Loving Your Neighbour in the Age of the Algorithm

Do you know your actual neighbours? Like the ones who live near you. Their names. Whether they have kids. If they have been struggling lately.

I ask because I have been thinking about the gap between how connected we feel and how connected we actually are. Most of us have hundreds of people in our online feeds. We know what they had for dinner. We know their opinions on everything. We feel like we are in community. And yet we could not name the person two doors down.

I think Jesus would find that very interesting.

The Lawyer Question and Ours

In Luke 10, a religious lawyer asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him what the law says. The man answers correctly: love God, love your neighbour. Jesus says: do this and you will live.

But the lawyer is not satisfied. And here is the thing, I actually respect this next bit. He does not pretend he understood. He asks a follow-up question that cuts right to the heart of the matter: "And who is my neighbour?"

It is such an honest question. And it is exactly the question we are all asking, whether we admit it or not. Because loving your neighbour sounds simple until you try to figure out who that actually includes. Does it mean everyone? Surely not everyone. There have to be limits, right?

And Jesus, as He so often does, answers with a story.

The Good Samaritan in 2026

You know the parable. A man is robbed and beaten on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Two religious leaders walk past him. Then a Samaritan, who has every social and cultural reason to keep walking, stops. He tends to the man is wounds. He puts him on his own animal. He takes him to an inn and pays for his care out of his own pocket.

And Jesus asks: which of these three was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?

The answer the lawyer has to give is the one that stings: the one who had mercy.

Now here is what strikes me about this story in 2026. The Samaritan did not have a complicated framework for figuring out who deserved his help. He did not scroll through the man is social media to see if their values aligned. He did not check if the man was from the right group, the right background, the right side of the cultural divide. He just saw a person who was bleeding on the road in front of him, and he stopped.

Proximity was the whole qualification. The man was there. That was enough.

What the Algorithm Has Done to Our Neighbourhoods

Here is the problem. The digital age has handed us a remarkable technology for filtering out the people who are not like us. The algorithm learns what keeps your attention and feeds you more of it. Over time, your feed becomes a mirror. The people you see, the opinions you encounter, the news you read, all of it gradually narrows toward people who think, vote, believe, and live the way you do.

That feels comfortable. It is not a neighbourhood. It is a bubble with very smooth walls.

The person on the road in the parable was not someone the Samaritan would have chosen to follow online. They were from different worlds. They would probably have disagreed about a lot of things. But the Samaritan could not swipe past him. He was right there, bleeding, in front of him.

Physical proximity is something the algorithm cannot fully eliminate. Your actual neighbours are still there, whether your feed shows them to you or not. The colleague who seems prickly. The elderly person on your street who you suspect is lonely. The family next door going through something hard. The person at church who is different from you in ways that create friction.

These are your neighbours. And Jesus says: go and do likewise.

It Is Inconvenient. That Is the Point.

The Samaritan was on his way somewhere. He had his own plans for the day. Stopping cost him time, money, and probably some social awkwardness. The text does not say he stopped because it was convenient or because he felt a warm spiritual glow about it. It says he saw the man, felt compassion, and acted.

Love your neighbour is not love the people who fit neatly into your schedule and share your values. It is love the person who interrupts your day. The one who needs more than you feel like giving right now. The one who is harder to love than the curated, compatible people in your carefully assembled feed.

This is not me making you feel guilty about your phone. I have one too, and I spend too much time on it. This is Jesus reminding us that the Kingdom grows in the actual, physical, sometimes inconvenient space between real people. And no algorithm can substitute for that.

Online Community Is Real. It Is Also Not Enough.

I want to be fair here. Online community can be genuinely meaningful. For people who are isolated by illness, geography, disability, or circumstance, it can be a lifeline. I am not dismissing that. God uses it.

But it has a built-in limitation that we need to be honest about. You cannot show up at someone is door with a meal through a screen. You cannot sit with someone in the hospital via a comment thread. You cannot hug someone is child or mow someone is lawn or cry with someone in the same room through a video call, not quite. There are things that only happen in embodied, physical, proximate community. And we were made for those things.

The early church was famous for something that astonished the Roman world: they took care of each other and of strangers in ways that made no economic sense. They crossed every social boundary to do it. They were known by their love in a way that was visible, tangible, and impossible to explain away.

That is the tradition we are heirs to. And it starts with looking up from our screens and seeing who is in front of us.

Start With One Person

You do not have to solve the loneliness epidemic. You do not have to fix the digital world. You just have to notice one person this week who is right there, close to you, and who might need someone to stop.

That is the whole parable. One person. One road. One decision to stop instead of walk past.

Go and do likewise.