Proper 10/Pentecost 8/Ordinary Time 15
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Object:
Theme For The Day
The parable of the Good Samaritan is not a morality fable, but a courtroom drama, in which Jesus' victory over his lawyer opponent shows forth God's all-inclusive love.
Old Testament Lesson
Amos 7:7-17
Amos And The Plumb Line
This week begins a four-week series of First Lesson selections from the two eighth-century B.C.E. prophets, Amos and Hosea. In a classic image, Amos uses a carpenter's plumb line as a metaphor for God's judgment of evildoers. The plumb line, one of the oldest architectural tools known to the human race, is still being used today in much the same fashion as it was in the eighth-century B.C.E. This simple lead weight on a string guides a mason in constructing a wall that is perpendicular to the ground and parallel to the force of gravity. If a wall is out of plumb, it is pointless to add more layers of brick or stone on top of it, for it is bound to collapse eventually. The only solution is to tear the wall down and start again. When Amos has the Lord saying, "See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel" (v. 8), he is declaring that God is going to judge the people by a thorough and objective standard. Amos has a real concern for exposing systematic injustice toward the poor; he sees this as evidence of a society that is badly out of plumb and in need of radical reform.
New Testament Lesson
Colossians 1:1-14
Strength For The Struggle Ahead
This week begins a four-week series of Epistle selections from the letter to the Colossians. As with many of Paul's letters, this one was written to address a theological crisis. The precise nature of this crisis is not so clear as in some of the other Pauline letters, but it appears to have something to do with countering the false teachings of a Judaizing faction within the church at Colossae. This concern is addressed specifically in 2:6-23. In these opening verses, Paul begins his letter with his customary warm greetings. In verse 1, he claims apostolic authority for himself. The tone in this opening portion of the letter is one of joyful thanksgiving for the Colossian Christians and their spiritual gifts. In verse 6, Paul reminds his readers that the faith that is growing and bearing fruit in their community is part of a worldwide movement, which God is nurturing and growing in many other places as well. No parochialism here! Paul's prayer is that the Colossians may receive "knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding" (v. 9) -- presumably so they may learn to distinguish orthodoxy from heresy. They are to "lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him" (v. 10). Verse 11, "May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power" is a particularly emphatic statement. They will need strength for the various struggles ahead. He prays that they may be able to "endure everything with patience" (v. 11). The final two verses form a summary statement of the nature of redemption: "He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (vv. 13-14).
The Gospel
Luke 10:25-37
The Parable Of The Good Samaritan
In this, one of the most familiar of Jesus' parables, he is responding to a specific question posed by a lawyer whom he is debating: "And who is my neighbor?" (v. 29). It is one of the most profound questions ever raised by human beings, and it continues to be raised every day, as we become increasingly aware of the varied communities of people with whom we share this planet. The details of the parable are familiar: a traveler falls among thieves who beat him, rob him, and leave him for dead. Two distinguished religious personages, a priest and a Levite, pass him by without helping. Each one professes to live by a code of loving one's neighbor (with "neighbor" narrowly defined as "a fellow Jew"), but each one also has an excellent justification for not stopping to help, based on ritual purity laws. Only the third passerby -- a Samaritan who, unlike the other two, has no compelling religious reason why he should help the man -- actually renders him assistance. The Samaritan is motivated by compassion, not legalism. Jesus has cleverly manipulated the lawyer into affirming something he would otherwise be loath to admit: that a Samaritan could, in some circumstances, be a better Jew than either a priest or a Levite.
Preaching Possibilities
Any preacher who chooses to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan has a difficult task. The passage is among the best known in all of scripture. Most of our people know the details of the story long before it's read to them: the traveler who falls among thieves, who dump him by the side of the road, unconscious ... the priest and the Levite who pass him by ... and finally, the Samaritan, the outcast, who proves himself the true neighbor.
Most of our people think they know the meaning of the story, too, it's a simple morality tale, an example for living. Time out of mind, sermons and Sunday school lessons have said exactly that. They have held up the character of the Good Samaritan as the paragon of compassionate caring. "Be like him!" is the moral of the story. "Don't be like those others, who passed by on the other side."
