying for your immediate neighbours. Get to know their names. Allow your compassion, even for your own Samaritans. Look around you at the half-dead people in your neighbourhood - people deprived of attention, network, opportunities, hope. Make a difference, without trying to delineate love.
This could be as simple as baking something delicious for neighbourhood children. Or organising a neighbourhood activity. Or opening your home for conversation. Or praying in places in your neighbourhood where needed.
The task is clear, but not easy. Charity is not about delineating who belongs, but about opening your heart to everyone who crosses your path - especially those you would prefer to avoid. And it starts with prayer, because prayer prepares our hearts for action.
In our cities, we all live close to each other, but are we each other's neighbours? This week challenges us to make neighbours into neighbours. Not by taking everything on our shoulders, but by starting where we are, with whom we encounter, in the strength God gives. Because ultimately, the story of the Good Samaritan is not about what we should all do, but about the God who in Jesus himself became our neighbour when we lay helpless by the roadside.
Let us pray and act on that certainty this week: that we are loved first, before we can love. That we are saved first, before we can save others. And that God uses us to make his love visible in every street, every neighbourhood, every encounter in our diverse society.