Scripture Reading: Genesis 4:8–10; Luke 10:25–37; Matthew 25:34–40; Galatians 6:2; Revelation 7:9–10
Perhaps one of the most dangerous questions ever spoken by a human being appears near the beginning of the Bible. After Cain murdered Abel, God asked where his brother was. Cain answered, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Humanity had barely begun, yet already we were asking how little responsibility we could have for one another.
Thousands of years later, a lawyer approached Jesus with essentially the same question, dressed in more respectable language: “And who is my neighbour?” He wanted a boundary. Surely love could not include everyone. Surely there were people beyond his responsibility.
Jesus answered with a wounded man lying beside a road.
A priest saw him and passed by. A Levite saw him and kept walking. Then came a Samaritan—a man belonging to a people despised by many Jews of that time. He stopped. He touched the wounds. He lifted the stranger onto his own animal, carried him to safety, and paid for his care.
Jesus had quietly destroyed the boundary.
Your neighbor is not merely the person who resembles you. Your neighbor is the person whose suffering God has allowed you to see.
That truth becomes uncomfortable when we realize how much suffering passes before our eyes every day. We live in a world capable of showing us another person’s hunger, loneliness, grief, war, poverty, or despair almost instantly. Yet constant exposure can make the heart strangely numb. We begin seeing people as crowds, statistics, categories, nations, arguments, even inconveniences.
Jesus never saw crowds that way.
He saw people.
Then He said something breathtaking: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
Suddenly the person before us becomes sacred territory.
What if the lonely person you nearly ignored was an opportunity to sit beside Christ? What if the hungry person was not an interruption but an encounter? What if someone around you is silently asking God to send help, and your name is part of heaven’s answer?
We spend considerable time asking God what His plan is for our lives. Perhaps sometimes His plan has a face.
Perhaps it is sitting across the table.
Perhaps it lives next door.
Perhaps it appears on your screen.
Perhaps it is someone you have already decided is too different from you.
Revelation gives us the final picture: a multitude “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” standing together before the Lamb. The divisions we protect so fiercely here will not define the kingdom there.
So look carefully at the empty chair beside you.
Someone may eventually sit there whose story you do not know, whose wounds you cannot see, and whose life may change because of something as simple as your willingness to notice.
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