O Merciful One, teach us what it means to see mercy
☩ in the name of
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Shakespeare
wrote in Romeo and Juliet that “A
rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” While that logic makes sense
on one level, it also completely underestimates the power of language. Names
matter; and we run into that when we consider the parable in today’s Gospel passage
from Luke.
The
name that it usually goes by is “The Parable of the Good Samaritan,” but to use
that name is to interpret it before we’ve even considered it. Using that name
focuses our attention on a particular character, who may or may not actually be
the person we’re supposed to be paying attention to. This parable is, perhaps,
the most well-known of all the parables and especially so when we consider the “Good
Samaritan” moniker. Charities and hospitals use that name to describe their
work. President George W. Bush famously referred to this story in his inaugural
address and the best television show of all time, Seinfeld, based the plot of its final episode around a “Good
Samaritan” law. But when we put a label on this parable, it lulls us into the
trap of thinking we know what it’s all about.
Instead
of reading this as a parable about a particular character, I want to follow the
logic of the way Luke presents it. I can’t stand doing this, but have you ever
read the final chapter of a book before the beginning? Well, that’s what I’d
suggest for approaching this parable. At the very end of the story, Jesus asks
the lawyer “Who was the neighbor?” and the lawyer responds, “The one who showed
mercy.” Jesus then commissions him, and us, to “Go and do likewise.” If we skip
to the end, we see that this is a parable about mercy.
Mercy
is a word that means a lot of things. In the Bible, there are many words that
are translated into our English word “mercy.” Mercy can be understood as love,
as steadfastness, as a womb, connoting nurture, as compassion, as graciousness,
as pity, as giving up your power over someone. The dictionary says the mercy is
about showing compassion, forgiveness, or aid to someone whom you could punish,
harm, or ignore. Synonyms include leniency, clemency, charity, kindness, and beneficence.
Throughout the Bible, God is described as being merciful and mercy is commended
to us as Godly behavior. Sadly, no one can look at our society right now and
with any sense of sincerity claim that we are a merciful people. Rather, we are
merciless. You don’t need me to list off the examples of this – you can turn
the news on for just a few minutes and see it for yourself.
As
a people, we need to be reminded of the Biblical virtue of mercy. And if we
start there, we can then look to this parable to learn something about mercy.
The way Jesus tells the parable, there are three people who see a man who is
beaten, robbed, and left for dead on the side of the road. As a word of
caution, Jesus doesn’t tell us why the priest and the Levite don’t offer assistance,
and we would do well not to guess. This parable has a sad and long history of
anti-Semitic interpretations that come from assigning motivations that aren’t
in the text. The first thing to learn about mercy is found in the subtle
difference in the actions of the first two passersby and the third. The first
two see the man and continue along, but Luke tells us that the Samaritan saw
him and “came near him.” Mercy is about coming near.
As
we’ve all experienced, what softens our hearts, makes us change our minds, and
see things differently are experiences. Whether it be images of pitiful looking
dogs being shown to a soundtrack by Sarah McLachlan or soul-crushing photos of
migrant children lying face down in the water, whether they be in Turkey or
Mexico, we are stirred to feeling mercy when we come close. Even if it’s just a
visual image, as soon as suffering is no longer an abstraction but something
that we actually see, the shift towards mercy begins. And isn’t this the story
of our own salvation, when God showed us mercy? God came near to us in Jesus.
So
if we are to reclaim the Biblical vision of mercy in our society, we need to
get closer to people. It’s so easy to live in isolation from each other.
Poverty is usually clustered in certain parts of town, parts that most of us
never have to enter. So a part of mercy is not just seeing people from a
distance, as the priest and Levite did, but mercy is about drawing near. But
the other side of that coin is that mercy includes letting people get close to
you. When someone asks us “How are you doing,” we instinctively reply “Good.” Maybe
that was true for a few seconds once, but normally, it’s not. We all are
carrying burdens, burdens of worrying about children, or parents, or jobs, or
diagnoses, or conflict, or the environment, or depression, or addiction, or loneliness.
How often do we let people see these burdens? In one of his letters, St. Paul
tells us to “bear one another’s burdens.” But if we are obsessed with keeping
up appearances and pretending that “everything’s okay,” we’re actually working
against mercy because we’re denying the possibility that we need anyone to show
us mercy. Mercy is about vulnerability, both in coming near to those in need
and in letting others come near to us.
Next,
Jesus mentions that the Samaritan is “moved with pity.” The word in the Greek
of Luke is more visceral than that, it means something like “he felt it in his
guts.” Mercy is about paying attention to your feelings, not your thoughts. The
way the parable is told, it is meant to be assumed that the beaten man is
Jewish. Jews and Samaritans hated each other – think a Palestinian freedom fighter
and an Israeli soldier or an NAACP member and a Confederate flag waving
Klansman. Had this Samaritan stayed with his thoughts and biases, he would have
walked right past this Jewish man in need. But he paid attention to what he
felt in his gut.
