The lawyer was a party crasher who attempted to entrap Jesus in answering:
What is the greatest commandment (he thought he knew he answer to this one)?
Who is my neighbor (maybe he was caught off guard by this question which sort of rose out of nowhere)?
Jesus was telling the lawyer to go out of his comfort zones to find/located/define/acknowledge all who are his neighbors; that is, don't just go to the neighborhood familiar to you or the one already defined, fenced in, prescribed by others; "neighbor" doesn't just mean the person who've known all along, but the person whom you might have never known at all; that is, go into the unfamiliar territory, the space that is not your normal "Jericho road", paths you might not typically travel to discover the new neighbors of your diverse communities
Paint by Numbers: Jesus isn't giving the lawyer the same palette of colors to work with; in fact, he is telling the questioner that there are no pre-drawn lines inside which you have to paint, and the colors can be all mixed -- nothing like matching numbers with colors. Jesus is pulling a Jackson Pollack on this Paint by Number idea: go wild, go out of the expected, go out of the ordinary. Use your mixed media and be creative because in being creative, you are recognizing the God-like potential in yourself, instilled in you by our Creator God.
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