“Love your neighbour.”
It is probably one of the best-known sayings of Jesus.
It sounds simple enough.
And perhaps that is part of the problem.
Words that are very familiar can become so familiar that we stop hearing what they ask of us.
We know that Christians are supposed to love their neighbours. We may even regard ourselves as caring and compassionate people. But what does loving our neighbour actually look like in the ordinary circumstances of daily life?
And who, exactly, is my neighbour?
The question behind the question
Someone once asked Jesus precisely that.
Luke tells us that an expert in the law wanted to know what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus drew him back to the commandments: love God, and love your neighbour as yourself.
But the man had another question.
“Who is my neighbour?”
Perhaps he wanted some clarity.
Where does my responsibility begin — and where does it end?
Jesus answered with a story.
A man is attacked on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and left badly injured. A priest sees him and passes by. Then a Levite does the same.
Finally, a Samaritan stops.
For Jesus’ listeners, that detail mattered. The Samaritan was not the obvious hero. He belonged to a group viewed with suspicion and hostility.
Yet he is the one who sees the wounded man, is moved with compassion, tends his injuries and makes arrangements for his care.
At the end of the story, Jesus subtly changes the original question.
He does not ask, “Which people count as my neighbours?”
He asks:
“Which of these three became a neighbour?”
That feels very different.
Becoming a neighbour
Perhaps loving our neighbour is less about deciding who qualifies for our concern and more about the kind of person we choose to become.
The Samaritan noticed.
He stopped.
He allowed someone else’s need to interrupt his journey.
That may be where loving our neighbour begins.
Not necessarily with dramatic acts of generosity, but with paying attention.
The colleague who seems unusually quiet.
The neighbour we have not seen for several days.
The person serving us in a shop who is having a difficult morning.
Someone whose opinion irritates us.
Someone whose life experience is completely different from our own.
The person we would normally pass without noticing.
The invitation to love our neighbour reaches into encounters like these.
Love is more than feeling warmly
We often use the word love to describe an emotion.
But the love Jesus speaks about is much more demanding than simply feeling affection.
We may not feel particularly warm towards everyone we encounter.
Some people are difficult.
Some frustrate us.
Some hold opinions with which we strongly disagree.
Some may have hurt us.
Christian love cannot simply mean pretending those realities do not exist.
Perhaps it means recognising that the other person still possesses dignity.
It means refusing to reduce them to the thing we dislike about them.
It means asking whether our words and actions contribute to their flourishing or diminish it.
Sometimes love may involve kindness.
Sometimes listening.
Sometimes generosity.
Sometimes forgiveness.
And sometimes love may require boundaries, particularly where relationships are harmful or abusive. Loving someone does not mean allowing ourselves or others to be mistreated.
Love is not the absence of wisdom.
But neither is it simply a feeling.
It becomes visible in the way we treat people.
The neighbours we do not choose
There is another uncomfortable part of Jesus’ story.
The wounded man did not get to choose who helped him.
And the Samaritan did not get to choose who was lying beside the road.
Much of Christian community is like that.
We often imagine community as finding people with whom we naturally belong — people who think like us, share our interests and make us feel comfortable.
But neighbours are not always people we would have chosen.
They may live differently.
Vote differently.
Understand faith differently.
Come from another culture.
Hold beliefs we find difficult.
Sometimes the challenge of loving our neighbour begins precisely at the point where similarity ends.
That does not require us to agree with everyone.
But it does ask whether disagreement prevents us from seeing another person as a person.
Love begins with seeing
One theme has been returning again and again as I have written these reflections.
We cannot respond to what we refuse to notice.
Jesus repeatedly noticed people others overlooked.
He noticed Zacchaeus in the tree.
He noticed the woman who touched his cloak in the crowd.
He noticed blind Bartimaeus when others tried to silence him.
He noticed children when the disciples regarded them as an interruption.
Again and again, compassion begins with attention.
Perhaps loving our neighbour begins in the same place.
Before we can help, speak, give or act, we have to see.
An ordinary discipleship
Most of us will not encounter somebody lying injured beside a road today.
But we will encounter people.
At home.
At work.
In shops.
Online.
In our neighbourhoods.
Perhaps even in church.
And every encounter contains a small question:
What does love require of me here?
The answer will not always be obvious.
Sometimes it may be nothing more than patience.
Sometimes it may mean speaking rather than remaining silent.
Sometimes it will mean giving time.
Sometimes listening.
Sometimes offering practical help.
Sometimes recognising that another person simply needs to be treated with dignity.
None of these things may appear particularly religious.
But perhaps this is where discipleship becomes real.
The invitation to follow Jesus reaches into the whole of life.
And that means the command to love our neighbour reaches there too.
Perhaps the question for today is not simply:
Who is my neighbour?
Perhaps Jesus still turns the question around and asks:
To whom might I become a neighbour today?
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