Br. Jamie Nelson

Luke 10:25-37

Who here remembers watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood?

For those who need a refresher, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a children’s television show that aired from 1968 to 2001. Mr. Rogers, the titular character, was a silver haired man with a gentle smile. Each episode began with him welcoming viewers into his home, then removing a businesslike suit jacket and putting on a comfortable handknit cardigan while singing the show’s theme song, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

The lyrics go like this:

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood
A beautiful day for a neighbor
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

… Please, won’t you be my neighbor?

The show’s content wasn’t overtly religious, but Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and it showed. His deep faith was the source of the show’s emphasis on kindness and community for its young audience.

The lyrics touch on questions at the heart of today’s reading from the gospel according to Luke: who is our neighbor, and how might we act as a neighbor to others.

But the reading doesn’t start talking about neighbors. Before it gets there, it starts out with a different question, posed by a scholar of religious law.

“Teacher,” the scholar said, addressing Jesus, “what must we do to inherit eternal life?”

The gospel writer tells us that the scholar is testing Jesus, using a standard question that served as a theological litmus test to determine where Jesus stood on key religious matters. Instead of answering, Jesus responded by asking the scholar to answer for himself.

The scholar quoted from the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, giving the standard response that a Torah scholar would give:

To love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.[1]

Jesus affirmed his response. By agreeing, Jesus showed that his ministry and the gospel message he proclaimed were in line with, not contrary to, the traditions of their shared faith.

But the conversation didn’t end there. Seeking to justify himself, the scholar responded with another question: “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus – as was typical – didn’t respond directly. He told a story instead: the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

It’s a parable found only in Luke’s gospel, a book which puts extra emphasis on God’s compassion, forgiveness, and mercy.[2]

The setting of the parable was the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. It’s a 17-mile walk, a winding, curving downhill journey through a narrow canyon peppered with blind curves, perfect places for bandits to take unsuspecting travelers by surprise, rob them, then quickly disappear into the hills.[3] Even until the 20^th century, robbery was common on that isolated stretch of road.[4] Jesus’s listeners would have understood the danger of the journey.

The main character is a traveler. Rather than seeking the safety of a caravan as many of his fellow travelers did, this traveler set out alone on the risky journey. Predictably, he was attacked by robbers, injured, and left for dead.

The first person who happened upon him was a priest, who, rather than helping the injured traveler, crossed the road to the other side and continued on his way. Due to religious purity laws, touching a dead body would have made him ritually unclean for seven days, so it’s possible that the priest didn’t want to risk having to miss work because he’d checked on the injured man.

The second person to walk by was a Levite. He, though not a priest, also had responsibilities in the temple, and thus was likely also keeping in mind the religious purity laws. He also crossed the road to avoid the injured man and passed by without stopping to help.

Finally, a Samaritan walked past. The Samaritan didn’t turn away from the man’s suffering, he noticed it, walked towards it, and offered the injured man compassionate care. He gave the man 1^st-century first aid with oil and wine and ensured that he’d be cared for as he recovered.

You may recall that Samaritans and Jews didn’t hold each other in high regard in Jesus’s time, to the degree that pilgrims traveling from Galilee to Jerusalem would routinely add 3-4 extra days of walking to their journey to avoid going through Samaria. Thus, Jesus’s audience may have thought the Samaritan was an unlikely hero.

Jesus asked the religious scholar to identify which of the three men had been a neighbor to the injured traveler. His answer: “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus ended by encouraging the audience to “Go and do likewise.”

It’s easy for us as listeners to imagine ourselves onto these characters. Perhaps a memory or personal story came to mind when you heard the passage proclaimed just now. If so, which character did you identify with, given your story?

Being a human is complicated. I imagine most of us have has moments where we behaved like each of the parable’s characters. Perhaps there was a time when you were able to emulate the Samaritan and act with compassion and practical care for another. But sometimes we may behave more like the priest or Levite, and our sense of duty or fear overrides our capacity to act with mercy. And then there may have been a time when you found yourself in circumstances like the traveler, lying injured on a lonely road and needing help. But Jesus gives us here a compass direction to follow.

So what message is Jesus sharing with us in this passage?

Notice that Jesus didn’t actually answer the scholar’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” He didn’t draw tidy boundary lines between neighbor and other. Jesus erased those boundary lines instead, thereby eliminating the category of “other” altogether. In God’s kingdom, Jesus revealed, we are all neighbors to one another.

So how can we be a neighbor to others? Here are several possibilities:

One way is to pray with the front page news. There’s a quote attributed to 20^th-century theologian Karl Barth: “We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” Stay informed about the suffering of our neighbors across the globe, across this continent, and in our own cities. Pray for them, let this shape your compassion.

A little closer to home, you might pray as you walk around your neighborhood. Yes, Jesus wants us to remember than our neighbors are not just the people whose lives are visible to us, but also, we can strengthen our neighborly muscles by remembering them before God.

You might also use the parable as a format for praying an examen. For instance, you could ask yourself:

• When have I been the one lying wounded, needing help?
• Who have I judged as “other” and failed to love?
• Who has been a Good Samaritan to me?
• How is Jesus inviting me to love differently?

On television, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood offered a visible parable of neighborliness to viewers.

When the show began, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had recently been passed, making the racial segregation of public facilities illegal in the United States. But segregation was still in effect in many places. And in places where segregation wasn’t an official policy, many public swimming pools were unofficially Whites-Only due to both interpersonal and structural forms of racism.[5]

On the May 9, 1969 episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons, the character played by African American actor François Clemmons, to cool off on a hot day by joining Mr. Rogers in submerging his feet in a wading pool.[6] And so he did, and there the two men sat, one Black and white, sharing the pool in neighborly companionship.

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood
A beautiful day for a neighbor
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

… Please, won’t you be my neighbor?

Officer Clemmons and Mr. Rogers showed us how to be neighbors.

May we go and do likewise.

[1] These verses come from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.

[2] Ottati, Douglas F. “Luke 10: 25-37 – Theological Perspective.” Essay. In Feasting on the Gospels–Luke, Vol. 2, 296–296. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015. Take, for example, the story of the prodigal son, another story found only in Luke. There too, Jesus offers a story that demonstrates the extravagance of God’s mercy.

[3] Peterson, Eugene. Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers, p.41. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

[4] Barclay, William. The Gospel of Luke, p.165. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1977.

[5] The impacts of swimming pool segregation continue to the present. A study completed earlier this year found that over 60% of African American children have not learned to swim: https://www.usaswimming.org/news/2025/02/24/deep-dive–a-look-back-on-the-desegregation-of-pools-in-america Related, African American children between ages 5-14 are 3x more likely to drown than white children in the same age group: https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/health-equity/index.html

[6] A fuller treatment of the episode can be found here: https://www.biography.com/actors/mister-rogers-officer-clemmons-pool