Sure, the parable of the Good Samaritan can be used as a morality tale. But that's not why Jesus told it. To begin to understand how this story came to be, and what Jesus meant his listeners to take away with them, we've got to turn back in the Gospel of Luke at least a chapter.
Back in chapter 9, verse 51, Jesus "sets his face to go to Jerusalem." It's that great transition point in his gospel, the pivotal moment when Jesus and his followers cease their carefree wanderings and begin to head in a determined way toward Jerusalem, where a cross awaits.
The first place they encounter, on their journey, is a village of Samaritans. "But," as Luke puts it, in marvelously terse prose, "they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem." Jesus has Jerusalem, the holy city, in his eyes and that's not acceptable to the Samaritans. They give him and his disciples the cold shoulder.
In order to understand why it's not acceptable to the Samaritans that Jesus and company are Jerusalem-bound, we've got to understand a little about where the Samaritans came from, as a people. They were Israelites, originally. During a terrible invasion by the Assyrians, many centuries before, most of the Israelites living up north in Samaria had been killed or carried off into exile. Only a few of these northern tribes of Israel -- who were either so well hidden, or so unimportant that nobody wanted them -- were left.
Over the years, these Samaritan Jews intermarried with other races. They adopted many of their neighbors' religious practices. They still worshiped Yahweh, the desert God, but they made their sacrifices on the top of Mount Gerizim, not in a temple. They interpreted the law differently from the southerners, the Jews of Judea. In language, lifestyle, and custom, there was little left that united these two cultures, both of whom considered their own people the true descendants of Moses and David.
The animosity between Jew and Samaritan was so great that many Jews would go miles out of their way to avoid passing through Samaritan territory. The Samaritans felt much the same way about the Jews. Yet when Jesus "sets his face to go to Jerusalem," he and his followers are in Galilee, far to the north. The land of Samaria lies squarely between them and their destination. They have a choice. They can either pass through the land of their enemies, or they can make a wide detour around it.
Jesus decides to go straight through. He sends messengers ahead to the first village, to announce to the Samaritans he's coming. But the people refuse to receive him. The doors of the houses remain locked and bolted. The best the disciples can find to eat or drink is some water drawn from the well.
James and John are outraged by this breach of hospitality. Do these Samaritans not realize whom they are dealing with? Do they not know that this is the greatest of all teachers of the scriptures? Do they not understand that Jesus is sent from God, to enlighten all the peoples who call Moses their ancestor?
At this point, James and John suggest a course of action that's perfectly consistent with what other great Israelite prophets might have done -- especially those two mighty men of power, Elijah and Elisha. "Lord," they ask, running up to him breathless, "do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" But Jesus only rebukes them for their misplaced zeal. They leave the Samaritan village and move on.
Along the way he teaches, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." The life of a disciple is hard, in other words. Followers of Jesus will encounter rejection as much as they do acceptance. He wants them to be hard and tough, seasoned campaigners who aren't troubled by the rigors of the road.
As they move out of Samaria and enter back into Jewish territory, people are constantly coming up to Jesus, asking if they, too, can follow him. But to each one, Jesus says that only utter and complete obedience will do. One he does not permit to go back and bury his father; another he refuses to allow to say farewell to the folks back home. "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." You can't plow a straight furrow if you take your eyes off that tree on the horizon you're using for a reference point.
As chapter 10 (the chapter of the good Samaritan) begins, Jesus is constructing his first organizational chart. He selects seventy of the best out of the great crowd that's following him around, and sends them out two-by-two, to make ready for his coming. To these advance men, he urges radical simplicity. They are to travel light, depending on the hospitality of those they meet. If anyone treats them as the Samaritans have just done, refusing to welcome them, they are to shake the dust off their sandals (a Middle-Eastern gesture of contempt), and move on to the next town.
