Ask a Caribbean family that has lived abroad for a generation about their first year, and sooner or later someone will tell a story about help from an unexpected direction.
It is rarely the story they expected to tell. They thought the help would come from the church, or from the cousin who sponsored them, and sometimes it did. But the story that gets retold is about someone else. The elderly Polish widow downstairs who knocked with a pot of soup when the baby was ill. The Pakistani shopkeeper who let them take groceries on credit until the first pay packet came. The Nigerian nurse on the night shift who explained how the council housing list worked. The white neighbour, gruff and unsmiling for months, who turned up with a shovel the morning the snow blocked the door.
They were not the people anyone would have picked as neighbours. They turned out to be the ones who acted like it.
A story told to a careful man
Jesus told His most famous story about neighbours to a lawyer who wanted to be precise. The man had asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, agreed that the law said to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself, and then asked a follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29, NKJV). He wanted to know where the boundary was. Who counted, and who didn’t.
Jesus answered with a story about a man beaten and left by the roadside. A priest passed by on the other side. So did a Levite. Then a Samaritan, a member of a group many of Jesus’s listeners regarded with deep suspicion, stopped, bandaged the man’s wounds, put him on his own animal, took him to an inn and paid for his care. At the end, Jesus turned the lawyer’s question around. He did not ask, “Who was the neighbour?” He asked which of the three proved a neighbour to the man in need. The lawyer could not bring himself to say “the Samaritan”. He said, “He who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus replied, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:36-37, NKJV).
Being the one in the ditch
We usually read the parable as a call to be the Samaritan. It is. But migrant families often first experience it from the other side, as the person by the road. Arriving in a new country, with the wrong clothes for the weather, no credit history, a landlord who won’t return calls and a housing system nobody explains, many Caribbean newcomers have been, in a sense, the one in need of help.
And the help did not always come from people who looked, sounded or worshipped like them. That is humbling. It can also be healing. It breaks down the easy assumption that the only people we can rely on are our own.
The turn in the story
Here is where the parable gets uncomfortable for settled families. Years later, many of those same households are now established. They own a terraced house in Croydon or a semi in Mississauga, or they have come back and built on the family land in St Mary. And new people are arriving on their streets.
In the diaspora, the newcomers might be families from West Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America or the Middle East. Back home, they may be Venezuelans, Haitians, Chinese shopkeepers, or foreign workers at a nearby hotel. They have the wrong accent, the wrong food smells, the wrong way of doing things. And it can be surprisingly easy for people who were once strangers to become the priest and the Levite, crossing to the other side of the road.
The Old Testament law saw this temptation coming. God told Israel repeatedly to love the stranger living among them, and gave a simple reason: “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34, NKJV). Memory was meant to produce mercy.
What proving a neighbour might look like
It is rarely dramatic. The Samaritan’s help was practical: first aid, transport, a place to stay, money for the bill. For our streets, the equivalent might be:
- Explaining how the rubbish collection, water supply or council services work to a family who has just moved in.
- Recommending an honest landlord, plumber or mechanic.
- Inviting the newcomers’ children to play with yours, or to the church youth group.
- Speaking up, gently but clearly, when others on the street make unkind assumptions about them.
- Being the one who knocks with soup when you hear the baby has been ill.
Paying it forward
The families who tell those stories about the Polish widow and the shopkeeper usually tell them with a kind of wonder, as if they still can’t quite believe it. That wonder is worth holding onto. It is the memory of being shown mercy by someone who owed us nothing.
Perhaps, years from now, a family newly arrived on your street will tell their own story about the neighbour they didn’t expect. It would be a fine thing if that neighbour were you.
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