Somebody Else’s Problem (or, The Donkeys Were Never the Point)

How many donkeys do you own?

I’ll go first:

Zero.

I own, at this moment in my life, zero donkeys. I have never previously owned a donkey, and unless my life takes a very drastic and unexpected turn, I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that I will not be owning a donkey at any point in the future.

This is an important detail to stress, because I find that the Old Testament spends a significant amount of time elaborating on rules involving donkeys.

There are rules for what happens if your donkey falls into a pit (Exodus 21:33), rules for what happens if your donkey is stolen and later discovered alive (Exodus 22:4), rules for what happens if your neighbor is taking care of your donkey and it runs away (verses 10-11), rules for what happens if you think your neighbor has stolen your donkey (verse 9), rules for what happens if your neighbor’s donkey dies on your watch (verse 14), rules for what to do with your firstborn donkeys (Exodus 34:20), rules for keeping the Sabbath with your donkey (Exodus 23:12), rules about how to plow with your donkey (Deuteronomy 22:10), even rules about the kind of feelings you shouldn’t have toward donkeys that aren’t yours (Exodus 20:17).

Basically, if you are a donkey owner with a donkey-related question, the Old Testament has you covered.

But what about for the rest of us? If your donkey-owning experience is, like mine, entirely nonexistent, you might be tempted to just skim over these kinds of passages.

This is, in part, an article about why that’s a terrible idea.

It’s not really about the animal

When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he reminded them of a law from the Old Testament. “For it is written in the law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain’” (1 Corinthians 9:9). Again, at first glance, it seems this is useful only if you have an ox.

But then Paul peels back a layer and shows us what’s at the core: “Is it oxen God is concerned about? Or does He say it altogether for our sakes?” (verses 9-10, emphasis added throughout). The context shows Paul was making a point about the need to support those who preach the gospel.

The donkeys, the oxen—they’re all secondary. Hidden behind that mountain of donkey-related ordinances is a set of principles.

What we’re really looking at here are rules for conflict resolution. For learning how to be trustworthy and dependable members of a society. For understanding that our own misfortune isn’t always someone else’s fault. For recognizing and honoring God’s blessings in our lives. For setting ourselves up for success instead of failure.

God isn’t primarily concerned about donkeys.

He’s concerned about us.

He has lessons to teach us—principles for us to learn and live by.

If we skim over the donkeys, we skim over the lessons.

When the donkeys go astray

We could spend hours talking about all of those principles, but since the editorial team unanimously rejected my proposal for this to become the donkey-themed issue of Discern, I’m going to have to settle for just one:

Be the kind of person who doesn’t hesitate to help where help is needed. In a world where everyone started making the effort to help out with Somebody Else’s Problem, we would all end up with lighter loads. The somebody-else’s-problem donkey.

The book of Deuteronomy has a fairly long passage about what’s expected of us when we see a domesticated animal that’s lost or struggling:

“You shall not see your brother’s ox or his sheep going astray and ignore them. You shall take them back to your brother. And if he does not live near you and you do not know who he is, you shall bring it home to your house, and it shall stay with you until your brother seeks it. Then you shall restore it to him.

“And you shall do the same with his donkey or with his garment, or with any lost thing of your brother’s, which he loses and you find; you may not ignore it. You shall not see your brother’s donkey or his ox fallen down by the way and ignore them. You shall help him to lift them up again” (Deuteronomy 22:1-4, English Standard Version).

You may not ignore it.

It can be tempting to do that sometimes—to see an obvious problem that could be solved by someone willing to get involved, remark on what an unfortunate situation it is, and then carry on with business as normal:

“Oh, no—how terrible. Anyway, as I was saying . . .”

God expects more from us than that.

He expects us to take action. It’s not enough to just call out to anyone within earshot, “Hey, someone really ought to do something about that donkey!”

God tells us, “You do something about it.”

Not ignoring is not enough

For us, bringing back the lost donkey means helping the way we’d want to be helped if the roles were reversed.

We should still tread with care—the Bible also warns us that “he who passes by and meddles in a quarrel not his own is like one who takes a dog by the ears” (Proverbs 26:17). I’ve never personally taken a dog by the ears, but my imagination can fill in for my lack of experience on that one. This one passage about a donkey isn’t an invitation to go and stick our nose in places where it doesn’t really belong.

But it is a command to not ignore the obvious problems our brother could use some help with.

And who is our brother? The whole passage seems to set the stage for Jesus Christ’s eventual parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37). The neighbor in that parable was “he who showed mercy” on his fellow man (verse 37). In Deuteronomy, your brother can even be someone who “does not live near you and you do not know who he is” (Deuteronomy 22:2, ESV).

“Not ignoring” is only the first step. In the case of the lost donkey, we even have to be willing to take it in and care for it until the owner comes looking. Or if our brother is struggling to get his donkey back on its feet, we should be rushing to lend a hand.

What lending a hand looks like is going to vary. It might not always be safe (or we might not always have the capability) to stop and help someone change a tire. It might not always be wise to throw money at a problem that’s bigger than just finances. But the core principle behind this passage in Deuteronomy is about refusing to ignore the needs of others and then figuring out what we can do to help, even when it means going out of our way to do it.

In fact, a similar passage in Exodus expands the definition of whose donkeys we should be concerned about: “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden, and you would refrain from helping it, you shall surely help him with it” (Exodus 23:4-5).

That’s not just going out of our way to help a friend. That’s sacrificing our time and energy for someone who actively hates us.

As Jesus would later tell the disciples, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:44-45).

Helping to shoulder Somebody Else’s Problem

British satirist Douglas Adams once wrote about “people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain” (Life, the Universe and Everything). He jokingly imagined a piece of technology designed to capitalize on that predisposition. Rather than going through all the effort of turning something invisible, it would be easier just to convince people to do what they wanted to do anyway: ignore it.

He called it the “Somebody Else’s Problem field.” It would be so efficient, he said, that it could “run for over a hundred years on a single flashlight battery.”

God calls on us to do the exact opposite. When someone else’s donkey wanders into our field of view, our job is to refuse to think of it as Somebody Else’s Problem—to refuse to look somewhere else until we can’t see it anymore.

Stepping in and returning one or two wayward donkeys isn’t going to change the world, sure.

But God isn’t as concerned about the donkeys.

He’s concerned about us.

Be the kind of person who doesn’t hesitate to help where help is needed. In a world where everyone started making the effort to help out with Somebody Else’s Problem, we would all end up with lighter loads.