Shouldn't I love my family first, then my neighbor, community, fellow citizen in that order, and then prioritize the rest of the world?

 

RAISE-UP supports loving everyone enough to come together and commit to developing and using AI so we all can flourish.

 

Please note Father James Martin's Facebook post below responding to a similar question or statement.

 

"Actually no. This misses the entire point of Jesus's Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 25-37).

 

After Jesus tells a lawyer that you should "love your neighbor as yourself," the lawyer asks him, "And who is my neighbor?" In response, Jesus tells the story of a Jewish man who has been beaten by robbers and is lying by the side of the road. The man is helped not by those closest to him (a "priest" and a "Levite," who pass him by), but rather by a Samaritan. At the time, Jews and Samaritans would have considered one another enemies.

 

So Jesus's fundamental message is that *everyone* is your neighbor, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It's specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our "neighbors."

 

In fact, Jesus was often critical of those who would put family first. When Jesus' own family came from Nazareth to Capernaum to "seize" him, he was told that his mother and brothers were waiting outside a house in which he was preaching. Jesus said, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”... Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother" (Mt 12:46-50). For Jesus, ties to the Father were more important than family ties. And responsibilities to family clearly took second place to the demands of discipleship.

 

But Jesus's deeper point in the Parable of the Good Samaritan can only be understood from the point of view of the beaten man: our ultimate salvation depends, as it did for that man, upon those whom we consider to be the "stranger."

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