The attacks in Paris and the millions of Syrian refugees have caused a lot of soul searching on social media (which may not be the best place to search your soul, anyway). Some people don’t have a lot of problem making a decision, such as the man who said that he “didn’t suffer from the moral ambiguity” that caused people to wrestle with what our response should be. His opinion was that any number of their lives didn’t equate to the life of a single US serviceman.

Somehow, I couldn’t see that his opinion even rose to the level of moral ambiguity. To me the wholesale weighting of lives—one kind of life is more valuable than another—is immoral.

Another poster pulled a verse from 1 Timothy out of context (But if anyone does not provide for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.) If he had dropped down a few verses, he would have found one that said "take a little wine for your stomach..."

However, there are others, some of whom I know to be serious and practicing Christians who are trying to find the Christian balance between compassion and safety. Sometimes they resort to analogy: would you feed grapes to your child if you knew that one percent of them were poisoned, or would you encourage your daughter to pick up hitchhikers. So far, all of the analogies I’ve seen were seriously flawed, usually because they only dealt with the “fear” side. Nobody was particularly concerned with the fate of the grape or the hitchhiker.

For Christians, there’s another story that should give us some insight into WWJD. It’s the story of the Good Samaritan. Everybody knows the story; it’s a Sunday School staple. A lawyer asks Jesus how to have eternal life. And Jesus answers his question with a question: What is written in the law? How do you read it?

The lawyer responds that the law says he should love God and love his neighbor as himself.

Then the lawyer has a lawyerly question: Who is my neighbor?

Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan.  The elevator pitch for the story is simple: A man, traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho is mugged and left in a ditch. A couple of religious officials see him and keep walking. A Samaritan rescues him. However, it goes a lot deeper than the plot outline suggests.

Everyone in the crowd listening to Jesus already knew what the Jews thought of the Samaritans. When the Northern Kingdom fell in the 8^th century BC, much of the population was deported. Others were brought in to replace them. So the Samaritans, once as Jewish as the people Jesus was talking to, were mixed blood. To the Jew, the Samaritans were inferior in blood line and in religion. Forget about a Jew crossing the street to avoid Samaritans; they walked around an entire country. The Jews expected nothing good of Samaritans.

And there were the professional religious people. Jesus gives them no slack at all; he says they saw him and crossed the road, leaving their bleeding, naked kinsman in the ditch. Then, the Samaritan comes along. He sees the Jew, cleans and bandages his wounds, and takes him to an inn. He give the innkeeper the equivalent of a couple of days’ wages and told him to do what he had to. The Samaritan would take care it when he came back.

Most of the time when we study the story of the Good Samaritan we concentrate on the difference between those who profess religion—the Priest and the Levite—and those who practice it. I’ve never heard anyone go into what to me is the most interesting question: why did Jesus, talking to a congregation of Jews, choose to make the Samaritan the hero. Wouldn’t the story about helping your neighbor been just as effective if it had been a Samaritan in the ditch, and a Jew came along and saved him?

I don’t know why it’s the Good Samaritan rather than the Good Jew, but I have a theory. Just as the Jews despised and looked down on the Samaritans, the Samaritans, logically enough, despised the Jews. If the hero had been a Jew, the congregation could have gathered their self-righteousness around them, convinced themselves that they wouldn’t be like the priest or the Levite and gone on their way.

However, Jesus didn’t let them off the hook. He said to the lawyer, “Which of the three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers.”

I can imagine that the lawyer almost choked on the answer: The one who had mercy on him. He probably couldn’t bring himself to simply say, “The Samaritan.”

Jesus told the lawyer to go and do likewise. It’s not reported whether he did nor not.

So we have the answer to the question, “How good was the Good Samaritan?” The answer is that he’s better than we are if weigh the value of life and find others’ less valuable than our own, than we are if we can ignore the needs of others because we’ve determined that their religion is not as authentic as our own, than we are if we interpret “providing for our families” to mean failing to help the helpless. This is “not in my back yard” writ extremely large.

If we are going to be Christians—followers of Christ, living in imitation of Christ—we are commanded to go and do likewise. To me that means that we have to save others, whether we like them or not. I realize that we can’t simply open our borders, but nobody is suggesting that. We currently have a vetting process in place that takes two years. Congress is sending a bill to the president with a provision that would make the vetting process take essentially an eternity. Maybe more.

It is possible that some small percentage of terrorists will be admitted with the refugees. There’s a greater possibility that terrorists will enter the country flying coach and passing through customs. The requirements are much more stringent for refugees than for tourists.

Then a purely practical question: Which action will most likely increase our witness, opening the door, however cautiously, or simply slamming it in their face?