Luke 10.25-39
As many of you know, two Sundays ago, I was in Haiti visiting our partner parish, St. Etienne. Moments before the service began; some of the parish leaders asked me to preach. The lay leaders brought me the French Bible with the passage of scripture marked off. Not being a French speaker, I was anxiously trying to determine what the lesson for the day was. As I scanned the passage for a clue, I noticed a word that, although it had a different ending, obviously was Samaritan. I let out a sigh of relief. The Good Samaritan is one of those stories that transcends our human condition and speaks, in powerful ways, to our call as Christians.
Jesus taught using parables, stories that teach a moral story. And these parables continue to touch our lives today. These moral stories don’t quite answer questions, in ways that pleased lawyers and other rule followers. Instead they opened up new ways of thinking. The great gift of Jesus’ parables is that they answer ambiguous questions with stories that can be interpreted in many different ways depending on your perspective.
Today’s gospel lesson is one of the most well known parables. The parable’s main character, the Samaritan, has become synonymous with someone who looks after his or her fellow human beings. Samaritan in French, or Creole, or English is lingo for good person. This is due to how often Jesus’ parable of the Samaritan is told or read. Even before we hear Jesus begin to tell the story, the Samaritan is the hero. And, we know that the priest and the Levite will not stop to help their fellow Jew.
I hate to say this, but because this parable is so well known, it has lost the impact it had when Jesus first told it. I’m sorry to say that we don’t think of priests in the same way as they did back then. And we don’t really know what a Levite is. We do know that, by definition, they are righteous followers of the Law. But when Jesus told this story to the lawyer and others who were wanting to trap Jesus in his religious interpretations, the priests and the Levites were the ones expected to know the answer and to live into the law, the law that said to love your neighbor as yourself. When the two religious and moral leaders pass by leaving the traveler to suffer at the bottom of the ditch, the story takes a new twist.
Samaritans, on the other hand, were not supposed to be the heroes. Samaria, at the time of Jesus, was the country of scoundrels sandwiched between Galilee and Judea. They were the others, the foreigners, the ones they were taught to avoid. They were not known, as they are today, for compassion and were not examples of religious observance.
Samaritans were not the ones you expected to stop and help, they were the ones you expected to finish what the robbers had left unfinished. If you were a Jew lying injured in a ditch and a Samaritan came walking by, you would expect nothing.
As I began to preach at St. Etienne two weeks ago, I saw movement on the winding mountain road that ran beside the temporary church structure. I could hear the trucks and knew from my limited experience that others were passing on foot. The narrow road was the artery that connected the entire countryside. I pointed to that road and said that it was like the road to Jericho from the parable of the Samaritan. And along that road, we will pass people in need. They may be our enemies, they may be our friends, they may be our family, they may be strangers, but they are all our neighbors and when they need help, we must stop our travels and help them.
I said those words at St. Etienne and as each of my sentences was translated into Creole, the gathered called out ‘Amen.’ The great thing about this parable is that the same is true here in Washington, DC. We are separated by 1000s of miles and our roads are very different and the way we live is very different. And yet, the parable’s message speaks to us in the same way. No matter where you are, the path you are following is not private. God asks us to be aware of the needs around us and when we are called upon to help, we are to show mercy.
The answer the lawyer expected to hear from Jesus was that neighbors were fellow Jews. That is the way the law had been interpreted, but after Jesus told his parable, he asked. “So who was the neighbor?”
Neighbors, for Jesus, includes everyone and anyone particularly those in need of mercy.
Jesus’ parable has lost its stun factor. Instead of seeing the Samaritan as an ugly outsider, we consider him a hero. Instead of expecting righteousness from the priest and Levite, we expect indifference and avoidance.
The challenge is to recast those characters in a way that returns their significance and brings us to a realization of what Jesus’ message was to those he taught. You could probably come up with many groups of people that are considered callous and self-centered, those who might fit the role of a stereotypical Samaritan from the time of Jesus: from Nazis to skinheads to members of the KKK.
But instead of transferring our disdain onto some other group, lets be honest enough to evaluate our own behavior. Do any of us do enough to help our neighbor? Don’t all of us get consumed with the important things in our own lives, so much so, that we avoid reaching out to help those who call out to us for mercy? I’m not saying that’s who we are all of the time but we are quick to relate our own choices with the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable because that’s who we want to see when we look into the mirror.
We are Samaritans, and I’m not talking about those good qualities. If people only knew what things we had ignored, what people we forgot, they would be surprised to see us stop and help someone in need.
But Jesus’ parable gives us hope. No matter what our reputation or our past behavior (things that we know in our heart), we can surprise even ourselves by stooping down and helping those who are in need. Our challenge should be to change from being a passerby to being a neighbor. Our challenge should be to change the surprise of the parable into a reality. Because, we are all foreigners in need of reclaiming our neighborhoods.
Jesus was a great rabbi. He taught using parables that challenged his students and challenge us to look at the question of meaning from new and different ways. There is an old tale about an elderly rabbi who asked his students how one could recognize when the night ends and the day begins. One of his students raised his hand and said, “It is when, from a great distance, you can tell a dog from a sheep.” The rabbi said, “No, that is not it.”
He again asked and another one of his students raised her hand, and said, “It is when from a great distance you can tell a date palm from a fig tree.”
He said, “No, It is when you look into the face of another human being and see they’re your brother and your sister. Until then the night is with us.”[1]
Look into the face of the people you pass and realize that every one of them is your neighbor. If they call out to you, stop and help. Or as Jesus said after telling this parable, “Go and do likewise.” As you make the choice to see your neighbor in everyone and to love him or her as you love yourself, then you will find what the lawyer sought, an escape from the dark of night into the brightness of eternal life.
July 11, 2010
Proper 10C
[1] Dorothee Sölle, The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984) 41.
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