This might sound like aweird question. Why do we need to define “who is not my neighbor?” Shouldn’t wejust say that everyone is my neighbor? Shouldn’t we love everyone equally?

Most of us are lockedin areas of various degrees of reachability. People in the past could onlytravel by foot, camel, raft, or horse. We can now board buses, trains, ships,airplanes to any place we want to be. We in richer countries can use our economicadvantage to go any poorer region and live easily in those regions. If I workedfor a year in the US, that would allow me to eat 30 years-worth of prettydecent dine-out meals in Indonesia, for example. Calculations like these makeme personally convinced that we in the Western world are not going to be congratulatedmuch (if at all) for being a Christian example once we get to heaven—even if wedo have the largest impact of good over the world. Jesus himself echoes this sentiment:

Luke 21:1   Jesuslooked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the offering box, ²and he saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. ³ And hesaid, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. ⁴For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty putin all she had to live on.”

We are people who havethe greatest reach to others, in terms of our technology, economy, and language.It is most likely 1,000 times easier for us to spread the gospel to someone inIndonesia than for them to spread it to us. There are probably 1,000 times moreEnglish-speaking online preachers from the US being listened to in Indonesiathan English-speaking online preachers in Indonesia, and probably 1,000,000 timesmore than Bahasa Indonesia-speaking online preachers anywhere. So we can atleast acknowledge first that we “have” more neighbors than our neighborsthemselves, or that we can “be more of a neighbor” to more people than them(according to Jesus’ parable). We can also take into account our individual socio-economicstatus or disabilities if we feel that we are doing not that well even in arich country.

Then the only question thatremains is: are we helping our neighbors within our reach? And although we maytechnically be able to reach farther neighbors, would helping them who are faroff be more efficient than helping those who are near us right here? Our reachhas a shape. For some people who wish to be altruistic, it may make moresense for them to help in a way that benefits others who are far off. Maybethere are modern-day legal Robin Hoods who govern a system that transferswealth from one richer neighborhood to another (although there are also manymore legal authorities that transfer wealth in the opposite direction). But formost of us, the many immediate actions you can do here and now are just asmeaningful as those grand donations far off, because you could be part of thesociety that is the true facilitator of those donations. In a real sense, thepeople closer to you in reach are more a neighbor (in the passive sense) thanthose far off.

Another real reason fordefining who is and is not our neighbor is to prevent us from romanticizing helpingfarther people, congratulating ourselves for the noble, grand vision, but thennever actually doing it—at the same time that we never actually help those whoare near either. It is too easy to engulf ourselves in caring about those whoare far off (or rather, showing others that we are concerned aboutpeople who are far off), but never helping even those near at hand. This is aheavy hypocrisy in the modern world. Rampant virtue signaling. Virtue signalingisn’t bad because someone is promoting the good. It’s bad because one ispretending to do a lot, pretending to be engaged in a more significant concern,when one is actually doing very little and is engaged in a concern of lessersignificance. The problem of virtue signaling lies in the signaling: it isfalse signaling. If we want to avoid that, we need to ask (1) if we have theright priorities; and (2) whether we have even helped a neighbor within ourpower instead of a stranger without.

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