Obama signs SCHIP bill.

I’ve often struggled with personal and corporate responsibility of people. In some faith traditions (Presbyterian, for example) you might confess as a congregation or in silence, but the idea is that you do so as a community, as the Body of Christ.

As people of faith, what is our responsibility if millions of children lack medical health insurance or even access to it?

I was not the person that denied health insurance to the child or her family. I was not the doctor that didn’t provide preventive care or an executive maximizing profit, or the neighbor, who hoping to respect fences, never quite made the trip next door to offer help. I am not making policy decisions that affect these children. Or am I?

Am I in some way responsible? The Parable of the Good Samaritan (see Luke 10:25-37) seems to offer a reply: Love thy neighbor, even if he’s different, strange, an outcast and not your legal responsibility. In this parable, loving thy neighbor is almost explicitly a posture of kindness, but also an actual servicing of needs.

Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Catholic theologian who famously articulated a liberation theology for Latin America, makes an insightful point:

“The parable of the Good Samaritan ends with the famous inversion which Christ makes of the original question. They asked him, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ and when everything seemed to point to the wounded man in the ditch on the side of the road, Christ asked, ‘Which of these three was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his neighbor. The neighbor…is not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.” (Essential Writings)

Signing a bill that supports children in this way is a glorious step forward–but still only a step. Will we walk the rest of the path?