I was inspired by Bruce C.’s recent post on poverty and Steve Reed’s comment on the scriptures yielding multiple interpretations.  Specifically, I was inspired to think about the parable of the Good Samaritan.

I do not reject the standard interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the point is that everyone is our “neighbor.”  I accept the authority of both tradition and the prophets.

But there is another interpretation, which actually fits the story better.

The easiest way to make that interpretation clear is to retell the Good Samaritan story.  With a few details changed such that we can read it as for the first time, without preconceptions.

A man came to the Master and said, Master, it is said that we should love and cherish our family members as ourselves.  But who then is my family member?

And Jesus, answering, said, A certain woman was an orphan from youth.  When she went to school, she fell into a student ward with many single young men.  At a ward dance, she was standing by herself.

By chance, a certain young man who was an athlete, academically gifted, and the ward’s Elder’s Quorum President wandered by her, but he did not ask her to dance.

And likewise, a young man who had many of the same interests and who shared class and ethnic characteristics with the young woman also passed her by without asking her to dance.

But a certain young man who had no particular status and perhaps nothing obvious in common with the young woman looked on her, and thought she was sweet and fair.  And went to her, and asked her to dance, and took her on dates, and made plans with her, and asked her to marry him.

Which of these three, thinkest thou, became family member to the woman?

Clearly only the latter.  In this updated form the parable is not teaching that everyone is our family member.  It is teaching that who is our family member is determined by something other than their status, rank, prestige, or shared ethnic and cultural background.  It is determined by who wants to be.

But that is also the straightforward reading of the Good Samaritan parable.  The lawyer begins by asking who is neighbor is.  The Savior tells the parable and then concludes by asking which of the three was neighbor to the injured man.  And the lawyer answers, only the Samaritan.  By implication, the other two were not.  Not everybody is our “neighbor.”  The straightforward reading of the Good Samaritan story is that we should be neighborly to people who are neighborly to us.

I love this interpretation.  It feels generous and expansive.  A duty of universal care for everybody, everywhere, is a crushing and impossible burden.  It is alien to real love.  But the idea that we may find neighbors anywhere is joyful and freeing.

In the gospel terms, we are like pioneers on the edge of the vast, virgin lands of an empty continent.  We each of us are not required or expected to settle the whole thing.  But we have the whole terrain before us.  We can make any part of it our own, as much as we can possibly handle or want.