And who is my neighbor? We have been saying all the time with this narrow Jewish lawyer, He is my fellow-Jew; he is akin to me—a man of my nation, and my neighborliness, diminishing with the square of the distance, vanishing altogether when he is out of sight.
Well, I tell you, this is not the Master’s, although very similar. His definition has just two definite terms, and two only—a certain man, and, to die unless someone helps him. A nameless man of a nameless land, and wholly desperate. All else is indefinite—a certain man. Was he a Jew? No answer. Was he stranger from the Perean hills beyond Jordan? No answer. Was he a merchantman from the isles of the sea returning with his Damascus purchases via Jerusalem and Joppa? No answer. Was he a good man? No answer. A man of means, or poor, with a dependent family? No answer. Was it not wrong of him to venture through so dangerous a region, and alone? No answer. Was it not foolhardy of him not to yield his goods and without a struggle? No answer.
All that enters into the Saviour’s definition is the fact that he was a man, a helpless, wounded man, and to die unless someone comes to him and ministers to his desperate need.
“Once in the flight of ages past,
There lived a man—and who was he?
Mortal howe’er thy lot be cast,
That man resembles thee.
The bounding pulse, the languid limb,
The changing spirit’s rise and fall,
We know that these were felt by him,