Richard P. Buchman
First Congregational Church
Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
April 29, 2001
THE GOOD SAMARITAN (REVISITED)
"Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" Luke 10:36
On April 15, which was Easter Day, my birthday, the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and the death of Abraham Lincoln, and a day which will live in infamy for any American who has ever made a buck, theDiscovery Channel presented a program in which it purported to show what Jesus actually looked like, as opposed to what we have always been told he looked like. And guess what? They presented Jesus as aSemitic type, with dark hair, eyes and beard, a prominent nose, and as a man who had spent considerable time outdoors, in the sun. Oh, the miracles of scientific research! He did not, in other words, look like aSwedish Lutheran, which he has in several movies, notably "King of Kings," in which Jesus, played by Whitefish Bay's own Jeffrey Hunter, after forty days of resisting the Devil, came out of the desert in aspanking clean white robe, showing no signs of having fasted for all of those forty days, and clean-shaven.
Makers of movies have trouble dealing with Jesus because he was… how should I say this? God. Theologians have much the same problem. They have always insisted that Jesus was "fully man and fully God," and, having said that, they have completely ignored the "man" thing. That began to bother me when I was about ten years old, and it still does. Several years ago, as you may remember, a movie was madebased on Nikos Kazantzakis' novel THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. There were a couple of weird and unintentionally hilarious moments in that film, an angel who spoke in an almost unintelligibleBritish accent, and a lion who, after roaring and roaring, sounded, when he finally spoke to Jesus, just like Mr. Rogers, but on balance it was by far the best portrayal of life in Jesus' time that I have ever seen. And they had John the Baptist just right. I took my youth group to see it at the Downer Theater and we had to push our way through Christian protesters in order to get into the place. Many Christians do not want to deal with Jesus as a man. Three people, all members of my several churches, told me that Jesus did not goto the bathroom. And one otherwise brilliant high-school girl told me that Jesus spoke French and knew all about nuclear physics.
While it is helpful to know that Jesus looked like a middle-eastern Jew who lived 2,000 years ago, that should not come as a surprise. When I was about twelve years old, I decided that Jesus probably thought and acted and spoke like a middle-eastern Jew who lived 2,000 years ago, and why wouldn't he? He was born in a certain place, at a certain time in history, to a family which was not Catholic. He was educated, to the extent that he was educated at all, by members of his own faith. Let me stop here and ask you, "Are you all sure what Jesus' faith was?" It has been my experience that some Christians believe that Jesus was aBaptist, or a Methodist or a Mormon. Hardly anyone thinks that he was a Congregationalist, although he WAS, I think, in one significant "small-c" way. He was a Jew and, as such, the inheritor of thousands of years of tradition and a book, a book which he knew very well, much of it by heart. Are you all sure what that book was? That's right, the Old Testament, although he did not call it that.
He was also, as it is sometimes phrased today, a practicing Jew. On the High Holy Days, Yom Kippur, the New Year and the Passover, he walked from Nazareth to Jerusalem, where the Temple was, as he didduring the last week of his life. At the end of that week, he died, still a Jew.
It is wonderful to be old and retired because, in the first place, nobody expects very much of you and, in the second place, you can't be fired.
Thus comforted, I will tell you what has troubled me since the age of puberty and still does, and I will begin by rephrasing, just for fun, one of Jesus' most important teachings, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Sometimes it helps to put things in a modern perspective, in places and situations with which we are familiar.
A man was traveling from Milwaukee to Chicago. He had abandoned his wife and children, cleaned out his family's bank account and stolen his neighbor's car. He got off I-94 in Kenosha to visit the dog track where, in succession, he got drunk and bet every penny he had on the slowest dog in Christendom (thesame dog, I suspect, that I backed on my only visit to that institution). He then proceeded to get into a loud and profane shouting match with some of his fellow sportsmen in the lobby of the clubhouse, threwup on the floor, and was escorted to the parking lot by security guards. There he was assaulted by some of the men with whom he had been arguing inside and left, bleeding and unconscious, behind someemployees' cars, where he was found, an hour or so later, by a woman who worked at the track as a custodian, who had witnessed the fracas in the lobby, and who had cleaned up the man's vomit. She made him as comfortable as she could, returned to the clubhouse to get his some water, and called the Rescue Squad. She rode with him to the hospital and stayed until she was told that he would survive, whereuponshe left her telephone number in case she could be of future help. Oh, I forgot. This woman, who came to this country from Laos, five years ago, is a Buddhist.
