July 10, 2022
Just then a lawyer
stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal
life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read
there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your
mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given
the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
But wanting to justify
himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man
was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers,
who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by
chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on
the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw
him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came
near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and
bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his
own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he
took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him;
and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of
these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of
the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him,
“Go and do likewise.”
We have been waiting for this text. It’s one of our favorites, an old friend that some of us have heard many times before. We call it the Good Samaritan. And we admire the central character in the plot. Unlike the two religious leaders who step around a wounded man on the road to Jericho, he stops to see what he can do to help.
Ever since, we have named hospitals after him. There is a network of Samaritan counseling centers. Those who travel in RV’s are familiar with the Good Sam Club, which works to make traveling safer (and sponsors a NASCAR race at Talladega). There is a Good Samaritan mission in Danville, aiming to lift those who are down. We have Good Samaritan laws that protect anybody who stops to care for someone in need. This guy is our hero. We love him very much.
As is the case with those we love, we let them get close enough to tell us the truth. The more American Christians dig into the parable, the more truth we uncover. Some of it is so true it’s uncomfortable. Here’s a short list:
- The priests and Levites of Jesus’ day were regarded as good people. Some bad apples, of course, but most were not the moustache-twisting villains of children’s stories. They knew the Laws of Gods, knew they were summarized as Jesus states them – love God, love neighbor. Their love for God was expressed in an effort to remain pure. If the man in the ditch was bleeding, God’s commandments taught, “Stay clear from blood. It’s the life force inside us.” So we can’t dismiss those characters out of hand.
- For another thing, Jesus seems to be picking a fight. He could have named the three travelers as a priest, a Levite, and a Jew. But he says, “Samaritan.” That’s trouble. Samaritans twisted the Bible in their own direction. Samaritans were suspicious. Samaritans were enemies. Did you notice? Jesus says, “Which one acted as a neighbor?” The lawyer doesn’t say Samaritan. He can’t say Samaritan. So he mumbles about mercy.
- Dig a bit deeper, and the parable has an edge. The inference is that the Samaritan is a neighbor. We thought we could redline someone like that to another town. Push a bit more, and the story implies the enemy is the one who saves our life. Is there anybody who would dare teach such a thing? Pretty soon, we start to understand that parables like these got Jesus killed. That’s something that we don’t tell our children.
Now I’ve said all this
before in my dozen sermons on the Good Samaritan. What I haven’t really
explored is why the story gets told. There is a lawyer: not an attorney, not
somebody who went to court, not somebody who handled lawsuits. Rather, a professional
expert in the Law of God – the Torah. He knew the 613 commandments, knew what
they said and knew what they didn’t say. His life’s work was to immerse himself
in the Bible, at least the first five books of it, and then prepare to discuss
and debate what the text means.
Jesus the Jew answers his fellow Jew with a question. That’s the Jewish way of learning. Somebody asked Woody Allen, “Why do Jews always ask questions of the rabbi?” Allen answered, “Why shouldn’t the Jews ask questions of the rabbi?” So Jesus asks his questioner, “What do you read in the Law?”
The man knows the right answer: love God and love neighbor. Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. If you’re going to summarize it all, there’s no better summary. Jesus affirms this. He ought to know. In the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, someone asked Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” He answers the same, love God and love neighbor. The teachers had been stapling those two commandments together for years.
We know the truth, that John Lennon said so simply, “All you need is love.” For the Jew, as for those who follow Jesus the Jew, we love upwards, and we love sideways. Love is more than a fluttering emotion. Love works for the best interest of those you love. We can work for God’s best interest or the neighbor’s.
We know the right answer, just like the lawyer does. “Love is all you need.” He knows it. But knowing is not enough. For the conversation goes on, as we heard. The lawyer asks another question, “But who is my neighbor?” And boom! With a twinge of self-righteousness, he had just fired a missile and blew it all up. If you must ask who your neighbor is, you have already been defining whom you will love and whom you will not.
So Jesus spins this parable to address the question. He doesn’t answer it directly. He tells this story. It’s a slanted story. It presses all of us to ask whom we love. Do we love only those who are familiar, like family and friends? Do we love only those who are healthy and well-adjusted? Do we love only those who have no obvious wounds?
And perhaps to flip it for a minute, can we love those who want to offer us help? That’s one of the fresh insights that I had after our men’s group spent some time with this parable last Thursday. One of one of the guys said, “That victim in the ditch – he was a Jew, right?” We looked, and the text doesn’t say. If the victim in the ditch was a Samaritan, the priest and the Levite had one more reason not to draw near. But Jesus doesn’t designate who the victim is. So we can presume it’s a Jew.
