Wanting to vindicate himself,
he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
—Luke 10.29
God is universally kind,
even, Jesus says, to the ungrateful and the wicked.
God asks us to love our neighbors.
Wanting to protect ourselves, we ask:
Who are our neighbors?
Meaning, of course: Who aren’t?
In Jesus’ parable the neighbor is the stranger, the outsider.
The Hebrew Bible says in one verse to love your neighbor—
and 36 times—36 times— it says to love the stranger.
Because you yourselves are strangers, not insiders.
Don’t look for “something to love” in one who is different.
Love them.
Love is not latching on to what we have in common,
or making us alike in some way,
but honoring one who is different.
Allowing them to stay different.
Honoring their being, not their condition.
Seeing God’s image in one who is unlike you.
Because they are God’s,
who is infinite,
and whose image in us is therefore of infinite variety,
and who loves us
who are so different from God,
who is “one of us,”
and also not.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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