I was going to say that the man had been spotted and ignored, in the parking lot, by a physician from Racine and the Methodist Bishop of Northeastern Illinois, but that would be laying it on a bit thick...although that didn't stop Jesus, did it?
Jesus was a marvelous storyteller. He chose his characters carefully, as we will see. He wasted few words. When the late great comedian, W. C. Fields, was dying, his lawyer came to see him and found him in bed, reading the Bible. "Bill," he said, "I've never seen you read the Bible. What's going on?" Mr. Fields replied, "I'm looking for loopholes." Jesus left no loopholes.
Important as the Parable of the Good Samaritan is, what led up to it, what prompted Jesus to tell it, is even more so. Jesus was asked what I like to call the Big Question, in this case by a lawyer, a member of a profession whose approval ratings, apparently, have not improved much over the centuries. The lawyer asked him, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Other people phrased it differently, but it's the same question. Jesus answered it as he always did, by quoting from that book he knew so well. "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and you must love your neighbor asyou love yourself." The lawyer, after years of training, wanted to be sure that he had his definitions right... as in "What does 'is' mean?" "Who," he asked Jesus, "is my neighbor?" Jesus told him not only who his neighbor was but what a neighbor does, and when he had finished, he asked the lawyer, "Who wasneighbor to the man who was beaten and abandoned?" The lawyer got it right. The one who helped him. "Go thou," said Jesus, "and do likewise."
Does that sound like something a Hebrew who lived 2,000 years ago in the Promised Land would say? Let's look a bit closer at the characters in his story, the victim first. We don't know much about the man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. We don't know who he was or which God he worshipped oranything about his moral character. The victim in my story was a no-good, a drunk, a gambler, a thief and a family deserter. He probably smoked, too, a sin, today, of enormous proportions which the Ten Commandments, unaccountably, forgot to mention. Does any of that matter, in Jesus' story, or in mine? No. All that matters is that they both needed help.
What about the rescuers? One was man, undoubtedly, and one was a woman. Both were what are currently known as minorities. Samaritans were not Hebrews and, in fact, were not at all like by the Hebrews, thought to be somewhat less than human. The woman was not a Christian, spoke little Englishand looked foreign. Does any of that matter, in Jesus' story or in mine? No. Their race, sex, religious affiliation and national origin were of no consequence whatsoever. All that matters is that after several Jews, in the first place, and several Christians, we can assume, in the second place, had done nothing, bothrescuers helped the victim. Both did something. Both acted.
I hope you listened carefully to those last three sentences because in those sentences were three words: helped, did and acted.
When I was about fourteen years old, I joined the confirmation class at my Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. There I was told by the Rev. Dr. Frank Halliday Ferris, who scared me half to death, that there was absolutely nothing I could do about my person salvation, that it was all in the hands ofGod, and that the secret was what I believed and not what I did. Dr. Ferris went so far as to assure me that anything I might do, in the way of good deeds, while certainly expected of me, would not only have noeffect on my chances of wearing wings someday, but should be disregarded by me and by everybody else as irrelevant.
I wrote all of that down and dutifully repeated it to the Elder who examined me for confirmation, and I passed. But I was a good little boy. I had Sunday School attendance awards almost down to my knees, and I read the Bible. I found what Dr. Ferris was telling me in the Bible, but I found it in the Letters of St.Paul. I did not find it in the teachings of Jesus, in the Gospels, at least not in the first three Gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke. If you bring me back someday, I'll tell you about the Gospel of John.
In the first three Gospels, Jesus didn't say much about faith, about believing. But he talked a lot about helping and doing and acting. He talked about works, in other words, and you can look it up, which I hopeyou will this afternoon, starting with Matthew 25: 31-46. And then read the Old Testament, which was Jesus' Bible. I'll give you until Tuesday to do that.
But before you read Matthew, perhaps on your way home this morning, think about the story that Jesus told and the one that I told. Think about the victims and the passersby and the rescuers, and ask yourself: "Is that what a Semite, who lived 2,000 years ago, with dark hair, eyes and beard, who had spent a lot of time outdoors, in the sun, would tell a lawyer who asked him the Big Question?"
And then ask yourself, "Who, in either of those stories, believed anything?"
And who... I guess... went to Heaven?
Amen.