Love Your Neighbor: Embracing Christ's Light in a Dark World

Based on Matthew 22: 34-40 and Luke 10: 25-37 In answer to a trick question asked of Jesus by a clever lawyer, Jesus gave us possibly the most well-known parable in the world. It leads us to ask the question, what does it mean to live Christianly in the dark hole of human need all around us. We don’t want to hear about the starving millions. We don’t want to see the homeless and we don’t seem to want to open our doors to refugees, who come in with their own baggage. After Jesus handled the first question without any problem, the lawyer asked a follow-up question, who is my neighbour? And in our difficult world, what does it mean to love your neighbour? What does it mean for you to be alive to God’s kind of world? An elderly rabbi once asked his students how one could recognize when the night ends and the day begins. One student raised his hand, and said, “It is when, from a great distance, you can tell a dog from a sheep.” The rabbi said, “No, that is not it.” Another student raised his hand, and said, “It is when from a great distance you can tell a date palm from a fig tree.” He said, “No. It is when you look into the face of another human being and see there your brother and your sister. Until then the night is with us. What would Christ do in the darkness of our world?