Jesus uses a stereotypical format to tell the story to the lawyer, but the format would usually go – there was a priest, a Levite and an ordinary Israelite. The story jars with his hearers when Jesus makes the third character… a Samaritan. (A parallel might be of us telling a joke about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Mexican, instead of the more usual ‘Scotsman’!) In the more normal format, the focus of the story would move out in a predictable way – from a priest, to a more general classification of priest – a Levite, to a more general classification of Levite – an Israelite. If the story did this, maybe the lawyer might conclude that he needed to spread the ‘net’ of hospitality a bit wider. But Jesus goes way beyond anything he could have expected. His neighbour could be a hated foreigner. More surprising still, while the ones in the story who should be neighbourly pass by, this foreigner becomes the true, loving, self-sacrificing neighbour, entirely centred on the needs of the other person.

Leave me out of this! A teacher told this story to a class of children and then asked ‘which one was the neighbour?’ Straightaway one of the children responded ‘The innkeeper: he had to put up with a man bleeding all over his inn’. Being a neighbour can be highly inconvenient: it can be asked of us at an inconvenient time, or by the person we would least like to help, or who might ask a lot of us.

Neighbours make a neighbourhood. Notice how the innkeeper gets sucked into the story by the actions of the Samaritan. Suddenly he is faced with housing, caring for, and perhaps even subsidising, the injured, bloody man. We do not hear his reaction to this – but maybe we can imagine how we would feel if we were asked to be neighbour in this way. But of course we are, by Jesus’ challenge to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. Being a neighbour is not just a one-to-one act, but involves building or creating a network of neighbourhood.