By Kerwin Holmes, Jr.

There are some people who imagine their neighborhoods twice as large to avoid the truthful inconvenience of Jesus’s parable: You don’t get to choose your neighbors.

Off and on, I hear Christian politicians, rhetoricians, theologians, and just regular people quote the parable of “The Good Samaritan” in arguing for altruistic, and often very lenient, border policies for nations…particularly nations like the United States of America and those in the European Union (North Korea doesn’t get much love). Some people also quote Jesus’s other teaching (not a parable) of how He will judge His followers on the last day, separating the sheep from the goats, for the same effect.

But, what did Jesus mean by these lessons, one being a parable and the other being a prophecy?

Right off the bat, you may notice that the story of “The Good Samaritan” is found only in one of the Gospel accounts, and that is the Gospel of Luke. It is part of the so-called “Special Luke” collection of stories in that it is only found in Luke.
There are certain things also found only in the Gospel of Matthew, such as the story of Jesus separating the sheep from the goats (also mentioned above). This is part of the so-called “Special Matthew” literary corpus.
Though these two are often paired together as if they point to the same lesson, they actually do not. They are not found in one another’s gospel narrative, and they do not coincide directly as synoptic stories.

Let me explain. First, into the story of the sheep and the goats.

THE SHEEP AND GOATS

At this moment in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is going through and delivering several lessons on what His coming judgment will be like and how His disciples should act in light of their coming reckoning.

Pause. This should already make us wary of a difference because of Jesus’s intended audience. Jesus is not teaching to people who may join with Him. No, Jesus is now teaching His own disciples, particularly the Twelve whom He personally hand-selected to join Him.
Though this lesson is located in Matthew 25, the actual audience is set up in Matthew 24 where we are told that Jesus is only addressing His disciples.

Another thing is that, in the sheep and goats story, the contrast is not simply between Jesus’s friends and His enemies, as even the goats call Jesus “Lord.” You see, sheep and goats look very similar to the untrained eye. But they are very different when analyzed face to face. The goats’ response to Jesus’s accusation of not doing charity to Him by doing charity for His brothers and sisters implies that they will be shocked at not doing the job. They will assume that they were in the clear. Jesus’s outward enemies don’t assume that they are in the clear, and they certainly wouldn’t assume such during their final judgment. Jesus’s outward enemies don’t give a good damn about following Jesus’s words, a fact that costs them daily and, by consequence, will cost them eternally.

No friends, this is the final judgment akin to the parable of separating the wheat from the weeds/tares (another comparison of face-value similarity to the untrained eye) which is in the same gospel narrative. This is judgment within Jesus’s kingdom, the Church, such that the true disciples of Jesus are rewarded for helping Jesus’s brothers and sisters, and those false disciples who did not help are rewarded with their just punishment of damnation.

But, who are Jesus’s brothers and sisters? Well, since this lesson of Jesus separating the sheep from the goats is only in the Gospel of Matthew, it is critical as Bible readers to search the Gospel of Matthew first to see if the writer answers this question.

The answer is found in Matthew chapter 12: Jesus’s mother and brothers and sisters are those who obey and do the will of God the Father (and God the Son and God the Spirit, since the God is Trinity). Jesus’s brothers and sisters are His true disciples.

This means that Jesus rewards His disciples for showing love for one another, visiting each other in prison, feeding one another, and clothing one another. This lines up greatly with what we read elsewhere in the Gospels and in the early Christian history of the Acts of the Apostles and in the epistles for how Christians loved one another.

So…unless we are going to make the case that every single person we help with charity be tested to be a Christian, Matthew 25 and the story of the “Sheep and the Goats” is not appropriate to be used for non-Christian charity of any kind. Jesus gave specific lessons for particular situations. We ought not take Jesus out of His own context to prove a point that He clearly proves in Scripture.

But what about the Good Samaritan? Well, let us go into this and then wrap up.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN

The essential problem with reading Luke 10:25-37 is that we really do not pause to ask the particular question which caused Jesus to tell His parable: “Who is my neighbor?”
Remember, this story is only found in the Gospel of Luke. We need to take the same precautions as before.

Well, now we get to the *best and nerdy part.

THE NERDY MINI-PART (THE BEST PART, LA PARTE SUAVE, THE CLUTCH PART)

The word written in the original Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew is the word πλήσιος (PLAY-see-os). Using the LSJ (Liddell-Scott-Jones Ancient Greek lexicon) the word is first used as an adjective, meaning “near, close to.” The sentiment is not someone who is far off, but someone who is nearby. You will notice that in Jesus’s story, all of the men involved travel along the same road and come near the unfortunate man who had been beaten, robbed, and left for dead. The Samaritan, though he was considered to be less pious and an eyesore to the Jewish people, saw the man on the road he was traveling and realized that the man needed help. The Samaritan made no excuses, but took action as was his duty as a human being close by, and took care of the man in his vicinity (you will see that the word “vicinity” is also related to a Latin term meaning “neighbor,” indicating close location).

Some may take issue with this, saying that Jesus originally spoke Aramaic and not Greek. First off, I reject the notion that Jesus only knew Aramaic, as do many scholars, but later on you can read about that here. Jesus most likely did (and necessarily) speak Ancient Greek (at least Koine) to be conversant with Pontius Pilate, the Roman centurion, the Syrophoenician woman, and many others in his area and lifetime who would not have known Aramaic but Koine Greek instead.