We
are told in Scripture that the place where we often feel the movements of the Holy
Spirit is in our guts. You’ve heard of orthodoxy (thinking the right things)
and perhaps orthopraxy (doing the right things), but mercy is about orthopathy –
feeling the right things. So often though we don’t pay attention to these holy
feelings. We hear someone on the other side make a good point and we dismiss it
because we can’t bring ourselves to admit it. Or, more often than not, we’re
just too busy and distracted to pay attention to our feelings. When you feel a
stirring in your gut, it can be far easier to dismiss it as hunger or
indigestion, but it could just as easily be the Holy Spirit stirring mercy in
you. Slow down, pay attention to your feelings, pay attention to your gut.
Having
drawn near and paid attention to the stirrings of God in his gut, the Samaritan
then acts, reminding us that mercy is not an emotion but an action. And it is a
particular type of action in which we see mercy – it is generous and
self-giving action. The Samaritan took care of the man’s immediate needs by
bandaging his wounds, but he also gives the man his own animal to ride on,
meaning that he’d have to walk the rest of his journey, and then he gives two
coins, representing two days’ worth of wages, to care for the man at an inn. When
we think about the mercy shown to us by God in Christ, it’s the very same –
Jesus gives all of himself to save us, and that is what mercy is all about.
Sometimes you’ll hear “compassion” used instead of mercy, and compassion
literally means “to suffer with.” Mercy is about getting down into the ditch
and giving of yourself both to address immediate needs and long-term concerns.
The
danger in the parable is that if we keep the title “The Good Samaritan,” we
might read it as three easy steps to showing mercy – drawing near, paying
attention to your gut, and giving generously. That’s just moralism. If the
point of this story was to get people to be kind, then Jesus would have just said
“be kind.” And certainly, we don’t need a crucified Messiah to show us a lesson
that is found throughout the Jewish Scriptures. Parables are stories that Jesus
told to teach people about God, and so if we turn this into a story about the
Samaritan, then we end up thinking we’re just supposed to follow his example.
But that isn’t shocking, that isn’t radical, that isn’t difficult – and the
parables are always shocking, radical, and challenging.
The
problem with calling this parable “The Good Samaritan” is that it isn’t really
a parable about the Samaritan, it’s a parable about the half-dead man lying on
the road. Doesn’t quite work as well as a name for a hospital, but it helps us
to see the parable more clearly.
The
reason why Jesus told this parable was to counter this lawyer who was trying to
test him. The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” But you’ll notice Jesus never
answers that question. It’s not the right question to be asking, and so Jesus
ignores it. Instead, Jesus shifts the question to “Who was a neighbor?” The man
was asking a question in terms of objects and status; he wanted to know who he
had to treat as a neighbor and who he didn’t. But Jesus offers a parable not
about objects, but subjects; not about titles, but actions. It’s a parable
about recognizing when people have been a neighbor to you.
Imagine
that you’re at the end of your rope – your world is falling apart and you
desperately need someone to help you out. Who is that person that you’d rather continue
in your suffering than accept help from them? Maybe an estranged family member,
maybe a politician you despise, maybe a former lover, maybe an old boss?
Imagine that’s the only person you could get help from. Would you take it?
That’s
what this is a parable about. It’s about the radical grace of God that comes in
ways and through people we’d never expect. A Samaritan wouldn’t help out a Jew
and a Jew wouldn’t accept help from a Samaritan. We might not hear it that way,
but it’s an unimaginable plot twist. Notice that when asked “Who was the
neighbor,” the lawyer couldn’t even bring himself to say the words “the
Samaritan,” there was too much hatred there. So, instead, he says “The one who
showed mercy.”
Can we recognize that the
gracious mercy of God can come through people we hate, through our enemies,
through people whose help we’d rather reject? The thing is, you can only recognize
the mercy of God when you’re honest about the fact that we’re all lying
helpless on the side of the road. This is a passage about mercy – the twist is
that it is not a moralistic fable about us showing mercy, it’s a radical
parable about us receiving the mercy that we so desperately need.
It’s
an allegory for our own salvation in Jesus Christ. We were lying dead in our
sins, in our selfishness, in our doubts, in our fear. But Jesus has come near
to us, he has suffered with us in compassion, he has given us all of himself to
heal us. And this grace looks as strange and as unimaginable as our worst enemy
helping us out. God is offering you mercy, and this parable shows us that mercy
often comes through unexpected people, in unexpected ways, and in undesired
circumstances, just as the Cross was all of those things. And if we’re not able
to see God’s salvation coming in these strange ways, then we just might miss
out on the eternal life that the lawyer was after. It’s a parable about
recognizing grace and mercy – so, go and do likewise.
