A Category Turned Into a Verb

"But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29)

There it is, and Luke does not soften it. He asks the question desiring to justify himself. He is not looking for information. He is looking for a boundary, a line drawn on a map so he can be sure he is standing inside it. He wants a definition of neighbor narrow enough that he can go home and be at peace, because a man who must love his neighbor as himself needs to know exactly how many neighbors he has.

We have all asked that same question with a straight face. How much is enough. Who exactly is my responsibility. Where does this end. Because if it does not end, we are undone. And that is the terrible thing about the story Jesus tells next: he does not answer the question. He changes it. The lawyer asked who qualifies as my neighbor, and Jesus, at the end, asks which man was a neighbor to the one who fell among the robbers. He turned a category into a verb.

You do not have neighbors, a fixed set of people who qualify for your love. You are a neighbor, or you are not, depending on what you do when a body is in the ditch. Stop trying to draw the line that lets you off. There is no number that finishes the command, because the command was never about a number. It was about becoming a certain kind of person, the kind who crosses the road.