Posted 457 days ago

The Other Is My Neighbor

by Greta Bergquist

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy / I cannot find in my own – Rich Mullins

You’ve probably heard the following story a hundred times.

In Luke, there’s a lawyer who’s kind of a smartass. This lawyer asks Jesus who his neighbor is. Jesus, as usual, instead of saying something concise and easy, something we’d all like to follow, turns the question around with the story of the Good Samaritan.¹ This is the story in which our favorite holy people (priest and Levite) step around a beaten traveler, ignoring his suffering. But then a Samaritan—someone from a group of people the Jews hated—comes along, and really helps the guy out. The Samaritan takes the traveler to a hotel, makes sure he’s okay, and asks the innkeeper to keep an eye on him. Then Jesus asks the smartass lawyer, “Who was the neighbor in the story?” And the lawyer says the only thing anyone can say: “The one who showed him mercy”—the Samaritan.

For some reason, the story of the Good Samaritan, the good neighbor, no matter how many times I’ve heard it, is still the one I think of when I think about the Other.

It’s awfully nice to think of the Other as someone far away and distant, someone from a drastically different culture or background, someone we don’t come into contact with very often, don’t have much in common with, and therefore don’t need to think about very much. But in my world, my Other is a woman I work with every day. She is kind of like Creepy Ben on ??Lost??—manipulative and annoying, although I don’t think she’s ever given orders to kill anyone. She is a person, I’m sure, whom God has put in my life for me to love, and I don’t like it. I don’t like her.

I’ve known this woman for about two years. Soon after I met her, what was mildly annoying became thoroughly irritating. I dismissed her as not worth my time. I wrote her off. But since I didn’t have to work directly with her, it was okay. I could do this surreptitiously, and no one would really notice.

Then I had a conversation with my mom about this woman. My mom merely said, “Hmm, it sounds like she needs some love.”

And that was that: My reminder that my deflated heart needed to expand right then and there.

The process of loving someone who is difficult to love can make our hearts grow softer and open wider and can allow us to see Jesus more clearly. This woman whom I found so annoying also claims Christ. And I might think she’s loopy and crazy and disagree with her on just about everything in the world, but it doesn’t matter. Because she’s my sister.

Sometimes this is true for me, more often it’s not. But the work of loving expands my heart. In this two-year journey of love (which sounds like some hippie peace song, but believe me, it’s been no easy thing) I have learned a few things, most of which I am continuing to learn:

1. We often think of the Other as someone far away, across the globe, or someone in our neighborhood of different race, gender, or values. It’s good to have an expansive view of who we are called to be in relationship with, and to recognize there are those who do not look or sound like us with whom we are the body of Christ, the communion of saints. But sometimes our Other is a person who looks and sounds a lot like us, someone we pass by every day. Kathleen Norris suggests that this is in fact how we work out salvation:

Conversion is no more spectacular than learning to love the people we live with and work among…Conversion is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people – even the difficult, unbearable ones – are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?²

2. My neighbor is often the person I most don’t want it to be. I think this might be because God has a sense of humor. Also, I think I learn more from people I dislike.

3. It is very easy to find things to dislike about people we are supposed to love. I can come up with about five hundred things I dislike about my other. Dwelling on these five hundred things does not make it easier for me to love her and see her as a child of God. In fact, they make it more difficult. It is a lot better for me to try and find things I can appreciate about her.

4. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the other was simply a man who stopped when interrupted on his journey. He wasn’t trying to be holy, like the priest and Levite. He simply stopped when confronted with someone who needed care. Every day we are stopped with people who need care, and too often we who claim to be holy people turn away.

I am trying this Easter season to be like that Samaritan, to stop when I’m walking along and there’s someone in front of me who is hurt. To bind up wounds, and to ask the innkeepers I know to help out, too. To see my neighbors and the Others in my life with eyes wide open, heart expanding.

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Notes

1. You can read the details in Luke 10:25-37.

2. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead Books, 1999), 44.

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