In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor.
That’s not what the lawyer wanted to hear. He stood up to put Jesus to the test, but Jesus ended up testing him—diagnosing him, exposing what was wrong with him. Jesus turned the question on the lawyer: “‘What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ You tell me. What does the Law say?” Well, obviously… 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. “Yep,” says Jesus, and He begins to turn away.
Well, that wasn’t very fun. Jesus made me give all the answers… Oh, I know how to get Him talking: And who is my neighbor? Answer me that, Jesus. If you can. The lawyer was trying to justify himself. But let’s be honest, that’s not really a bad question. Who is my neighbor? It’s easy to say, “Love your neighbor.” But what does that actually mean? Maybe we should seriously ask ourselves, And who is my neighbor?
Now we’ve been trained to give the answer: Everyone—everyone’s my neighbor. We should love everyone. But again, how do you really do that? We like this answer even though it’s horribly impossible. But we like it because it’s also wonderfully impossible. There’s no humanly possible way to love everyone, which really helps to get us off the hook. Just say, Oh yes, we should love everyone. Be nice and claim to love everyone. Just think about loving everyone. And with any luck, you’ll never have to do any real work. You can avoid any real suffering with real neighbors.
See, we love the “idea” of our neighbor. We love humanity in the abstract. But real neighbors are annoying. The people we have to live with, the people we don’t like but show up in our lives anyway, we don’t really want to deal with them. So, we tell ourselves we have a duty to humanity or to society—very abstract ideas that are nice and easy to think about without worrying too much about any real details. We come up with ways to love others (the generic “others”)—ways that are often not much more than things we like doing anyway.
Also, I have to point this out: it’s no coincidence that while talk of “social justice” and “equality” is the fashionable thing, there is less and less care for individuals. Everything is race and gender and class—groups we can lump people into. And the individual baby in the womb, or the individual terminally ill parent is gotten rid of (often literally), or the individual poor person is put into the system, because we don’t want to actually deal with them. And while everyone talks about love and acceptance in general, personal interaction and communication grows more and more hostile, with people refusing to listen to each other.
We don’t exactly escape this in the Church either. We especially like to choose our favorite ways of showing love. We’ll serve our neighbor or the church by doing our hobbies and declaring our hobbies to be holy. Some of us think you can tell the church is strong when the building is taken care of, when the budget is met, when the pews are full. They care about the building projects more than what the building is there for—that it’s a place to hear and talk about God’s Word. They think: There. I helped out. I did my duty. Or others love to talk about missions and they send money to various church organizations… because we don’t have to know “those people out there.” We don’t have to deal with them. And we don’t want to think about the people in our own families that don’t come to church.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor. And frankly, we resent that. We resent being told who we must love, because often we don’t personally like those people. But we have to love our neighbor because he is the one who is put there for you to love. What an alarming, almost ridiculous, reason for such a serious work as love. But it is precisely because love is such a serious work that we are not allowed to choose whom we love, but we must be directed to the ones we are to love. (Remember, when I say “love” we’re talking about doing the Law, sacrifice, service, giving of yourself. We’re not talking about romantic love or pleasant feelings). But if who we got to love, who we got to serve, was completely left up to us, then we would make idols out of them all. We would only serve and love them because of something in them (because we liked them), rather than because God commanded us. We would turn love into the most outrageous blasphemy against God. Indeed, we do exactly this, as we claim to love people while approving or celebrating their sins; and as we claim to love people while not actually lifting a finger for a neighbor in need.
So, for our good, God directs us to our neighbors: real people God sticks right in your face. There’s no such thing as love for humanity in general. There is the neighbor, who is the concrete sample of humanity that is actually given to you to love. And helping our real neighbor is always uglier, dirtier, always less convenient, than helping the people we like. It’s certainly harder than just talking about love, or thinking lovely thoughts.
The priest and the Levite had the job of teaching people God’s Law. It was their job to teach people about loving their neighbors. And yet, when confronted by one of their own, lying half-dead in a ditch—a concrete example where they could put their teaching into practice—they looked the other way. And they probably went back to their congregation later, and mentioned the sad sight: “Oh, it was just so terrible. Yes, poor man. It’s such a shame how unsafe the roads are these days. So many robbers about. You can’t trust anyone anymore.” Empty words and useless handwringing, but no acts of love.
