Who Was Their Neighbor?

What's happening

A paper this month in Nature Human Behaviour reports that American conservatives now die from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes at roughly six times the rate of liberals, a gap that didn't exist in 2008. The authors point to growing distrust of doctors and medicine.

The same map that shows the mortality gap also shows something else: rural hospitals closing, clinics shutting down, fewer doctors per person, gaps in insurance coverage.

Some of the gap is about what people chose not to do. Some of it is about what was no longer there to be done. The study leans on the first explanation. The second is sitting right beside it.

What the Text says

Jesus once told a story about a man who was beaten and left on the side of the road. Two religious people walked past him. A Samaritan, an outsider, someone the man would not normally have trusted, stopped, treated his wounds, and paid for his care. Then Jesus asked a question that turned the whole story around. He did not ask who was at fault for the man being on that road. He asked which of the three was the neighbor.

Luke 10:36-3736Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?"37He said, "He who showed mercy on him." Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

The question Jesus refused to ask is the one we keep wanting to ask first: whose fault is it. The question He did ask is the one most of us would rather skip: who showed up.

The reflection

There is a real pattern here that would be dishonest to wave away. People are losing years of life because they stopped trusting the doctors who could help them.

But another pattern sits in the same study. Many of those people never refused a doctor. They never had one. The clinic closed. The hospital was two hours away. The insurance did not cover it. When someone dies because no one was there to help, the prophets are clear that the weight does not fall on the one who died.

For someone in grief, neither reading is a comfort, and neither should be used as one. The faithful posture toward grief is presence, not diagnosis. Job's friends did their worst damage when they started explaining. The gospel does not ask why someone was on the road. It asks whether anyone stopped.