One day a religious expert on Moses' law came to test Jesus' orthodoxy by asking him this question: "Teacher, what does a man need to do to live forever in heaven?"
Jesus replied, "What does Moses' law say about it?"
"It says," he replied, "that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength, and with all your mind. And you must love you neighbor just as much as you love yourself."
"Right!" Jesus told him. "Do this and you shall live!"
The man wanted to justify (his lack of love for some kind of people), so he asked, "which neighbors?"
Jesus replied with an illustration: "A Jew going on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho was attached by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes and money and beat him up and left him lying half dead beside the road.
"By chance a Jewish priest came along; and when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. A Jewish Temple-assistant walked over and looked at him lying there, but then went on.
"But a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw him, he felt deep pity. Kneeling beside him the Samartian soothed his wounds with medicine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his donkey and walked along beside him till they came to an inn, where he nursed him through the night. The next day he handed the innkeeper two twenty dollar bills and told him to take care of the man. "If his bill runs higher than that," he said," I'll pay the difference the next time I am here."
"Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the bandits' victim?"
The man replied, "The one who showed him some pity."
Then Jesus said, "Yes now go and do the same."
This story is really common, almost everyone's heard it. But what if we took this a step further and actually applied it to our lives.
I like to think that I'm pretty accepting, but often there are things revealed to me where I'm not. Where I'm more judgemental than loving, more hard hearted than I would like to have been.
Each human is a human. There's no human that is better than the other. The world blinds us into thinking that some are different, a cut above, but we're all the same. All of us have our so called, "unique," interests and hobbies, and we have our circle of people that are easy to love and our circle of people that are hard to love.
Everyone has that one person that annoys them. The Jew and the Samaritan in the story were enemies. What if we showed compassion and love not only to the people that were in our circle of acceptance, but to everyone else as well.
The world has it's way of thinking we'll find peace, but it won't happen until every person loves EVERY other person, not just he people that are easy to love.
Jesus says that everyone can love the people that they love. It's easy to love people that are your friends, what about everyone else?
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