Instead, the Samaritan recognized that he didn’t have much choice in the matter. There was a neighbor in need if ever there was one: a real, flesh and blood man, with much of his blood pooling beside him. The Samaritan had to love this man because he was the one put there. He had to show love to that Jewish man, and it didn’t matter that the Jews had never been very nice to him. The Samaritan did the dirty, bloody, inconvenient work of loving his neighbor.
So, who is your neighbor? Who precisely should you love? And remember, the answer isn’t “Everyone”—that’s too generic. So, does this mean you should wait until somebody is literally lying in your path, half–dead? Well, kind of. That would certainly be a big clue. But you don’t really have to wait for that. Who is already lying in your path? Who are your neighbors? Who are the people next to you? We like to pretend this is so complicated, but it’s really not that hard.
Think of the three estates, the three main areas of life: Home, Society, Church. First: the Home—there’s your closest neighbors. Your husband or wife, your children. These are people God has commanded you to love and care for. It doesn’t matter if you “like” them every moment of the day. God has put them in your life for you to serve. And you cannot abandon your duty to love the people in your home, in order to find your fulfillment somewhere else—not in a job or a hobby or some mission. But God gives a blessing with this command: you will find fulfillment and joy by sticking with it. It won’t always be easy or pleasant to serve your spouse or teach your children. But it will be a good work, a true sacrifice of love. God is pleased with that. And He promises that, in time, you will be pleased with it too.
Second: the Civil Society—or we could say, your community. Your literal neighbors. Do they need your help? Do you let them fend for themselves and figure their relatives will take care of it? It’s easy to complain about our society these days. There’s a lot to complain about—our culture seems to be dying. But nothing will get better if we aren’t looking for small ways to improve our community. It’s up to us to see that our schools are teaching children well, that we value human life, that we even be willing to give up some of our mindless entertainment and give to others.
Third: the Church. Most people naturally like their family, and you can have some choice about what neighborhood you live in, but you don’t get to choose the members of your church. Once again, these are the ones you must love because they’ve been put there. So, in church we should certainly care for one another’s needs—if someone is sick, if there’s been a death in the family, if we can provide some help out of poverty and hardship, then we should do that for fellow members in the Body of Christ. But the best way the members of the Church can love one another is by praying for one another and encouraging one another in the faith. And that doesn’t happen with just a friendly smile or handshake. We build up one another in the faith by being in church together. It is encouraging to your brothers and sisters in Christ to see you in the pew—to see they are not alone, to pray and sing with more voices than just their own. Even if you think you didn’t “get anything out of it” today, someone else was blessed just by your being there. And when you are absent, you hurt your neighbors who are here without you. The Body hurts when its parts are missing. We also build up one another and love each other by speaking God’s Word to each other, talking about it, learning it together. So, not just sitting in church, but also engaging with the Word, whether that’s in a Bible class or over a cup of coffee in the fellowship hall.
All of this has been God’s Law: Love the Lord your God with all your heart… and love your neighbor as yourself. God has commanded it. That’s why we should do it. But there is another reason why we should love God and love our neighbor. St. John the Apostle wrote in his First Epistle: In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another (1 John 4:10–11). We love because Jesus did it for us. He did His love—it was an action, a sacrifice. By His suffering, bleeding, and dying He turned away God’s wrath. He made satisfaction for our sins. He did not love the people He liked. He made us unlikeable, unlovable people worthy of God’s love—totally justified by His righteousness. He loved His real neighbors, the ones in desperate need right there in front of Him. And for Him that really was everyone. He made everyone His neighbor by His love, you included.
We can’t do that. We can’t love everyone the way Jesus did. We certainly can’t love them by taking away their sins. We aren’t Jesus. So, Jesus gives us specific neighbors—a limited amount of people we truly can love, we truly can serve. And He gives us specific earthly works—the Ten Commandments—ten things to do for God and for other people. That’s what real love for humanity looks like: doing a commandment for another person. Your Small Catechism gives good suggestions on how to do that (and if you don’t remember what it says, then your homework is go read it).
Real love is action. It’s sacrifice. Real love is what God did on the cross where Jesus suffered and died for us. And that same real love is now here at work in the lives of His people. Let us pray:
Lord of glory, You have bought us With Your life-blood as the price,
Never grudging for the lost ones That tremendous sacrifice.
Give us faith to trust You boldly,
Hope, to stay our souls on You;
But, oh, best of all Your graces, With Your love our love renew (LSB 851:4).
In the Holy + Name of Jesus. Amen.
Preached at Trinity, Clinton, IA & Immanuel, Charlotte, IA
Some ideas from G.K. Chesterton, "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family", Brave New Family, p. 41
