Gracious Living

We are all familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan. We think of a Good Samaritan as anyone who does a good deed, particularly for a stranger. Many communities have hospitals named Good Samaritan, we have Good Samaritan awards, we have a class of Good Samaritan laws that protect persons who aid strangers. There is even a “Good Sam” RV club among campers, urging campers to clean up after themselves and be good RV and camping neighbors. Yes, the Good Samaritan is a secularized saint, a reminder that we should all do good deeds to help each other.

And yet we have domesticated the story away from its original meanings. We have wrenched it from the context in which Jesus told it. Even our Bibles have done this, unintentionally. Many of the chapter headings, or marginal headings, that Bibles use to help the reader, will title today’s text as ”The GOOD Samaritan,” and yet nowhere in the Biblical text itself is the word “good” used. In fact, the story is about the exact opposite. Really, I think this is the story of the Bad Samaritan.

At the beginning of that story, a lawyer asks Jesus a question, the text says, to test Jesus. Now, a lawyer in that era would be an expert in both civil and religious law, as there was no separation of the two. He was not an expert in secular law, as we have today, but of the Law of Moses. The lawyer asks: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answers with a question, by asking what is in the Scriptures. The lawyer quotes Scripture accurately. But still not satisfied, the lawyer asks – "Who is my neighbor?"

And Jesus answers by telling a story, a parable. The predictable answer we might think Jesus would give is something like, "Why, everyone is your neighbor," for that answer was consonant with his own Jewish teachings and is pretty much conventional spiritual wisdom in our own age. But his answer is really more profound than that. He responds to the question by telling a parable.

The story is familiar to us: A man is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho and he is beaten by robbers, leaving him "half dead." A priest is coming down that side of the road, but when he sees the injured man he crosses the road to avoid him. Then a Levite – who is another high Temple official, another kind of priest – did the same thing. Now, to the ears of Jesus’ audience in the first century who were very used to the arts of storytelling, they probably knew the third character would break the pattern created by the first two. And the expected sequence would be a priest, a Levite, and then an Israelite, so the story would then have an anti-clerical edge to it, which would have been very popular among the common Jewish folks. The ordinary Israelite would do what the priest and the Levite would not. It would be a nice moral tale for the common man.

But Jesus shatters all conventions. The third person is a Samaritan. And a Samaritan was a hated person among the Israelites. Samaritans were regarded as unclean people, descendents of the mixed marriages that followed from the Assyrian settlement from various regions in the fallen Northern kingdom. The Samaritan really was, in the culture of first century Israel, a bad person. Just a few verses earlier in Luke, (9:52-54) a Samaritan village denies welcome to Jesus and the disciples, and James and John wanted to call down fire to consume it.

So here is the Samaritan – widely hated and distrusted – and yet Jesus holds up that person as the hero of the story. "Which of these three," Jesus asks the lawyer, "do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" The lawyer responds, by this point forced to admit to Jesus’ wisdom and knowing the truth, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said: "Go and do likewise."

" Who is my neighbor?" the lawyer asks. Jesus redefines the category, abolishing boundaries of social position, race, religion, geographic region – these count for nothing. The neighbor is the one—even the lowly and the hated—who cares for the wounded.

So this story goes from being a nice little moral tale about doing good deeds, to the reminder that bad people can do good things. Or, more to the point, that people who are considered bad by certain cultural conventions still share a common humanity. So Jesus invites the hearer to go beyond mere bias, beyond mere cultural convention, beyond deeply ingrained societal patterns, and to see even the lowly Samaritan as not just a good neighbor, but as a child of God.

There is such need in today’s world for that realization. How many barriers we erect to wall us off from each other. Here in our society as well as around the globe, we so often fail to see each other’s common humanity and common divine parentage, we might say, as children of God.

Here in our own culture, it is of course nearing election time and this summer both major political parties are getting ready for their conventions. And so political rancor is revving up, as we saw in the news this week. Some of these is mere politics, yes, the necessary messiness for our democratic system. Some social commentators are telling us that we are more divided than usual politically – with less and less of a moderate middle ground and people staking camps in either blue or red areas, losing sight of working for the common good.

One of you told me a story this last week which makes almost a perfect sermon illustration. (You need to be careful when you tell ministers stories, for they might end up in sermons!) One church member said he was at a concert and chatting with people sitting nearby. The church member introduced his friend to the couple. His friend is active on the staff of one political party in Wisconsin. He was introduced to the couple, one of whom then began to berate the man for his party affiliation. So our church member friend was in the middle of a Republican and Democratic argument while waiting for the symphony to begin. It was an embarrassing moment. And it is perhaps a minor thing, but an example of how political judgmentalism can run so deep as to become inhospitable. So in this season, our gospel lesson today could be the story of the Good Democrat or the Good Republican, depending on your personal point of view.

