In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
The
parable of “The Good Samaritan” may be the most well-known passage in the
entire Bible. We have hospitals, outreach organizations, and laws named after
the “Good Samaritan.” Even the great cultural icon of the 90s, the television
show Seinfeld used the image of the
Good Samaritan in its final episode. We use that moniker, “Good Samaritan,” to
denote selfless action – so people who go out of their way to help other people
are called “good Samaritans.” The moral of the story ends up being “Help those
in need.” But I’m not convinced that’s why Jesus told the story. After all,
this is a parable, not a fable with a moral to it. Furthermore, the Old
Testament is full of examples where God tells the people to help those in need.
It’s not like Jews didn’t know that they were called to take care of their
neighbors. Jesus doesn’t tell this parable as a way of saying “Be nice to
other.” So, then, why might Jesus have told this parable?
Parables
were not told to be entertaining stories, but rather to instruct us about the
Kingdom of God. It was also his parables that ultimately got Jesus killed.
Parables, if they are heard the way that Jesus told them, should have a certain
“shock value” to them. We should walk away in deep thought, seeing the world
afresh in the light of the Gospel. And because this is the point the parables,
we often need to read the parables from the underside instead of sticking with
a simple and saccharine reading of “Be nice to others.”
So
if we read this parable from the underside, we might focus on what it’s like to
be the man, or woman, in the ditch. Have you ever been in a ditch on the side
of the road? Even if not a literal ditch, we’ve all be metaphorically stuck,
beaten down by the events of life. The parable invites us to consider who are
the persons in our life that we would rather suffer than be helped by. Think
about it – if somehow you lost your job, and your savings account, and your
house, who would be the last person on earth that you would want to offer you a
room in their house to stay in? Who would make you want to sleep on the street
rather than under their roof? Jews and Samaritans had a deep and generational
hatred for each other, and part of the subversive nature of this parable is
this notion of accepting help from those whom we hate. After all, Jesus could
have left the Samaritan part out, it could have just been another traveler
without an ethnic identification that helped the man in the ditch.
One
of the things that parables do is to show us a bit what God is like. So this
parable shows that God sees us in our pain, and will come to us in order to
bind up our wounds. But the parable also says that the way that God might come
to us is through the person that we’d rather reject than accept God’s help. So
that’s the first subversive aspect to this parable that leaves us shaking our
heads – that we might have to see the grace of God, even God’s salvation for
us, in the face of the person that we hate the most.
The
parable also says something subversive about how we view consequences. Everyone
in Jerusalem knew that the road that led to Jericho was a dangerous one – that
incidents such as this one were common. It would have surprised no one to hear
that someone was mugged while traveling alone on this road. Now we don’t know
why the first two people, the priest and the Levite, passed by this man. You
may have heard that it was because touching him would have made them ritually
unclean, but that simply isn’t true based on the laws of the Old Testament,
furthermore, the laws of the Old Testament were understood to be all in the
service of loving God and neighbor. So if you have heard that interpretation of
this text, forget it. If we put ourselves in the story though, we might come up
with some ideas why we would be hesitant to help the beaten man.
It
could be trap – and the same robbers that beat him would come after us if we
stopped to help him. I don’t know about you all, but I’m really good at judging
other people. If I’m honest with myself, I probably think that if you gave me a
magic wand, I could fix a lot of the problems in this world, and I don’t think
that I’m alone in thinking that. The thing is, it’s really easy to see someone
in a situation like this and think “Well, it’s their fault that they’re in this
situation.” Well, she spends her money on booze, so it’s her fault that she’s
homeless. Well, he was a black man with a gun in his pocket, so it’s his fault
that the police shot and killed him. Well, she has anger issues and refuses to
go to counseling, so it’s her fault that she doesn’t have any friends. Well, he
wasn’t born here, so it’s his fault that he can’t get a job. He was traveling
alone on a dangerous road, he should have known better, so it’s his fault that
he’s in this situation, and I don’t want to enable his bad decision making by
helping him out. It’s a game that I’m really good at. How about you?
