Hank's Bible Study Resources

We’ve been holding up the offenses of Jesus like a mirror, watching the most Scripture-soaked men who ever lived look him full in the face and call him a heretic. Every time, the reason was the same. He kept walking straight through the fences they’d built, and he never once apologized for it. This post is about the fences that decide who belongs. Because Jesus had a habit of handing the front-row seat to the very people the system had sent to the back.

The Scene

A lawyer stands up to test Jesus and asks the question that decides eternity. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus turns it back on him, and the man answers well. Love God, love your neighbor. Then he asks the follow-up that gives him away. “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29, NKJV).

Watch what Jesus does with that question. He doesn’t define the neighbor. He tells a story about a man beaten and bleeding in a ditch on the Jericho road. A priest passes by. A Levite passes by. Both of them clergy, both of them men who knew the Law cold, both of them crossing to the far side of the road to keep their distance. And then the hero comes. A Samaritan.

Sit with that word the way the lawyer had to. Not a Samaritan bystander. The Samaritan is the good one. He’s the one who stops, who bandages, who pays. Jesus made the enemy the example.

And it wasn’t a one-time thing. A Roman centurion, an officer of the occupying army, comes asking for his servant’s healing, and Jesus says out loud, in front of the crowd, “I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!” (Matthew 8:10). A Samaritan woman meets him at a well at noon, and he asks her for a drink and then hands her the clearest statement about worship in all four Gospels. The disciples come back and find him talking theology with her, and John tells us “they marveled that He talked with a woman” (John 4:27). Marveled. It broke their categories to watch it happen.

The Offense

To understand why this landed as heresy, you have to understand that first-century Judaism ran on a map of who was in and who was out, and that map felt like faithfulness. It wasn’t cruelty for its own sake. Centuries of exile and pagan pressure had taught them that the boundary was survival. Keep separate, stay holy, don’t let the nations dissolve you. The Samaritans were the ancient wound of that story, a mixed people with a rival temple and a bent version of the faith. A rabbi had a saying, that eating the bread of a Samaritan was like eating swine’s flesh. The centurion was worse, a Gentile and a soldier of Rome’s boot.

So when Jesus makes a Samaritan righteous and a Roman a model of faith, he isn’t just being kind to outsiders. He’s pulling up the fence posts. He’s saying the map you’ve been reading your whole life has the wrong people on the wrong side. To men whose entire identity was built on being the chosen inside the line, that’s not generosity. That’s demolition.

Look at the word underneath the lawyer’s question.

The word simply means the one who is near you. It comes from an adverb for nearness, for proximity. And that’s the trap the lawyer walked into. He wanted plēsion to have an edge, a border where neighbor ends and stranger begins. Who counts? How far out does the obligation run? He wanted a definition he could stand inside of, with people he was allowed to pass by.

Jesus took the word and blew the walls out. He never answers “who is my neighbor.” He changes the question entirely. At the end he asks, “which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?” (Luke 10:36). Do you see the shift? The lawyer asked who qualifies to receive my love. Jesus asked who I am willing to become. Neighbor stopped being a category you screen people into. It became a verb, a thing you do to the bleeding man in front of you, whoever he is.

The Mirror

Now the mirror, and we aim it at ourselves. Not at some other congregation across town. Us.

We don’t have Samaritans and Gentiles. We have our own lines, and they’re quieter and more respectable, which makes them harder to see. We have the family that always sat on that pew and the family that showed up looking a little rough. We have the people who vote the way the room votes and the people who don’t. We have the ones who know how to talk in the fellowship-hall dialect and the ones who ask the wrong questions too loudly. Every church, given enough time, sorts itself. It decides who the real members are and who’s just around. Nobody votes on it. It settles in like dust.

Here’s the honest part. The priest and the Levite weren’t villains. They were busy, respectable men with real reasons to keep moving. Temple duty, ritual purity, a schedule. And that’s exactly how we do it. We don’t stand at the door turning people away. We just cross to the other side of the road with a good reason in our mouths. We build the in-group by a thousand small avoidances, and we tell ourselves the whole time that we’re being faithful, the way they told themselves they were staying holy. The rut here is a church that has quietly decided its own boundary is the same thing as God’s, and stopped noticing the man in the ditch because he doesn’t look like our kind of neighbor.

The Invitation

So here is the turn, and I want to make it warm, because this one cuts close for all of us. If you’ve ever sat in a room full of believers and felt like you were on the outside of some line you couldn’t name, hear this. Jesus built his whole ministry out of walking across that line to get to people like you. The Samaritan woman went from an outsider at a noon well to the first evangelist in Samaria. The centurion, a man with no claim on the covenant at all, got words from Jesus that no insider got. There is no line the cross respects. Christ died for the whole world while we were still on the far side of it, still enemies, and the fence came down at Golgotha, “having broken down the middle wall of separation” (Ephesians 2:14).

And if you’re one of the ones who’s comfortable inside, the way I am more often than I’d like to admit, then the invitation is harder and better. Stop asking who qualifies. That was the lawyer’s question, and it’s the wrong one. Go find out who’s near you, the person actually in front of you this week, the one it would be easiest to cross the road to avoid, and be a neighbor to him. Not because he earned a place inside your line. Because Jesus never drew the line where you did.

This church needs a scandal. It needs to start letting the wrong people in, and finding out they were never the wrong people at all.