The Good Samaritan

Luke 10, 25-37                                                                                          Proper 10

11 July 2010

Years ago my father worked for a company which occasionally sent him to trade shows in Chicago.  He was a small town man and enjoyed seeing the big city.  On one of these occasions he went out for a stroll and then took a bus and ended up in the wrong place.  In fact, when dark was coming on, he realized he was on the far south side and was waiting for a bus to come along to take him back toward the center of the city.  At that point a cop pulled up and with the customary delicacy of the Chicago police, the man said to my father, “What, are you crazy, being out here by yourself at night?  Do you want to get yourself killed?”  And with that he called a cab for my dad and waited until he was safely inside.

I suppose it was a stroke of luck that my father did not end up like the poor man in our parable this morning, beaten and left half dead on the side of the road.  But before we cast the Chicago policeman in the role of the Good Samaritan, let’s stand back and see if we are approaching this story in the right way.  There are a couple of issues that we have to settle in our minds before this parable speaks to us the way Jesus intended it.  It is very well-known and whenever one of Jesus’ sayings is well-known, we have to take precautions lest we accept some kind of domesticated version that misses the original point. 

The place to start is with the lawyer who asked the original question of Jesus.  When he gave his summary of the law and then went on to ask about his neighbor, what was he doing?  It seems odd to me that he thought he understood how to love God with all his heart.  It seems he assumed that as a teacher of the law, we was a good keeper of the rules: what else could loving God be about?  Instead, he wanted to know about the neighbor.  We can see from the kind of story Jesus told that his question was a question of boundaries.  That is, if I am obligated by the law to care for my neighbor, how far does that command go?  Where can I draw the line?  And then Jesus told a story that asked a different question and to understand the question we must make sure we are identifying with the right character in the story. 

We are, I believe, to see ourselves as the man who was beaten and lying on the side of the road.  His neighbors, technically speaking, fellow countrymen and religious comrades, were the ones who avoided coming to his aid.  His worst nightmare was what actually happened to him: a man he never would have said “Hello” to when he was in a normal healthy condition, was the one who assisted him when he was so weak he needed whomever would help him.  So we need to decide as we listen to this, “Who is the one person, or kind of person, in the whole world that I would most hate to have help me out when I was absolutely desperate for assistance?” 

Many of us don’t like to ask for help in any case, even when we need it.  Yet, most of us would be willing to ask for help from a good friend, a good neighbor, or a fellow-member of the Church, if we were in a serious difficulty.  But many of us would be hard-pressed to swallow our pride and ask the help of a person who belonged to a member of a group of people that we had no time for or held in contempt.  Maybe for you there is no such group.  That would be a wonderful thing.  For the man who asked the original question, however, there were many groups about whom nothing good could be said, who were considered as being beneath contempt.  For example, there were the Samaritans.  They were heretics, of an impure race, of an alien though similar culture, and from a corrupt country.  The better sort of people simply avoided even speaking to them, not having the ability to eliminate them all.  To be in a situation in which you would need the assistance of such a person and be willing to accept it, was to suffer a humiliation that was almost as bad as dying. 

We human beings seem to reserve our greatest dislike for ethnic groups that are different from us.  For a long time prejudice was directed towards blacks—and sometimes still is—and before them native Americans.  My wife says that when she was growing up in the mining country of Montana, there were still signs in the bars in town which read “No Irish or Indians.”  Irish and Italians both had a hard time in this country.  Other people couldn’t abide Jews.  Now the hated persons are illegal aliens or immigrants in general, or perhaps Muslim immigrants in particular.  Perhaps it is the gay or lesbian person that attracts one’s anger.  The list goes on and on.  Now imagine, says Jesus, that you are a helpless, wounded person on the side of the road and the very person in the whole world that you most cannot abide comes along, recognizes you as a person who hates him, and still helps you. 

So when Jesus finally gets to the end of the story and says, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” You can just see the teacher of the law speaking through clenched teeth, saying, “The one who showed him mercy.”  And then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” 

What does that mean?  It means that loving your neighbor as yourself is to go outside normal boundaries of race and class and culture.  It means to be aware of the outsider, the one whom others, and maybe even you, don’t like very much, and to be a neighbor to them.  It means not to worry about who is in and who is out, who is liked and who is disliked, who is acceptable and who is not acceptable—whether those you think of as your friends would approve of them or not.  This is just an application of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

How can a person live like that?  It is not the normal way that folks behave, as we can see from looking around us.  As Jesus was trying to show the person who asked the question in today’s Gospel, it takes a change of heart.  You have to let Jesus change you and open up your heart to others, open up your heart to loving others as God loves them, by opening up your heart to Jesus.  This is what it means to be alive in the Kingdom of God.  In the new age, when our Lord returns and when this world is made anew, there will be no distinctions between persons that give some greater value than others.  There will be no point to helping your friends and hurting your enemies—for there will be no difference between people that corresponds to this way of thinking.  Those who follow Jesus now have been offered the opportunity to anticipate this new age and so show to others what life is going to be like in the new world, by living it in the present.