Andy Ogram

Actually no. This misses the point of Jesus's Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 25-37). After Jesus tells a lawyer that you should "love your neighbor as yourself," the lawyer asks him, "And who is my neighbor?" In response, Jesus tells the story of a Jewish man who has been beaten by robbers and is lying by the side of the road. The man is helped not by those closest to him (a "priest" and a "Levite"), but rather by a Samaritan. At the time, Jews and Samaritans would have considered one another enemies. So Jesus's fundamental message is that *everyone* is your neighbor, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It's specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our "neighbors." But Jesus's deeper point can only be understood from the point of view of the beaten man: our ultimate salvation depends, as it did for that man, upon those whom we often consider to be the "stranger."