Sunday Morning Greek Blog

I preached this message July 13, 2025, at Mount View Presbyterian Church in Omaha, NE.

Good morning. The Lord be with you.

I imagine that most of us either grew up watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood or had young children who watched that show. (It’s okay to admit it if you watched it with your kids.) As a kid, one of my favorite parts of the show was when he sang “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?” He would usually find someone who could demonstrate their talents or skills. When I watched it with my kids later on, that had become a visit to a factory where something was made. I was fascinated by the episode on how aluminum foil was made.

Of course, being a train lover, my other favorite part of the show was when Trolley went to the Magic Kingdom. I never thought much about it as a kid, but as a parent it dawned on me, spoiler alert here, that Mr. Rogers was doing most if not all of the puppet voices.

As a kid, it was just a fun show to watch. But as I watched it as an adult with my kids, especially in the small rural town we lived in in Illinois and where I served as a pastor, I began to broaden my concept of who my “neighbors” were. I used to think “neighbors” were just the people who lived in the houses around us. But as I would go for walks with the kids or go to the park with them, we would meet people we didn’t know or I would meet the parents of my kids’ classmates.

If I said hi to someone in passing, my kids sometimes asked, “Who was that?” If I didn’t know their name, I would usually say, “That’s one of our Paxton neighbors.” After all, they may have been neighbors to people in our congregation, so I wanted to make sure they knew that the newcomer to the town wanted to fit in.

In Mediterranean culture, the concept of neighbor had a slightly different nuance. Their culture was steeped in the concept of “in-group” vs. “out-group.” The concept of neighbor went much further than just people who live near you. Bruce Malina, a Theology professor who taught for 48 years at Creighton before his death in 2017, defined “neighbor” in the Bible this way:

“The term refers to a social role with rights and obligations that derive simply from living close with others—the same village or neighborhood. Neighbors of this sort are an extension of one’s kin group.”[1]

In other words, neighbors were family and were to be treated like family. Along with that, being considered family meant you had a certain degree of honor in the community as well. But that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule for Jews. If you did something to violate the honor or trust you had in the community, you would most likely be shamed or even ostracized. If you got drunk and embarrassed yourself or got in a fight or damaged someone else’s property, the community would not excuse or overlook such behavior. If you stole from your neighbor or committed adultery, you got more than a slap on the wrist. You would find yourself in the out-group.

These concepts of honor and shame, in-group and out-group, have lost their force in modern culture. Malina documents that in one of his other books.[2] In fact, in some respects, this has been flipped on its head. The in-groups value law and order in their communities and have certain expectations about what good behavior looks like, while the out-groups, something that used to carry shame and guilt, are now intentionally and sometimes violently trying to disrupt the law and order and care little about good behavior or even trying to be restored to an in-group.

It’s not that there’s only one in-group for everybody either. Several in-groups peacefully coexisted in neighboring communities and were distinguished by any number or combination of cultural and ethnic characteristics. But they all had the overarching concept of honor and shame and could peacefully interact with other in-groups when they acted honorably and without malice. If anyone acted with malice or violence toward another in-group, the gloves were off at that point.

This is some of the cultural background that was assumed by the authors of the Bible when they wrote. We in America tend to read the Bible through our 21^st-century cultural lens and will sometimes get a little uncomfortable with the way the Bible describes a certain scenario. That’s because the scenario is set in a time and place with a completely different worldview. This Mediterranean worldview is the lens through which we should view the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

One caveat, I’m not excusing anyone’s behavior in the story. Jesus clearly expects the expert in the law to come up with the only right answer to the question he asked after Jesus finishes the story. Yet we’re somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that servants of God bypassed the wounded man in the parable.

First off in the story, we notice that the man is not identified by any ethnic or cultural features. In the story, he’s just a man. He also appears to be traveling alone. The path from Jerusalem to Jericho was a bit of a challenge, a descent of nearly 3,400 feet over 17 miles, so that’s a 200-foot change in elevation every mile through rocky terrain. Plenty of places for bandits to hide.

Priests and Levites were generally respected in that day, and they were easily recognizable as well by the garments they wore. As such, many people would have looked up to them, even those people who were not Jewish, so they would not have typically been targeted by bandits. It’s not that the bandits cared about their reputation with any one group; they just knew that the civil and legal penalties for them would have probably been a lot more severe.

For the priest and Levite, those jobs were their livelihood and gave them a certain social standing within their “in-groups.” When each of them walked by the bloodied-up man on the side of the road, their first thought wasn’t to help. There’s no indication in the story that either of them even bothered to check if the man was Jewish himself. No, their first thought was, “If this man is dead, I’m going to be unclean and not able to do my job.” They had a legalistic view of the law that they thought they could use to protect their “status” in their in-groups, but we all know by now that Jesus wasn’t interested in the legalistic interpretation.

The people hearing the story, including the expert in the law who asked the question, probably expected that would be the behavior of the priest and the Levite. But then Jesus throws a twist into the story that the expert may not have been expecting. He says a Samaritan came along and helped the man thoroughly, even using his own money to pay for his care until he could return. Now Samaritans were definitely not part of the Jews’ in-group. So when Jesus asks the expert to identify which one was the neighbor, you can imagine that the expert must have gulped a bit and tugged at his collar uncomfortably.

Since the Jews were known for walking around Samaria rather than going through it, which was the more direct route, one could say here that the priest and the Levite treated the wounded man like a Samaritan, even though they probably didn’t know if the man was a Samaritan. If the man was a Jew, then they actually violated a cultural norm that was probably considered to be on the same level with the Law.

Meanwhile, the Samaritan, who doesn’t hate the Jews as much as the Jews hate them, chose to treat the man like he would treat his own family, without concern for whether the man was Samaritan, Jew, or some other ethnic background. In other words, as the law expert correctly discerned, the Samaritan treated the man like a neighbor.

What Jesus is obviously getting at here then is that being a neighbor or showing a stranger the same level of respect as a neighbor isn’t a noun or an adjective, it’s a verb. It doesn’t matter what your background is; you’re considered a neighbor by the way you treat those you come in contact with. That doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned your primary in-group and joined the stranger’s in-group, nor does it mean you’ve adopted or supported any beliefs or customs of the stranger’s in-group contrary to your own. When you act like a neighbor, you’re not “guilty by association,” at least not from Jesus’s perspective.

In verse 29, Luke tells us the legal expert wanted to “justify himself” by asking the question. Do you suppose the legal expert accomplished that? I’m guessing not, but we’ll never know. Just because Jesus tweaked the definition of neighbor here doesn’t mean he overturned the idea of one’s own “kinship” in-group, though. The question each of us must ask, then, is the same question Mr. Rogers sang in his show: “Who are the people in YOUR neighborhood?” Not only that, but “How are you loving the people in your neighborhood?” You may have guessed by now that when I say “neighborhood,” I don’t just mean inside these four walls.

In an age where we’re personally and increasingly isolated by either technology or mobility, it’s important that we have a neighborhood to connect with so we can feel the support, love, and encouragement that comes from those associations. I pray that you might get to know a new neighbor this week and share the love of the savior with them. Peace to you. Amen.

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[1] Malina, Bruce J. Windows on the World of Jesus: Time Travel to Ancient Judea. Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 1993, p. 52.

[2] Malina, Bruce J. The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology. Revised Edition. Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 1993, pp. 82–86.

My opinions are my own, except where otherwise cited.

Scott Stocking