Assuming he’s a Jew, we must assume he was deeply wounded, really out of it. A first-century Jew wouldn’t want a Samaritan to touch him, not if he was conscious. So do you hear what Jesus is doing? He’s expanding the neighborhood. Rightfully so. The lawyer asked him about gaining life, the life of eternity, the life with God.
And I don’t know much about eternal life, but I know this: it’s eternal. It has no boundaries. It has no borders. There are no ethnic divisions. No worldly categories. No human judgments about who belongs and who doesn’t belong. This is God’s life we’re talking about. To be part of that, we must see what God sees: that every single creature has meaning and value. We must love whatever and whomever God loves. Which is to say, the life of eternity does not continue the divisions, the grudges, the hurts of our ages.
Sometimes I receive a visit by somebody around here. They come to say they have a hard time forgiving another who hurt them. I listen. I invite them to blow off some steam. But if there’s an impasse, I might say, “Listen, you’d better let it go. Better get over yourself. Eternity is a long time. Start practicing now.” And the best way to practice is to start forgiving. Go and do. Show some love, even from a distance.
And Jesus shows us how. Stop your hurried journey to Jericho. Step down on level ground. Draw alongside, not above. Identify the hurts. Offer what you have to facilitate healing. Accompany the wounded to a safe location. Stay for a bit in case a new need emerges. Make sure they are cared for before slipping out the door. Stop back and follow up.
Love begins by getting off your donkey (I was going to say that another way and decided not to). Get off your donkey and put yourself out for another. That’s what love looks like.
Nobody comes to this naturally. Like the lawyer in the story, we are inclined in our own direction. So it takes a while to learn love, even longer to do it. Like the new father, so awkward that he didn’t know how to pick up his crying son and console him. Or the freshly minted math teacher who doesn’t know how to slow down a student can’t comprehend the multiplication problem. Or the in-laws who grieved at the brother’s funeral and never once checked in with widow.
Love can misfire in a hundred different ways. Could be incompetence, naivete, or self-absorption. Or emotional ineptness, hardened indifference, or good old-fashioned fear.
The miracle in the story is that someone stopped for the wounded man. Maybe he was wrong person, or maybe not. But he stopped. He showed up. He could not fix everything. He couldn’t police that terrible, lonely road from Jerusalem to Jericho, a road where a lot of travelers were attacked and robbed. He couldn’t find the robber and bring them to justice. He couldn’t chase down the priest or the Levite, even to ask, “Where’s your conscience?”
But we know what he did. He paused from his journey. The robbers might still be hiding behind a rock, so he’s risking his own vulnerability. But he stops anyway, to offer some humanity. And this, of course, is what Jesus has done for all of us – offers his own vulnerability in the fullness of his humanity.
So you want life, life with God, the life of eternity? Jesus says, “Do this and you’ll live.” For life comes from love. And doing love is the only life worth living. And it takes a while to learn this. Takes a lot of practice.
Some years ago, Robert Wuthnow, a researcher from Princeton University, was researching how some folks have learned to care for others. He talked to Jack Casey, a volunteer fireman and ambulance attendant. Casey had recently been called to the scene of an accident. The driver was pinned upside down in his pickup truck, and Jack crawled inside to try to get him out of the wreckages. The gas tank was leaking onto both Jack and his driver, and there was the imminent danger of an explosion.
The driver was distraught. “I don’t want to die,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m going to die.” Jack said, “Look, don’t worry, I’m right here with you. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay until they get your free.”
Later, after the other rescue workers had freed him and taken to the hospital, Jack stopped by to see how the driver was doing. The man took one look at Jack and said, “You’re crazy. I can’t believe you did what you did. The truck could have exploded. We’d have both been burned up.” Jack sat quietly, waited him out, and replied, “I felt like I couldn’t leave you.”
Wuthnow was curious. In the interview, he said, “Jack, can you remember a time when somebody treated you with such kindness?” He thought for a minute and recalled a moment twenty years before. Jack said, “I was just a child, and I needed to have some teeth extracted. They told me they were going to put me under with anesthesia. I was scared I would not wake up. A nurse nearby saw the fear on my face. She came over, sat down, put her hand on my arm, and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be here right beside you no matter what.”[1]
It was the same thing he said to the truck driver twenty years later. Even though he couldn’t consciously remember the story at the time, it shaped how he responded to another human being in peril. The nurse had shown him some love. He had learned how to “go and do likewise.”
So do you want to live? Really want to live? Live so deeply that it’s like you are living with God? We know the answer. Of course we know the answer. But it’s not enough to know the answer.
Jesus says, “Do this …
and live.”
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Quoted in Thomas G. Long, “Dancing
the Decalogue,” The Christian Century, 7 March 2006, p. 17. https://www.religion-online.org/article/dancing-the-decalogue-ex-201-17/
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