It is always our duty to ask ourselves whether the kind of speech we voice and the kind of rhetoric we listen to engenders respect for our neighbor, no matter how different she or he might be from ourselves, or whether it is sowing the seeds of hatred and violence.
The Good Samaritan
The parable of the Good Samaritan came as a response to the lawyer’s question, “And who is my neighbor?” The lawyer wanted Jesus to draw a circle defining who is inside, and therefore the neighbor I must love, and who is outside. Jesus, by using Leviticus 19:34, ingeniously turned the lawyer’s question on its head.
This article is a sample chapter of Marc Turnage’s, Windows into the Bible: Cultural and Historical Insights into the Bible for Modern Readers (Springfield, Mo.: Logion, 2016), which will be released at the end of March 2016.