Who is my neighbour?
In his answer to this question, Jesus shows us what our humanity could be. This is the courage that Christ calls us to exercise: courage to serve; to serve one another and not ourselves.
When asked this question by a lawyer keen to know how he could work his way into heaven, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan: of a Jew, beaten up, ignored by his own people and cared for by his nemesis, by a Samaritan. The story is told in the stained glass window of the north transept of the church.
At the end of the story Jesus challenges the lawyer to be like the Samaritan with his final words to the lawyer being “Go and do likewise”.
Sixteen centuries later, Edward Colston took that phrase as his motto. A hundred a fifty years after his death, that window was installed in his memory. It’s the first of the major memorials to Colston in the city; and, interestingly, the records show that the idea of memorialising Colston (even back then in the 1860s) “was received coolly”
Now the four panels at the base of the window are missing and there are just two more days to enter the competition for a new design for those four windows which will
… help us remember and reconcile ourselves to our past;
… enable everyone to encounter the gospel, the good news of God in Christ;
… and promote a sense of hope in our shared future
The concept of “the global village” was first coined by a Canadian in the 1960s and gained traction for the following two decades. We are keen that these new windows capture that growing, developing, evolving, significance of the question posed by the lawyer trying to justify himself to Jesus: “Who is my neighbour?”