It is after the seventy -- Jesus' advance team -- return, reporting on their progress, that a certain "lawyer" stands up, to "test" Jesus. This lawyer is nothing like a lawyer of today. He has more in common with a seminary professor than with a practicing attorney. What the man really is, is a scholar of religious law. He's a true believer, who knows the law of Moses (both Torah and its commentary, Midrash) so intimately that others come to him for advice.
This lawyer is certain that this country-bumpkin rabbi from Galilee is no match for his towering intellect. So he asks Jesus a condescending question, one to which any Jewish schoolboy would know the answer: "Teacher," he asks, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
Jesus turns the question back upon him: "What do you read in the law?"
The lawyer beams. He's on his own turf now. Even though the question is not terribly complex, he will have an opportunity to demonstrate his learning and erudition. He recites the familiar words of the Shema: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." (Well, he added "mind" to the traditional list of heart, soul, and strength, but no matter.)
Then the lawyer goes on to add another thought: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." It's a brilliant theological move: to pair the words of the Shema, the commandment to love God at all times, with the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself, found in Leviticus 19:18. The lawyer's just starting to pat himself on the back when this Galilean rabbi congratulates him on answering rightly. "Do this," he tells the lawyer, "and you will live."
"Imagine" -- the lawyer thinks to himself -- "the sheer nerve of this Galilean: presuming to inform me whether I am right or wrong. But no matter: because, with this answer, I've got him right where I want him."
The lawyer turns to Jesus and asks, "And who is my neighbor?" He's posing, now, an abstract theological question that the most learned scholars of the law have been debating for centuries. "When Leviticus commands the love of neighbor, is this love to be limited only to the people of Israel?" Some rabbis would say yes. Others would go a little further, declaring that the sojourners -- those green-card holders from other lands, officially sanctioned to live and work in Judea -- may also be classified as neighbors. No one, but no one among the learned elite would dream of suggesting that the word "neighbor" also includes Gentiles: the non-Jews who refuse to place themselves under the law of Moses.
It is at this point that Jesus launches into the parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable would have been shocking and surprising to the lawyer -- and, indeed, to anyone and everyone listening to Jesus that day. All of them take it for granted that God has established rigid boundaries that separate one people from another. For Jesus to make the man's rescuer a Samaritan is more than just radical. It's provocative, paradigm-busting -- and possibly even insulting to the lawyer, who seems as shocked as anyone else.
The people of Jesus' day would have heard the parable very differently from the ways we are accustomed to hearing it. First of all, the traveler who's stripped and beaten and left for dead (presumably a Jew) has lost a lot more, in the robbery, than merely his purse and the robe he was wearing. The man has lost his very identity.
In a society as class-conscious as first-century Judea, this is a crisis of the first order. There this man is lying unconscious by the roadside. The robbers have stripped him of his outer garments, which means he could be Jew, Samaritan, Roman -- anyone. He's "half-dead" -- unconscious -- so he can't simply tell who he is. To anyone who happens by, the man has been reduced to a generic human being.
More than that, he's so badly injured that the casual observer can hardly tell if he's dead or alive. This poor unfortunate could die at any time. For any faithful, observant Jew -- like the priest or the Levite -- who might pass by, there's the very real possibility that, if he should stop and help, he could end up handling a corpse before the day is done. The consequences of that are serious. Any Jew who touches a corpse is rendered ritually unclean. He must go through a complicated series of bathing and purification rituals, lasting several days, before he is permitted to enter the temple, or even a synagogue. For a religious official like the priest or the Levite, this means several days of not working at all. Far better, instead, to pass by on the other side.
Those various details -- the victim's nakedness, his unconsciousness, and his nearness to death -- are what is truly brilliant about the parable. Jesus has set the story up in such a way as to not merely answer the lawyer's trick question, but to surround it and devour it with a scenario of his own making.
We are so used to thinking ill of the priest and the Levite in the parable that we may not realize that Jesus' listeners would have seen these characters very differently. Both these religious officials are figures of respect. Of course they wouldn't stop and help the injured man: Temple officials can't afford to dirty their hands with such things. And besides, a half-naked, unconscious man like this could belong to any nation and the law of Moses commands us to treat as neighbors only those who are Jewish (and possibly also the small number of officially sanctioned "sojourners").
