Those who’ve yet to see and feel, lean heavy on thinking. It’s a shallow game to play. The philosopher Rene’ Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am.” He was wrong.
The proud rule keeper asked Jesus to define what it means to be a neighbor*. Drawing the man outside the bounds of his law, he told him a story, which always moves from the head to the heart.
A man is robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Two men, living within the sterile container of the law, walk past the pain. It was too unsafe, too unclean. The third man walks toward it. His heart leapt out of his chest. He has been the forgotten, the broken, the cast away, the unclean. It’s no wonder that he stopped to tend to that broken man. He lives with the pain of what it’s like to be left on the side of life’s road… objectified and ignored.
His courageous and generous act of altruistic tenderness screamed into the great void, into the great cultural divide, “This sick cycle of separation, this dirty rotten system of who’s in and who’s out, ends right now. I will stand in his gap. I will be his bridge.” He stopped his life in order to join that of another. And in so doing, The Great Waterwheel of Love within his heart turned with such strength, releasing such a flow, filling those empty buckets until the healing came. There’s more than enough love to fill every one. In this grand giving theater, in this pruning of the great tree of life, this wounded healer witnessed that wild truth, born of the fruit of his shared love: I am my neighbor.
The words that were spoken between these children of God that night as they both talked about their wounds are not shared with us. But words can’t capture what the heart can hold when it leaves itself. And when you turn your heart loose, you observe the beautifully strange miracle: There is no “they.”
*Luke 10:25-37 (The Message)
Questions to wrestle with:
- When is it that your heart leaps out of you, and when is it that your heart contracts and resists?
- What unlikely “neighbor” is in need of being loved by you?
-Jim Marsh, Jr., Bread of Life Church
