" Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29b). That is a good question. The common view of that day was that “neighbor” meant “cultural equivalent”: the person who looks like me, dresses like me, thinks like me. To explode that common view of neighbor, Jesus tells the now-famous story of a Samaritan — someone who is definitely not the Jew’s cultural equivalent — who showed compassion on a beaten and broken Jew, the avowed enemy of the Samaritan. That’s it! Neighbor, says Jesus, is “nigh-bor,” the person near us, the person in need. Jesus refuses to put walls around the word neighbor. No national heritage, no racial origin, no ethnic background, no barriers of class or culture can separate us from our neighbor. "

― Richard J. Foster , Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith