2  WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?

I HAD A FRIEND WHO LIVED and worked with refugee communities. One day a woman reached out to her, asking, “Do you have any refugees I could come hug?” This woman was agitated, anguished even, about the political situation that kept pushing refugees to the top of the headlines. She was a good-hearted person, no doubt, but my friend was at a loss for words. Her neighborhood wasn’t a zoo full of people that this woman could drop into and observe or hug somebody whenever she felt sad. But this woman, like so many, reached out to my friend precisely because of her lack of connection. She was trying to span the bridges our society had created, albeit on her own terms. And those terms dictated that some people were nameless, faceless groups of the miserable, always up for a nice woman to come in and comfort them.

I too have experienced many such offers of “help” and have polished my ministry of gently deflating these do-gooder dreams. The people in my neighborhood who have experienced forced migration don’t need a hug from a strange woman. What they need are good neighbors. They need people to live next door to them, to send their kids to school with theirs, to vote for policies that protect instead of harm them. They need people whose lives are intricately bound up with their flourishing.

It’s a hard message to give in my city—which, like so many in our world, is segregated by race and class. Asking people to do good, to give, to be charitable, becomes easy in these kinds of societies; asking them to be neighbors with those they most wish to help is not, since it points out an inconvenient truth that most of us try hard to forget all the time: some of us have worked hard to make sure we are only neighbors with certain kinds of people, and now we have to live with the results.

There is a famous parable Jesus told about a good Samaritan in Luke 10. It is about how a priest and a Levite—the pristine, untouched, religious, the followers of God—ignored a man who had been beaten by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road that went from Jerusalem to Jericho. It is a Samaritan man—someone Jesus’ audience had been conditioned to despise from birth—who took care of the victim and found him shelter and clothes. There are many reasons people love and fear this parable. Jesus was telling the crowd that it is often the people we least expect who are the ones who actually do the work of God in the world, saving those who have been battered by our culture. He was telling us that the people who think of themselves as good often turn out to be terrible neighbors.

But I often think, too, about the man who asked the question that sparked the parable. We are told that a lawyer—an expert in the Old Testament law—wanted to test Jesus (Luke 10). So he asked the mother of all questions, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus turned the test back on him, shrewdly asking him to sum up the law—which the man had studied his whole life. “How do you read it?” Jesus asks him, all innocent. The man is a good student, he immediately sums up the entire work of Scripture: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all of your strength and with all of your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus replies, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you shall live.”

But the lawyer is not satisfied with Jesus’ answer. The lawyer could say all the words of what it meant to be good, to possess the keys to God’s approval and favor and eternal life; but he did not understand them. We know this because in verse 29 it tells us he reached out to Jesus again, not done with the conversation. “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ ”

This verse haunts me more than any other in Scripture, for it defines the ethics of our time. How many of us have orchestrated our lives around this same question, buoyed by a life of continual self-rationalization? In truth, I don’t really want the answer to that question who is my neighbor? I want to remain safe and secure, confident that I have accrued eternal life for myself, that I am a good person. But Jesus tells the lawyer, and he tells me and he tells you, that the good neighbor is the one who shows mercy to those who have been robbed and left by the wayside of society.

The irony is, the more you try to be the good neighbor, the good Samaritan with eyes to see the world, the more the battered and bruised bodies start to pile up. As one of my mentors once told me, you can only help so many people on the side of the road before you start to wonder where all of these damn robbers are coming from. The more you see a world that creates Jericho highways and profits off of there being a society full of both robbers and victims. The more you notice the outwardly righteous who either cannot or will not see their responsibility to alleviate the suffering, the more we might have to ask ourselves where we fit in the parable. I think about that priest and that Levite in the story, how they were so sure they were doing what was right. The Samaritan man possessed something they did not, something I am now on a perpetual quest for: curiosity at the way the world works and what our responsibility might be to each other.

The people who most hate talking about money are the rich. This is one reason I’ve come to appreciate the work of Rachel Sherman, a sociologist who studied the very wealthy in New York City.1 She describes the lack of research on the wealthy—study after study talks about how poverty influences people but not affluence. One of the reasons for this is that wealthy people abhor talking about money. It is incredibly difficult to do research on this topic. But Sherman found more than fifty wealthy couples in New York City, the most unequal city in the world, to research, and the results are fascinating.

