Gospel Commentary: Who Is My Neighbor?

By Fr. John De Celles
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 7/8/04)

Today’s Gospel text gives us the famous commandment: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." But, as it did 2,000 years ago, this commandment still begs the question: "Who is my neighbor?"

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand who our neighbor is. It is easy to see the family down the block or the guy sitting at the next desk as our neighbor. But others are not so easy to recognize: it’s harder to see a poor person or a person living half a world away as our neighbor. Yet most people would agree that these are, in fact, some of the neighbors that Jesus is talking about.

For many, however, it seems impossible to recognize their neighbor in human beings who can neither speak for themselves nor somehow elicit our sympathy. I’m thinking particularly about the human beings who have not yet been born, especially the tiny ones referred to as "embryos" and "fetuses."

One of the problems is that our understanding of our neighbor is often determined by emotions. So our neighbor is the person next door or the poor because we feel something toward them.

But emotions can be terribly misleading. For example, the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany largely grew out of the frenzied emotions of the people — fear, bitterness and hatred — as has most racial prejudice, even in our own country.

This reminds us that we cannot afford to be governed by emotion. We must instead be governed by reason and the truth. And the truth is that my neighbor is every single human being that God sends to me for help. So, 2,000 years ago, the samaritan was the neighbor of the Jew, and 60 years ago the Jew was the neighbor of the Nazi. And today people of every religion and race are "my neighbor." The person next door and the person half a world away are my neighbor. And the old person in the nursing home and the embryonic baby in the womb or in a test tube are my neighbor.

Many people today, however, advocate the killing of these tiniest and most vulnerable of our neighbors, making strong appeals to our emotions. In the case of embryonic stem cell research, they poignantly point to the potential for saving lives of sick children, but ignore the fact that adult stem cells have similar potential without the downside of taking the lives of embryonic children. Recently, as we mourn the death of Ronald Reagan, they have been pointing to the "potential" for a cure for Alzheimer’s, but ignore the fact that researchers say there is no indication of that, and that there are many more promising lines of research.

In the case of abortion, they repeatedly appeal to the extremely emotional cases of rape and incest, but ignore the fact that these cases represent less than 1 percent of all abortions. They appeal to the patriotism of Americans by talking about the "freedom to choose," but ignore the freedom to choose to refrain before conception.

And in both cases they point to the minuscule embryo and tell us it is not a human being because it doesn’t "look" like a cute little baby. They ignore the fact that 90 year olds don’t look like cute little babies either, yet have the same human DNA that makes embryos grow into those babies, and those babies grow into 90 year olds.

Sometimes our emotions cause us to not recognize our neighbor. But emotions don’t bind the conscience — the truth does. "You shall love … your neighbor as yourself."

Fr. De Celles is parochial vicar at St. Michael Church in Annandale.

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