Who Is My Neighbour? Beyond an Anthropocentric Answer ~ a sermon on Luke 10 by Jooseup Keum

Who Is My Neighbour? Beyond an Anthropocentric Answer
Luke 10:25-37
A sermon preached on Monday 14 April 2008 by Jooseop Keum

How Do You Read It?
The Parable of the Good Samaritan begins with the lawyer’s question about eternal life(v 25). However, Jesus replies to him with a hermeneutical question, how do you interpret the law of love. This reply does not allow any dualistic approach to eternal life. Rather it requires a hermeneutics of praxis. “Go and do likewise”(37ff) is Jesus’ way of interpreting the text, which is necessary for us in reading the Bible. Jesus raised a question of interpretation and also gave us a key.

At the same time, verse 37 is an answer to the question of eternal life. In the story, the robbed neighbour is not merely a person who needs our help. The poor are more than the object of our sympathy. If we read the text carefully, we have to appreciate the existence of the poor in this world because for the poor “go and do likewise” is the only way to inherit eternal life. Therefore, the poor exist for the salvation of all of us. How do you read the story of the Good Samaritan?

Who Is My Neighbour?
When I was a Sunday School boy, there was a teacher who used to teach us the story of the Good Samaritan very often. She emphasized that the Good Samaritan was neither Jewish nor a person in a higher position of the political and religious hierarchy. “He was a gentile but he knew enough about how we should love our neighbours.” She requested each of us to be a Good Samaritan in our children’s context.

Later, I and my Sunday School friends became university students and members of ecumenical youth movement in Korea. As young people who lived under the military dictatorship, our interest on the story moved from the Good Samaritan to the robbed. We asked a question, “Who is the robbed neighbour in our society?” Then we went to urban factories and rural villages to teach the workers and farmers in the night schools. However, as a matter of fact, we learnt more from them about the reality of Korean society. Furthermore, the people in the minjung communities taught us how they share their resources; how much they enjoy their own cultural richness; and how much strength and self-dignity they have, in spite of their poverty.

When these innocent Christian students, who saw for the first time the reality of people’s lives, came back from the lesson, their focus on the Good Samaritan story was altered once again. “Who are the robbers in our society?” “What kind of social system produces the victims and the exploited?” “How do we transform this robbing system?” These questions brought the students to stand on streets struggling with the robbers and the system, which justified their robbing in the name of “development”. Many of us were kicked out of the university campus by the dictator and became labourers and farmers, organizing people like the minjung who have a consciousness for the transformation of history and society. Some of us met each other in a jail. These were hard times but we were happy because we thought that we were becoming the Good Samaritan, as our Sunday School teacher had taught us.

Eventually, Korean society became democratized. We found that most of us became pastors in minjung churches. As minjung pastors, we raised the question again about the Good Samaritan. We began to think of the work of the Good Samaritan as a mission of community beyond an individual act. The minjung Christians had intended to, and became “organized Good Samaritans” for community mission and ministry. Indeed, the story of the Good Samaritan has not been only a story in the text but a living story, which transformed the lives of many young people in Korea.

Sam Bo Il Bae (Three Steps and One Bow): A Korean Interfaith Solidarity for Life
While we were on the journey to try to answer the question, “who is my neighbour,” there was a forgotten robbed neighbour. Recently, the Korean government announced a land reclamation plan in Samangeum, which is one of the largest mud flats in the world. A huge area of arable land will appear on the western coast of the Koran peninsula if the plan is successfully carried out. The government justified the plan by saying that the land will be used for agricultural purposes to support the starving North Koreans. But it’s not true.

One day, four religious leaders : from Buddhism, an indigenous religion, Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism appeared in Saemangeum. They distributed their statement, but did not talk. Then they started to walk three steps and to bow once. It was not a half bowing but a full Buddhist bowing made by kneeling, making contact with the head on the earth and stretching arms out to the front. The four religious leaders marched about four hundreds kilometers to the Parliament in Seoul doing “three steps and one bowing.” It took almost three months to reach Seoul. But, still they did not say a single word during the whole march. They just kept silent!

However, for these three months, all of Korean society was astir with the news. There were controversial arguments on issues of development and environment. Many people joined the march of Sam Bo Il Bae with tears for the asceticism of these four priests. In Samangeum, there were only four, but when they arrived in Seoul, an inter-religious group of thousands has joined the march, and were following the actions of the priests.

In the statement, the priests had said, “We hear the cries of numerous living creatures in Saemangeum every night.” “The lives in this mud flat called us to stop the wind of death in the name of development.” “Therefore, we, as priests of Korean religions, begin Sam Bo Il Bae for the repentance of all human exploitation against nature.” They declared, “The lives in this mud are alive and breathing, our neighbours as much as humanity!” This statement was a strong request for the repentance of modern humanity. It requires us to convert our way of life from emphasizing only material riches. The message of the four priests echoes that the other living creatures have the same nature and value of life from heaven as each human being. They affirmed, “the spirituality of co-existence in the network of life is the only way to heal the sin of our greed.”

These four priests read together the story of the Good Samaritan from an entirely different perspective. They approached the text beyond an anthropocentric view. They interpreted that all creation is the neighbour of humanity. In their method of protest, they chose not a struggle but Sam Bo Il Bae, which is a traditional ascetic discipline for repentance in Korean Buddhism. They expressed their message as an act of asceticism like the suffering of the lives in the mud flat. As is the way of a Roman Catholic retreat, they did not speak out in spoken language during the discipline, but prayed as a whole body for three months. This was a soundless spiritual echo to all Koreans.

Poverty, Wealth and Environment
So far, my friends and I in the minjung movement have interpreted the story of the Good Samaritan from firstly a charity, and later from a socio-political and economic perspective. However, we regarded the issue of the environment in development to be something of a luxury discourse of the rich white people. While many people were killing in the third world context because of unjust political and economic systems, talking about the environment seemed like a way to avoid the issue of justice.

However, through the contribution of the interfaith praxis by the four religious priests, we were able to read the Good Samaritan story from a holistic perspective. Issues of charity, justice, environment and spirituality have begun to be inter-connected in the reading of the Good Samaritan story in the Korean context. The question of Jesus, “who is your neighbour?” is being answered beyond an anthropocentric dimension. The notion of who is my neighbour is not merely about human relationship, but it means living in the network of life in all creation. The question is not a relative question asking about the others. Rather, it is an ontological question asking us whether we are existing among the network of life for co-existence, or in the world which justifies material success as the good. In order to closely co-exist with other creatures in God’s life-network, a sensitive spirituality is essential just as the priests listened to the silent tears of small creatures in the mud flat every night. It is necessary to experience a spiritual “re-incarnation,” which will enable us to feel a part of a whole organic creation.

Therefore, the question, “who is my neighbour” is a call for us to hear all the cries of suffering creation and humanity with sensitive ears of spirituality. It is a calling to commence a pilgrimage of the Good Samaritan, who was Jesus himself as the Suffering Servant, for life in all its fullness.