When Jesus asks the lawyer a question of his own, after telling the parable -- "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" -- the lawyer suddenly discovers that he's painted himself into a logical corner. Jesus' shrewd question forces the lawyer to admit that the true neighbor of the injured traveler is none other than a hated Samaritan. (Only he can't bring himself to utter the word "Samaritan"; the best he can do is to mumble, "The one who showed him mercy.")
In the great Jewish sport of theological debate, Jesus has won a resounding victory. He's done it with a parable: a story told not as a morality-fable for the ages, but rather as a sharply crafted hypothetical situation right out of religious case law. In citing this case, Jesus has just exposed and overturned the exclusive, racist character of the lawyer's fundamental beliefs. The lawyer has always viewed the human race as sorted into "in" groups and "out" groups, those who enjoy the Lord's blessing and those who do not. What Jesus has done is to melt those religious class divisions before the man's very eyes, displaying the human race as one family, created in God's image.
Prayer For The Day
God of compassion and endless caring,
May we be so blessed as to discover, in our lives,
some small measure of your life-giving, world-conquering love.
In the days to come, as we encounter others --
some of them people like us, others very different --
may our attention linger not only on their external circumstances,
but may we meet also the Christ who dwells within. Amen.
To Illustrate
The love for equals is a human thing -- of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.
The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing -- the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.
The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing -- to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
And then there is the love for the enemy -- love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer.
This is God's love. It conquers the world.
-- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1985)
***
The challenge, then, is to recognize that the world is about two things: differentiation and communion. The challenge is to seek a unity that celebrates diversity, to unite the particular with the universal, to recognize the need for roots while insisting that the point of roots is to put forth branches. What is intolerable is for differences to become idolatrous. No human being's identity is exhausted by his or her gender, race, ethnic origin, national loyalty, or sexual orientation. All human beings have more in common than they have in conflict, and it is precisely when what they have in conflict seems overwhelming that what they have in common needs most to be affirmed. James Baldwin described us well: "Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other."
-- William Sloane Coffin, from The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality (Aldershot, United Kingdom: Dartmouth, 1991)
***
Diversity may be both the hardest thing to live with and the most dangerous thing to be without.
-- William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005)
The parable of the Good Samaritan is not a morality fable, but a courtroom drama, in which Jesus' victory over his lawyer opponent shows forth God's all-inclusive love.
Old Testament Lesson
Amos 7:7-17
Amos And The Plumb Line
This week begins a four-week series of First Lesson selections from the two eighth-century B.C.E. prophets, Amos and Hosea. In a classic image, Amos uses a carpenter's plumb line as a metaphor for God's judgment of evildoers. The plumb line, one of the oldest architectural tools known to the human race, is still being used today in much the same fashion as it was in the eighth-century B.C.E. This simple lead weight on a string guides a mason in constructing a wall that is perpendicular to the ground and parallel to the force of gravity. If a wall is out of plumb, it is pointless to add more layers of brick or stone on top of it, for it is bound to collapse eventually. The only solution is to tear the wall down and start again. When Amos has the Lord saying, "See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel" (v. 8), he is declaring that God is going to judge the people by a thorough and objective standard. Amos has a real concern for exposing systematic injustice toward the poor; he sees this as evidence of a society that is badly out of plumb and in need of radical reform.
New Testament Lesson
Colossians 1:1-14
Strength For The Struggle Ahead
This week begins a four-week series of Epistle selections from the letter to the Colossians. As with many of Paul's letters, this one was written to address a theological crisis. The precise nature of this crisis is not so clear as in some of the other Pauline letters, but it appears to have something to do with countering the false teachings of a Judaizing faction within the church at Colossae. This concern is addressed specifically in 2:6-23. In these opening verses, Paul begins his letter with his customary warm greetings. In verse 1, he claims apostolic authority for himself. The tone in this opening portion of the letter is one of joyful thanksgiving for the Colossian Christians and their spiritual gifts. In verse 6, Paul reminds his readers that the faith that is growing and bearing fruit in their community is part of a worldwide movement, which God is nurturing and growing in many other places as well. No parochialism here! Paul's prayer is that the Colossians may receive "knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding" (v. 9) -- presumably so they may learn to distinguish orthodoxy from heresy. They are to "lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him" (v. 10). Verse 11, "May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power" is a particularly emphatic statement. They will need strength for the various struggles ahead. He prays that they may be able to "endure everything with patience" (v. 11). The final two verses form a summary statement of the nature of redemption: "He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (vv. 13-14).
