A few years ago, one of my daughters, her husband, and our granddaughter lived in San Diego. On one of our visits there, I remember deciding that I was going to do something different; I was going to say hello to people I passed on the street. So, I did. I’d pass someone and say, “hello,” or “how are you?” or “nice day, huh?” My daughter looked at me and asked: “What are you doing?” I said that I was trying to cheer up southern California because everyone seemed in a hurry or self-absorbed in their phones. 

And what happened when I did this? As you might imagine, I got some startled looks, but I also got a lot of smiles, and zero brush offs. So, maybe in a small way I cheered up a very small part of southern California. Maybe in a small way, I was a neighbor to those people. Or maybe they thought I was a kook!

In the Gospel today, we hear about what it means to be a neighbor. Jesus is asked by a scholar of the law: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And what follows is a prescription for the pathway to eternal life and a story to emphasize just what God expects from us.

Jesus responds to this question with a question. “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” and the scholar responds by reciting the Shema, a most important Jewish prayer. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus says, “Do this and you shall live.” But the scholar wants to go deeper and asks, “And who is my neighbor?” That, my friends, is a very good question!

So, who is our neighbor? When I think of our neighbors, I think… well, they are the Careys, the Newfelds, and the Casinelli’s who live next door and across the street. When we see them we ask how their kids are, what have you been up to, and how was the Cape? These are our neighbors, but really they are our friends. This is not exactly what Jesus had in mind when He thinks about who our neighbor is. 

Let’s revisit the Gospel story for a minute. In the story, a man was attacked by robbers and left for dead along the side of the road. Two people passed by him but did not help. They were like, “I don’t know him” and hurried on their way. A third person was moved with compassion and did stop to care for him. He took time out of his busy trip to make sure the man recovered. He had a different definition of neighbor than maybe we do. 

So, who then is my neighbor? Are our neighbors people we don’t even know, ones we might avoid because we are busy working on our to do list at that time? Will we help this neighbor if it makes us late?

Certainly, we would all run to help someone who was robbed and left bleeding on the side of the road… but what about the wounds people carry that we don’t see? Do we tend these? The wounds inside like loneliness, anxiety, fear, physical pain, being left out, and forgotten…. We may not recognize these, unless we let ourselves get close… unless we create dialog… unless we slow down and stop to check in… unless we are present and listen. 

Maybe this neighbor is someone in town, at Stop & Shop, or at our work. Maybe it’s someone at school who is lonely. And by stopping, by being present we… soothe a wound that’s inside… we help mend a damaged heart… we plant a seed in their hearts that Jesus Christ cultivates. We stop because, like the Samaritan traveler, we are moved with compassion. We show mercy.

That’s what a disciple of Jesus Christ looks like. That’s what a Catholic Christian looks like. Someone who doesn’t just pass by. Someone who measures actions by the yardstick of the common good. Someone who knows right from wrong and chooses the right. That’s someone who understands what Jesus means by neighbor and so is on the pathway to inheriting eternal life. 

We must be attentive to others, to look for opportunities for dialog, to be countercultural by putting ourselves somewhere down the pecking order and others at the top. Stop, slow down, listen, create dialog… and maybe make a neighbor a friend in the process. That’s what we do. God is present in our community and the Body of Christ is more than just in here, it is out there. Being Catholic is so much more than attending Mass. It’s what we do with the good we receive here… out there. 

“And who is my neighbor?”