Jesus tells the familiar story of
the Good Samaritan in answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” What does it
mean to “love your neighbor as yourself”? It isn’t an unreasonable question,
though we’re told that the lawyer who asked it was trying “to justify himself.”
Apparently he wanted to put some limits on who he had to consider a neighbor.
But there’s
an earlier point that could have been pursued. Jesus had agreed with the lawyer
that God’s law is summarized, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your
mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?”
— but not “Who is my God?”
It’s easy to understand why. Jesus
and the lawyer are both Jews and they both know the religious traditions of Israel
that identified the Lord as Israel’s God. Every day they said the Shema: “Hear,
O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD alone.”1 So the identity of
the God referred to in the commandment wouldn’t have seemed to be an issue.
But suppose there had been a Gentile
at the edge of the crowd listening to this exchange. (And there may well have
been: There were a lot of Gentiles in Galilee in Jesus’ time.) He wouldn’t have
known all the traditions of Israel. So after Jesus and the lawyer had finished
their conversation, the Gentile might have gotten Jesus’ attention and said, “All
right, I understand the business about my neighbor. But let’s go back to that
first part. I’m supposed to love my God above everything else. But who is my
God?”
How would Jesus have answered? Or —
so that we don’t presumptuously put words in Jesus’ mouth — h
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