Who is My Neighbor?

Our nation was shocked to see the forced removal of children from their illegal refugee parents, the cynical and cruel reason for their removal, the false appeals to the rule of law and Romans 13, and the hypocrisy on many sides in the matter.

This raises the larger issue: just who is our neighbor who God commands we must be kind towards?

Jesus used the story of the good Samaritan to rebuke the lawyer who sought to minimize his duties under God's law to love his neighbor. So long as we are trying to obtain righteousness by law-keeping, we will always fail, because we will not love our neighbors as God commands.

The lawyer sought to pare back the number of people he had to love, but Jesus expanded it to include strangers and outcasts. He pointed out that the priest and the Levite disobeyed the commandment, but the despised Samaritan fulfilled it.

Like the lawyer, we all like to pretend that we don't have to show love to foreigners and strangers, because we claim they are not our neighbors.

In our country, we disobey the command to love our neighbors, when we rip apart families and send people back to the countries they fled from due to oppression, fear, and poverty.

We justify what we do with lies, and cruelly shift the blame onto the poor parents off of ourselves.

Last year in our own community, a hard-working, decent man was deported, along with his wife and five American children, all because his parents illegally brought him over as a minor 20 years ago. We showed him and his family no mercy, no love.

Praise God, He found a way to be kind to His people, we who deserved condemnation! He tore down the legal wall and reconciled us by Jesus!