But
those responses to the man are focused on ourselves. Parables aren’t about us,
they’re about God. As Martin Luther King put it, the question that the priest
and the Levite asked was “What will happen to me if I help him out?” Will I get
mugged, too? Will I have to get off of my high-horse in order to stoop down and
help him? Meanwhile, the question, the holier question, that the Samaritan asks
is “What will happen to the man if I don’t help him?” It puts the focus not on
ourselves, but the other. And so that is the second way that this parable
subverts our way of thinking – it’s not the consequences of their actions that
matter, but rather the consequences of ours.
You
know what happens if you ask a bad question, right? You get a bad answer.
That’s what the lawyer does when he asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” As an
aside, attorneys get a pass on this one – the term that we have translated as
“lawyer” really is more of a “religious scholar,” so there are no lawyer jokes
here. On the surface level, the question isn’t all bad. He needs to know to
whom he should extend this religious mandate to “love your neighbor yourself.”
The problem with that question is that love has no boundaries – so it’s a nonsensical
question. The flip side of the question “Who is my neighbor?” is “Who can I
ignore?”. And since it’s a question about love, the answer is “Nobody, there is
nobody that you can ignore.”
But
Jesus doesn’t attack him for asking a bad question, instead he changes the
question. The question put to Jesus was “Who is my neighbor?” and after the parable is told, Jesus asks “Who was a neighbor?”. The original question had
an outer perspective – focusing on how we view other people. The point of this
parable is absolutely not that we should see everyone as our neighbor. That’s
certainly true: everyone is our neighbor, but that isn’t at all the point of
this parable. That’s the tame reading of the parable, not the subversive one,
and therefore, likely not the point that Jesus was trying to make.
Rather,
when Jesus says “Go and do likewise” he’s telling us what the point really is –
that we are to be the neighbor. It’s not that we’re supposed to see other
people as our neighbors, but we’re to see ourselves as the neighbor to them.
It’s a subtle shift in language, but a seismic shift in meaning. We might read
this as saying it doesn’t matter if that person is your neighbor or not, what
matters is that you are theirs. By reframing the question as “Who was the neighbor,” Jesus gives the
question an inner focus instead of an outer orientation.
When
we focus on classifying others as “neighbor” and “non-neighbor” we easily fall
into the trap of thinking the right things instead of doing the right things.
The thing is, the lawyer answered the question about what is written in the Law
correctly – love God and love neighbor. He properly understood what the
Scripture said and what was expected of him, but he didn’t understand what the
Scripture was saying to him. It’s how we have those who identify as Christian
while not acting very much like Christians. I’ll stay out of trouble and not
get any more specific than that, but you can come up with your own examples.
This is not a parable about having good intentions, saying your prayers, or
being a “nice” person. It’s a subversive parable about changing not how we see
the world, but how we interact with the world. Don’t worry about whether or not
you feel love for your neighbor, worry about showing love for your neighbor.
Don’t worry about whether or not you see that person as your neighbor, worry
about whether or not that person thinks you, based on your actions, are their
neighbor. And after the events of this week in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and St. Paul, we could all use some neighborly love. This the third subverting thing about this parable – that it isn’t
about the mental exercise of seeing others differently, but that it requires us
to live differently.
The
parable of the Good Samaritan reveals something to us about God: that God sees
us when we have been mugged by life, that God has compassion on us in our
suffering, that God is a neighbor for us who seeks to bind up our wounds. How
might you pray this week as the person lying on the side of the road? What
wounds do you want God to bandage for you or our communities? How might the Eucharist be a part of
the way that God is nursing you back to health?
As
we go forth from this place today, remember that God might come to you through
the person that you’d rather never see again. Remember that we ought to focus
on the consequences of our inaction more than on the consequences of the
actions of others. And remember that this parable isn’t about seeing others as
our neighbor as much as it is about seeing ourselves as the neighbor to them. May
this parable subvert the way we see ourselves and the world, that God might
help us to be a neighbor to all. Amen.
