Neighbourliness

One does not have to be a moral or a spiritual giant to understand that one’s objectives and priorities could stretch far beyond the narrow limit of one’s own personal well being and community.
What we need is a new idea of “neighbourliness” , different both by the myopic context described by Nietzsche “they lay lures for one another, they lure things out of one another - that they call good neighbourliness” or by the common socio-political understanding that consider the neighbor merely as socially-charged environment that people recognise closest to their life.
The parable of the Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke could be a useful and important starting point. It is a powerful reference text. Here we can find one of the most challenging idea of neighbourliness. And it is more than a reassessment of the Golden Rule (love not only God but also your neighbor): we usually understand neighbourliness as geographic, emotional, cultural nearness. So the practical translation of the Golden Rule is this: we must love those who are nearer, closer - or more like - us than those that are more distant or less like us.
The biblical perspectives on Justice seems to be radically different, it extend beyond the geographic, cultural, religious and ethnic confines of one’s neighborhood. There is a deep and dangerous fragility if we think of people in terms of fixed communities, formed by exclusive boundaries.
Jesus told the parable of the Samaritan in response to the question “who is my neighbor”. The story tell us that in the end, the neighbor of the “man who fell among thieves” was the Samaritan, not the Levite or the Priest, two kind of people whose expression of neighbourliness were bound to a shared and reciprocal proximity. But not for Jesus. The Samaritan – typically disliked and despised - become a neighbor because he took care of the man in the need. He is a new kind of neighbor because he went beyond all other conditions of neighbourliness.
The point that Jesus makes is not to offer an interesting discussion on the duty to help others in need, but he raises a powerful question regarding the definition of one’s neighbor. He asks the lawyer “who was the wounded man’s neighbor?” and the lawyer cannot avoid answering “the man who helped him”. This is Jesus’ point: the duty to neighbors is never confined only to those who live next door, or are similar to us.
It’s the event in itself – a stricken man in need – that is the platform to act justly. It does not matter whether the Samaritan was moved by charity, or symphaty, or by a sense of justice, or by a religious duty, or by a personal sense of fairness and impartiality … once he finds himself, he is new neighborhood.
Here we can find a powerful understanding of justice: the true neighbourliness must be always inclusive and constructed with courage by our relation with distant people.
This is transformative and, I guess, really cross-centered.