Who is my neighbor?

The Pharisees came to ask Christ, “Master, Teacher, tell us who is my neighbor?” They didn’t ask him, how does one behave to one’s neighbor? They asked him, point blank, the question: Who is the guy whom you call neighbor?

And Christ told them a man (a Jew) was going down to Jericho, fell among robbers, was beaten up and left wounded. A teacher goes by, a priest goes by, sees him and walks on. And then an outsider comes along, the traditional enemy (a Samaritan), and turns to the wounded man, as an internal turning (compassion), and picks him up, takes him into his arms and brings him to the inn.

There is no way of categorizing who my neighbor ought to be. Christ told them who your neighbor is is not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you speak, by the ethnos, but by (((you))). You can recognize the other (hu)man who is out of bounds culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who – you can say by providence or by pure chance – is the one who lies somewhere along your road in the grass and create the supreme form of relatedness which is not given by creation but created by (((you))).