And as we look out across the globe, we see very serious ethnic and political divisions that tear the fabric of human community and too often lead to unnecessary violence.

One such division is the Catholic/Protestant issue in Ireland. Next week, we will have in worship the youth from the Ulster Project. The project brings teenagers from Northern Ireland – half Catholic and half Protestant – to stay with area families to promote peace by fostering mutual respect and trying to heal religious and political divisions. We are an active congregation in the project, inviting these young people to worship with us next week and they will later use our building for their goodbye ceremony toward the end of the month.

Certainly, the love of neighbor that Jesus speaks of is so desperately needed to help the very deep divisions and violence in Ireland. So this story for them becomes either the Parable of the Good Protestant or the Good Catholic.

And of course many other parts of the globe are suffering under the violence of misunderstanding and deep cultural and political differences, not the least of which is the Palestinian/Israeli problem and the Sudanese civil war, just to take a couple of other examples.

The ability to see beyond our human differences to our shared divine origin as children of God is what this story of the Samaritan is about, I think.

Jesus redefines what constitutes a neighbor. He asks the lawyer, “Which of these three proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer answers “the one who showed mercy on him,” which provides an accurate description of a neighbor.

Jesus has redefined neighbor from the geographic boundaries of neighborliness to the essential nature of neighborliness. As an Arab proverb says, “To have a good neighbor you must be one.” And also, Jesus suggests that God’s interest in humanity lies beyond any particular tribe of people. We see in this story the universality of God’s love and God’s expectation for our love to likewise reflect that divine universality.

Jesus points beyond the differences that separate us to our common humanity. Jesus points beyond our tribal affiliations to the family of God: one family with a billion names. One of the most important things about us Christians is that we stand in a certain relationship to God. We affirm that God made us, judges us, in Christ has suffered to redeem us. Whatever else may be true about us, nothing matters as compared to this.

Just last Sunday we commemorated Independence Day, the founding of our nation. It strikes me that one of the things America is about is recognizing our common humanity, and the divine sources of human dignity. A nation of immigrants, or of strangers, naturally welcomed other strangers to build a new society. Yes, there are been dark episodes in that struggle where we have denied basic rights to whole categories of peoples, yes our understanding has been imperfect, but we have overall been a nation open to people from around the world, welcoming of the stranger, aware of our common human struggle.

This parable not only reminds us that goodness is found in surprising people, that human categories sometimes try to shut out the good that God has provided, but that ultimately, we are dependent upon one another.

As we read this story, most of us place ourselves in the role of the Samaritan, the helper, the one who rescues the other. So many sermons on this text exhort the listener to BE the good Samaritan, to help the other.

We usually identify with the Samaritan, but if truth be told, in reality we are too often the injured man by the side of the road left for half-dead. We are wounded by the side of the road.

This story reminds us of the limits of self sufficiency, of how we need others, of how we will most likely at some point in our lives find ourselves bleeding by the side of the road. We have known suffering so that the poetry of the Psalm rings so true when God is addressing the lesser Gods, “You shall die like men and fall like any prince.” This week as we have seen three church members pass away, we need no reminder of our mortality.

And maybe the Samaritan is also the Christ in this story. For remember, it was Jesus who was also despised. It was Jesus who was the outsider, the stranger, the one who was cruelly executed. We want to domesticate that story as well, to skip past the crucifixion to the resurrection, but our God is an outsider himself, one who brings a radical new view of the world, one who suggests a whole new order to the kingdom of God, that we are all children of one God, as Paul says, “to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”

In the letter to the Colossians, Paul reminds us that we are delivered from the dominion of darkness and now in the kingdom of Christ, “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

So our inheritance is not merely earthly, not merely ethnic or racial, but of a divine origin. We pray each Sunday to our father, which makes us all brothers and sisters. And furthermore, we pray in that prayer “on earth as it is in heaven.” This is what the parable of the Samaritan is about, I think….living out on earth, on the everyday paths of our lives, especially on the dangerous journeys from Jerusalem to Jericho, what we know is our duty to our brothers and sisters as children of the same God.

Whatever the divisions you face that separate you from your sister or brother, may you show mercy on the other. And remember that one has shown mercy on you. In these days of division, may you have the steadfastness to go and do likewise.
Amen.