Lectio Divina — Monday of the Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Neighbor
This week’s thread: Vineyard
1. Lectio — “And who is my neighbor?”
> “And who is my neighbor?”
— Luke 10:29
I hear the question of the scholar of the law, and I recognize something uncomfortable in it. He wants a definition. He wants a boundary. He wants to know where neighbor begins—and perhaps more importantly, where neighbor ends.
Jesus refuses to give him a boundary.
Instead, he gives him a road.
A man lies wounded. A priest passes. A Levite passes. A Samaritan stops. And suddenly “neighbor” is no longer a noun describing somebody who happens to live nearby. Neighbor becomes a verb.
“Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”
Jesus changes the question from Who is my neighbor? to To whom will I become a neighbor?
And this week, as I continue walking through the image of the vineyard, perhaps Christ is asking me another version of the same question:
Who is my neighbor in God’s vineyard?
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2. Meditatio — A neighbor at the front door
I was relaxing in my easy chair in our house at The Glenn when a neighbor came to the front door.
I couldn’t recall the neighbor’s name. In fact, before I could even make out the purpose of the visit, my neighbor suddenly flew away to other places.
This particular neighbor had feathers.
It was one of those little encounters with creation that interrupts my plans just long enough to make me look again.
I cannot speak for my bird neighbor’s life. I don’t know where it had been, where it was going, what it was searching for, or why my front door happened to become a stopping place along its journey.
But perhaps I do not need to know.
The question is not really whether the bird considers me its neighbor.
The question is whether I am learning to consider it mine.
Laudato si’ reminds me that my life rests upon three fundamental and intimately connected relationships: my relationship with God, with my neighbor, and with the earth itself. Sin fractures all three. When I attempt to occupy God’s place, I do not merely damage my relationship with God. Inevitably, I begin seeing my human neighbor as competitor or inconvenience and creation as property or resource.
Perhaps that is why the Good Samaritan matters so much.
He sees differently.
The priest sees a problem and passes.
The Levite sees a problem and passes.
The Samaritan sees a neighbor.
And maybe that is part of the conversion integral ecology requires of me: learning to see what I have previously walked past.
Yesterday I contemplated the vineyard and remembered that I am not its owner but its tenant. Today Jesus seems to expand the lesson. If this is God’s vineyard, then I don’t get to decide which creatures within it matter merely according to their usefulness to me.
The bird at my front door belongs to the vineyard too.
So does the sheep in the pasture.
So does the pollinator among the flowers.
So does the person whose politics irritate me.
So does the stranger.
So does the wounded person lying inconveniently beside the road.
And perhaps the most dangerous question I can ask is still:
“And who is my neighbor?”
because somewhere inside that question may lurk another:
Who isn’t?
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3. Oratio — Prayer of a neighbor
Lord Jesus,
You did not answer the question,
“Who is my neighbor?”
with a definition.
You answered it with mercy.
Open my eyes to the neighbors who enter the vineyard You have entrusted to me.
Forgive me when I divide Your creation too quickly into useful and useless, welcome and unwelcome, mine and theirs.
Teach me to recognize my limitations as a creature among creatures and to remember that I am neither the Creator nor the owner of the vineyard.
When a neighbor appears unexpectedly at my door, beside my road, within my family, across a fence, on a screen, or even perched for a moment outside my house, keep me from passing by.
Give me the eyes of the Samaritan.
Give me the courage to stop.
Give me the patience to care.
And then give me the humility to hear Your command:
“Go and do likewise.”
Amen.
4. Contemplatio — The hidden neighbors of the vineyard
Yesterday the vineyard led me toward the great public witnesses of human dignity. Today Magnifica humanitas points me toward something quieter.
There are people whose names will never appear in history books.
Parents getting up once more during the night. Nurses entering another hospital room. Doctors sitting down beside frightened patients. Volunteers serving people who cannot repay them. Someone remaining with an elderly person simply so that person will not be alone.
These are the martyrs of everyday life.
And perhaps they reveal what it really means to become a neighbor.
The Good Samaritan did nothing spectacular by the standards of history. He saw. He stopped. He approached. He bandaged. He carried. He paid. He promised to return.
Small verbs.
Yet the Kingdom of God seems strangely fond of small verbs.
So is a vineyard.
No grapevine produces a harvest in one magnificent gesture. It grows quietly—rooting, reaching, flowering, bearing fruit. Much of its work happens unseen.
Perhaps goodness grows the same way.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Saint Oscar Romero, Blessed Enrique Angelelli and Venerable Francis-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận reveal extraordinary forms of this neighborliness. Yet Magnifica humanitas reminds me that the same Gospel is being lived quietly every day by people who simply refuse to abandon another person.
Goodness does not happen automatically.
Neither does a vineyard tend itself.
Both require perseverance.
Both require remembering.
Both require returning after failure and beginning again.
And that brings me back to the little bird at my front door.
It arrived without announcement and departed without explanation. Yet for a moment it interrupted my comfortable chair and invited me to look outside myself.
Maybe that is one of the gifts a neighbor gives me.
My neighbor interrupts the illusion that the vineyard revolves around me.
My neighbor reminds me that I share it.
God is the owner.
I am one tenant among many.
And Christ keeps walking the roads between us, asking whether I will finally recognize who has been planted beside me.
Actio — Become the neighbor
Today I will resist asking only, “Who is my neighbor?”
Instead, when someone—or some creature—interrupts the vineyard I have planned for myself, I will ask:
“How can I become a neighbor here?”
I will make one deliberate act of neighborliness that costs me something small: a little time, attention, patience, comfort, or convenience.
Because perhaps the fruit Christ seeks from His vineyard today is not something I grow.
Perhaps it is someone I stop for.
Monday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