Several of the most important takeaways from Sherman’s research are that wealthy people love to downplay their own privilege. This happened almost exclusively with people Sherman describes as “upwardly oriented.” Their $1.5 million beach house is the smallest on the block; they struggle to keep up with the other families at their children’s expensive private school. Someone always has a better penthouse. Nearly everyone, Sherman found, had a hard time articulating the reality that they were some of the richest people in the world.

Sherman also found that many of the wealthy people she talked to downplayed their wealth as a way of dealing with being on the top of an unequal system—one where the top 1 percent has more than the rest combined. But another way they coped is by believing that inequality and unjust social systems always had and always would exist. Therefore, they reasoned, they should strive to be good people and use their money wisely, rather than trying to change the system. In interviews many people brought up how they had earned their money. People who had inherited their wealth struggled the most with guilt; those who accrued wealth through their jobs as lawyers or bankers had no problem saying they had earned their money by working hard and thus had a moral right to it.

Talking about affluence and privilege is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. I am continually grateful for the perspectives of people outside my own fold. Like Dr. Martin Luther King, for instance, who turned the discussion of consumerism and affluence upside down. Dr. King didn’t talk about guilt, instead he loved to talk about how before we even get to work in the morning we have already lived a globalized life—our coffee grown in Latin America, our soap made in France, our bread grown by farmers in the Midwest.

I think about Dr. King, his head and heart full of the troubles of his country in the 1960s, himself and his family under the constant threat of assassination due to his work trying to get America to provide equal rights to all citizens, especially Black folk. And he took the time to consider the small aspects of his life—the coffee, the soap, the toast—and asked us to do the same. This is the language he used—behold, dependent, interconnected. Right after talking about coffee and soap, Dr. King said, “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought until you are what you ought to be.”2

This is a beautiful reframing of the problem that runs on a loop in my mind. In the decades since King’s life and death, our economy has only become more complicated. Phones made in factories in China, chocolate made by exploitative child labor in West Africa, clothing made in factories wherever it is cheapest. These are the kinds of things that overwhelm me when I start to pay attention. Consumerism—and a global economy that remains opaque in order to preserve the luxury of some and the suffering of others—feels deeply personal because it is. I am connected to real human beings through my purchases: my iPhone, my candy bar, my T-shirts. Am I responsible for their suffering in some way, or am I just a powerless cog in the machine? I am constantly battling numbness, one of the spiritual fruits of affluence. I become paralyzed by all the ways I can do wrong, all the neighbors I might have to care about if I truly start to view myself as responsible. Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh posits that the disembodied vice of greed is not so much what ails our society as it is an economic system based on detaching people both from production and consumption, leading to some pretty un-Christian modes of living. He says that no person really wants to impoverish a single mother in Latin America in order to buy cheap clothes—we are simply too detached from the process to be bothered by the unjust realities that we engage in.3

Dr. King pushed back against dehumanization and detachment in many forms. He looked at his own life and choices as a chance to live out a holistic ethic of a Christ-centered life: to practice neighbor love on the smallest levels and to build up the muscles of gratitude, dependency, and connection—all vital if we are to live and work for justice. Dr. King was inspired to look at his life, down to the items he used and where they were produced, by the parable of the rich fool and the barns in Luke 12. Jesus tells the story of a rich man who builds bigger and bigger barns in order to store all of his goods. The rich man tells his soul to eat, drink, and be merry. But God comes and tells him he is a fool instead, and that all his stored goods will end up going to someone else. Dr. King’s interpretation of this story was that the rich man was a fool because he failed to realize he was dependent on others. And as a result, he was spiritually impoverished.4

As a privileged person in an unjust world, I see myself as a mirror image of the rich man building his barns or of the lawyer who asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” There is a thinness to my idea of who my neighbor is that has dire consequences for my neighbors both near and far. I too have spent my days with my nose in the Good Book, searching for all the right answers, longing to present to God an air-tight case of why I have been found perfect, why I am deserving of love. I am tired, however, of seeking to justify myself. Instead, I long for the eyes to see the bruised and battered of the world. I long to wake up with the curiosity it will take to one day make the world a highway safe enough for anyone to travel on.