It Is About Attention

"Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity." (Psalm 133:1)

Most people will tell you the country is more divided than united. And most of the same people, asked honestly, will also say we still have an enormous amount in common. Both of those cannot simply be true at once unless something has gone very wrong with how we are seeing each other. We are alike. We know we are alike. And we are living as though we are not.

Which means the division is not primarily about facts, or even about values. It is about attention. We are shown the small slice of one another that differs, constantly, at volume, by people who profit from our looking. And we are not shown the vast portion we share, because no one makes money on what we hold in common.

You have far more in common with your neighbor than you have been led to believe. You would discover it in about twenty minutes on a porch, and you will never discover it on a screen, and the screen is not sorry. So stop letting your sense of other people be manufactured by those who are paid to keep you afraid of them. Go sit with one person you have been told is your opposite. Attention is the whole battle, and the people who have your attention are deciding who your neighbor gets to be. Take it back, and spend it on an actual face.

The Person Who Lives Near You

"Love your neighbor as yourself." (Leviticus 19:18)

We have quietly turned neighbor into a metaphor. We use it to mean the poor in general, or the world, or people far away who need things, and all of that is real. But that is not what the word means, and it never was. A neighbor is a person who lives near you. Which is much harder. It is easy to love the suffering of a nation you will never visit; it costs nothing but money and a feeling. It is considerably harder to love the man four doors down whose dog barks at five in the morning, or the woman whose politics make your jaw tighten, or the family whose crisis you have watched from behind your blinds for two years without ever knocking.

Those are your neighbors. They are the ones the commandment is actually about. And most of us do not know their names. There are churches that have discovered this and started meeting where people actually live, in a yard, on a street, among the people who are there, and it turns out to preach a sermon no building can preach.

So resist the comfort of the metaphor. The distant need is real, but it can also be a way of never loving anyone in particular. Loving humanity in general is easy precisely because humanity in general never disappoints you at close range. Go learn one name on your own street this week. The commandment was never mainly about the far country. It was about the house next to yours.

What They Let It Do

"But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion." (Luke 10:33)

Every man on that road saw him. Read it again. The priest saw him. The Levite came to the place and saw him. The Samaritan saw him. The seeing is identical. The seeing is not the difference. What separates the three men is the sentence that comes next. The priest saw and passed by. The Levite saw and passed by. The Samaritan saw and was moved with compassion, and the word there is a violent one, a word about the gut, about something turning over inside a body.

Then he went to him. And the going is not one act but a cascade, because compassion is expensive and does not stop at the first bill. He bandaged the wounds. He poured on his own oil and wine. He set the man on his own animal, which means the Samaritan walked. He brought him to an inn. He paid. He promised to return and settle whatever else was owed. His supplies, his transport, his time, his money, his return trip.

The difference between the three men was never information. All three had the same facts, the same body in the same ditch. The difference was what they let the information do to them. So do not pray for more awareness of the world's need; you have seen plenty already. Pray that what you have already seen would be allowed, finally, to move you, and then to move you off the road you were on.

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.

What Tuesday Reveals

"You shall love the Lord your God ... and your neighbor as yourself." (Luke 10:27)

The Great Commandment tells you what actually matters, and it is two things, and they are not separable. Love God. Love people. And here is where we must be careful, because we are very good at the first one in a way that costs us nothing. Loving God is more than having the heart moved in a worship service. It is more than the catch in the throat during the last chorus, more than the sense of nearness in prayer, and those are treasures. But they can be entirely genuine and entirely uncoupled from a life.

We prove that we love God by how we love other people. That is not a modern softening of the gospel. John says it flatly: if anyone says he loves God and hates his brother, he is a liar. Not mistaken. Not immature. A liar. The vertical and the horizontal are welded together, and you cannot have one without the other, however moved you feel on a Sunday.

So the test of your love for God is not what happens in the room during the service. It is what happened in your driveway on Tuesday, in the tone you took with the person who wronged you, in whether you crossed a room or crossed a street. Do not measure your love for God by the warmth of your worship. Measure it by the person you find hardest to love, and how you actually treat them when no one is singing.

The Question Behind the Question

"And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (Luke 10:25)

He was not asking. He was trapping. A lawyer stands up in a crowd and asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and everyone in the room knows the question is a snare, meant to get Jesus to say something that will land him in trouble. And Jesus does not take the bait. He answers a question with a question. What does the law say? You are the expert. You tell me.

And the man does, and he does it perfectly, because he has known it since he was a boy. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Deuteronomy and Leviticus, stitched together. He got it right.

And getting it right was exactly what was killing him, and he did not know it. There is a way of holding the truth that keeps you safe from it, a way of being correct that never once costs you anything, and it is more dangerous than being wrong, because the man who is wrong may still be searching, while the man who is right has stopped. The next question out of the lawyer's mouth is going to give him away completely. So examine the thing you are sure you already know. Right answers can be a hiding place, and the tidy, correct faith you have carried since childhood may be the very thing standing between you and God.

The Wrong Target

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood." (Ephesians 6:12)

Read that again, because we do not believe it. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood. And yet almost everything in a life gets organized around wrestling with flesh and blood. The person on the board. The person in the comments. The one at the far end of the country who votes wrong. The family member. The neighbor. The one who said the thing. That is where the energy goes, and where the imagination goes when we lie down at night, running the argument again, winning it again, and feeling worse.

Paul says that is not the fight. Not because those people are not difficult; they are. Not because what they did was fine; it was not. But because they are not the enemy, and as long as you are swinging at them, you are swinging at the wrong thing, and you are doing exactly what the actual enemy would most like you to do with an afternoon.

The person across from you is a person who is also being fought. Both of you are. That does not excuse either of you, and it does not make the harm imaginary. It means you have been aiming at the wrong target for most of your adult life, and every ounce of strength spent hating a human being is an ounce the real enemy was glad to see you waste. Lift your eyes past the face in front of you. There is a battle on, and it was never with them.