But “alright then” to you who make that objection. The Aramaic term used in the Syriac translation of the Ancient Greek text of the Gospel of Luke (Syriac being the Aramaic of the Syrian dialect, and an ancestor to modern Aramaic) is ܩܪܝܒܐ (kree-boh/kree-bah), which also first has the adjectival meaning of “near, close by.” This word comes from the root ܩܪܒ, which (consulting Michael Sokoloff’s 2009 updated Syriac lexicon) in Aramaic has the meaning “to approach to, be near” and is related to the Hebrew (קרב), which has the same meaning.
So, whether Jesus spoke in Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew, there is no difference. The meaning of “neighbor” back then and in the way Jesus used it did not mean someone five hundred miles away while you have people there on your city block or the next farm over. It meant those close to you by proximity and vicinity.

Theologian’s Note: There really is no getting around the fact that Jesus, in this parable, was taking away the choice from the Torah expert and the people around Him by saying explicitly the lesson: “Your neighborhood is whoever is closest to you, even if they are someone you despise, like a Samaritan.”

It gets even easier in Spanish, where the translation often uses the two words most commonly used for “neighbor”: prójimo (related to the word “proximity”) or vecino (related to the word “vicinity”).

I told you that I’ve been working on those upgrades, mi gente. A lot of my life happens outside of the web, including my caring for my neighbors.

Many Christian thinkers and even Christian political activists (like Russell Moore, for example…and not to pick on him) far too often operate without clearly engaging with Jesus’s lesson on who our neighbors are. They find themselves advocating that Christians stretch out their hands to the best of their abilities to people thousands of miles away while withdrawing their hands (and that same effort or better!) from those down the street. They misplace caring for those in another nation before those within their nation…or even caring for those outside of their own province before taking care of their own city…or worse, even caring for those outside of their own families before caring for their own relatives. In doing the latter they both deny the faith and even become worse than a denier of the faith.

For those who have hearts for communities outside of our own, this is not to damper your abilities to help those people.
But this is to reign in your temptation to engage in righteous platitudes when those around you are too busy helping those nearest to them. Have some humility and also awareness to know that God may be calling some of you to engage in that kind of long-distance charity, or even, gasp, God may even be calling you to live with them.

I know right? Actual tent-making-missional work. These are scary times.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

For the Christian, generally speaking, the circle of charity should be the following list in descending order of importance, according to Jesus and His apostles (who carried on/out His teaching):

• Your family
• Your local community
• Your local vicinity
• Your local province/state
• Your local government
• Your national government
• The international community

Juxtaposed to each level of this is the distinction that those within the Church should have your attention also per the warning of Jesus’s coming judgment separating the sheep from the goats. Serve charitably in this order of decreasing importance, and keep an eye out for those in the Church who fit into these categories (appropriately) in order to fulfill Jesus’s warning to help His (and your) brothers and sisters.
You will be helping our Messiah in the process. This is what it means to be neighborly and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

And guess what? If Christians all did this around the world, the world would be taken care of a whole lot better than it is now because we know more about how our own communities are jacked up than those living hundreds of miles away. We are able to do much more where we are than where we are not.

This lesson isn’t politically correct. This lesson also is not so vague that it allows for bad policy-making which throws fellow citizens under the bus or at the back of the line behind non-citizens (as Russell Moore implies). At the same time, it does not allow for xenophobia: you are not to be irrationally fearful and suspicious of everyone foreign. No.

Even if you have a person not legally in your country, and they are living near you, guess what?

They are your neighbor also.
That does not mean that you break the laws of the land or work in opposition to your responsibility for those in your own nation, your neighbors. It does mean that you have the duty, as a Christian, to ensure that they are loved as you would want someone to love you if you were in their country illegally. Oh yes, put yourself in that vulnerable position, and live and serve them in the reality of it. Don’t just settle for easy-roads-out.

There is enough flexibility in Jesus’s commands for this to look differently depending upon our neighborhoods and our situational responsibilities. Not everyone lives in the same neighborhood or is even born in the same nation, and not everyone has the same amount of financial or temporal ability for charity. But we are all capable of charity, whether in our time or in our money. It is the second commandment for the eternal life of God.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR YOU AND FOR OTHERS

The men in Jesus’s parable all came across the same wounded man, broken on the road that they traveled upon. That day, God required for them to help the man in need nearest to them, and only one man stepped forward for the job. If Jesus had that much disdain for the men who stepped around that man, and if Jesus has that much disdain for those of us who leave family out to dry, how much does Jesus judge us with disdain for leaving our fellow countrymen, citizens, and city-dwellers to rot while inviting people hundreds of miles away and across borders to take their places at our tables?

This is wrong, and it not only hurts us by causing us to reject helping our families and countrymen. The result is catastrophic to the people of the foreigners as they mirror our actions of neighborly abdication with their own.

Jesus’s lessons are not easy, but they are straight-forward. When you live them out, you realize how far short you come and how far ahead God is from you, bidding you to reach that stage of this adventurous journey of sanctification. But take heart! This is God’s work in you prepared beforehand! You were quite actually (re)born for this!
Hop to it Christian soldier!

Mankind, he has told each of you what is good
and what it is the Lord requires of you:
to act justly,
to love faithfulness,
and to walk humbly with your God.
-Micah 6:8

Featured artwork is “The Good Samaritan” by William Henry Margetson, date unknown.

[*Edited April 3, 2020]