Won't You Be My Neighbor? (Friday Devotional)

‘“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” [Jesus asked.] The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”’

- Luke 10:36-37a

“Won’t you be my neighbor?” That was the question Fred Rogers asked his viewers, week after week, on the PBS television program Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Before he ever walked around the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, checking in with King Friday and X the Owl and all the rest, he first extended that invitation. Whoever you were, wherever you were watching, you could be Mr. Rogers’ neighbor, simply because he was willing to treat you as one.

As believers in Christ, we could learn something from Mr. Rogers’ approach. When Jesus was asked who we should consider to be our neighbors, he responded with the now-famous parable of the Good Samaritan, regaling his listeners with a story about a man beaten and left for dead only to be rescued by a Samaritan who did what a priest and Levite had already failed to do: rescue the man from immediate harm and set him on a path to restoration.

When we hear the parable, there is a tendency to reduce its characters to stereotypes. The priest and Levite become legalistic, hypocritical religious authorities with hard hearts, stand-ins for the Pharisees Jesus so often butted heads with. The Samaritan becomes a saintly hero, eager to show mercy to a man in need. When the characters are caricatured like this, it leaves little room for us to apply their story to our own lives—the priest and Levite become the moral low bar, easy to leap over without even trying; the Samaritan becomes an impossible goal we can never reasonably be expected to achieve.

But remember Jesus’s question after telling the story: “which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man?” In the parable, the man who fell in the robbers’ hands was an utter stranger to the priest, Levite, and Samaritan alike…but only one of them treated him that way.

If a fellow priest had laid dying there by the side of the road, the passing priest almost certainly would have attended to him. If it had been a Levite battered and bleeding, the passing Levite would have done whatever he could to help. There’s nothing heroic about it, that’s just what people do for their friends, family, and neighbors. What set the Samaritan apart was that he chose to see a stranger as a neighbor. And when it was no longer ‘some guy’ dying in the ditch, but his own neighbor, he was compelled to help.

What Jesus calls us to through this parable is the same mindset Mr. Rogers spent decades teaching small children: if you’ll allow yourself to think it, anyone can be your neighbor. The day laborer who speaks only Spanish, the small business owner opening her third franchise, the mentally ill panhandler, the stay-at-home mom battling postpartum depression, the cashier who forgot to double-bag your groceries—all the people you barely acknowledge each day—all of these strangers are suddenly your neighbors when you see them with Jesus’s eyes.

Our increasingly polarized culture demands that you see all but your inner circle as strangers, that trying to understand, let alone help, those who are different from you is an exercise in futility. Sticking to your tribe is the safest thing to do in the culture of outrage. But the follower of Christ chooses love over safety, because there are no strangers in the kingdom of God. May your life be a constant invitation to those around you: won’t you be my neighbor?