The Gospel
Luke 10:25-37
The Parable Of The Good Samaritan
In this, one of the most familiar of Jesus' parables, he is responding to a specific question posed by a lawyer whom he is debating: "And who is my neighbor?" (v. 29). It is one of the most profound questions ever raised by human beings, and it continues to be raised every day, as we become increasingly aware of the varied communities of people with whom we share this planet. The details of the parable are familiar: a traveler falls among thieves who beat him, rob him, and leave him for dead. Two distinguished religious personages, a priest and a Levite, pass him by without helping. Each one professes to live by a code of loving one's neighbor (with "neighbor" narrowly defined as "a fellow Jew"), but each one also has an excellent justification for not stopping to help, based on ritual purity laws. Only the third passerby -- a Samaritan who, unlike the other two, has no compelling religious reason why he should help the man -- actually renders him assistance. The Samaritan is motivated by compassion, not legalism. Jesus has cleverly manipulated the lawyer into affirming something he would otherwise be loath to admit: that a Samaritan could, in some circumstances, be a better Jew than either a priest or a Levite.
Preaching Possibilities
Any preacher who chooses to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan has a difficult task. The passage is among the best known in all of scripture. Most of our people know the details of the story long before it's read to them: the traveler who falls among thieves, who dump him by the side of the road, unconscious ... the priest and the Levite who pass him by ... and finally, the Samaritan, the outcast, who proves himself the true neighbor.
Most of our people think they know the meaning of the story, too, it's a simple morality tale, an example for living. Time out of mind, sermons and Sunday school lessons have said exactly that. They have held up the character of the Good Samaritan as the paragon of compassionate caring. "Be like him!" is the moral of the story. "Don't be like those others, who passed by on the other side."
Sure, the parable of the Good Samaritan can be used as a morality tale. But that's not why Jesus told it. To begin to understand how this story came to be, and what Jesus meant his listeners to take away with them, we've got to turn back in the Gospel of Luke at least a chapter.
Back in chapter 9, verse 51, Jesus "sets his face to go to Jerusalem." It's that great transition point in his gospel, the pivotal moment when Jesus and his followers cease their carefree wanderings and begin to head in a determined way toward Jerusalem, where a cross awaits.
The first place they encounter, on their journey, is a village of Samaritans. "But," as Luke puts it, in marvelously terse prose, "they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem." Jesus has Jerusalem, the holy city, in his eyes and that's not acceptable to the Samaritans. They give him and his disciples the cold shoulder.
In order to understand why it's not acceptable to the Samaritans that Jesus and company are Jerusalem-bound, we've got to understand a little about where the Samaritans came from, as a people. They were Israelites, originally. During a terrible invasion by the Assyrians, many centuries before, most of the Israelites living up north in Samaria had been killed or carried off into exile. Only a few of these northern tribes of Israel -- who were either so well hidden, or so unimportant that nobody wanted them -- were left.
Over the years, these Samaritan Jews intermarried with other races. They adopted many of their neighbors' religious practices. They still worshiped Yahweh, the desert God, but they made their sacrifices on the top of Mount Gerizim, not in a temple. They interpreted the law differently from the southerners, the Jews of Judea. In language, lifestyle, and custom, there was little left that united these two cultures, both of whom considered their own people the true descendants of Moses and David.
The animosity between Jew and Samaritan was so great that many Jews would go miles out of their way to avoid passing through Samaritan territory. The Samaritans felt much the same way about the Jews. Yet when Jesus "sets his face to go to Jerusalem," he and his followers are in Galilee, far to the north. The land of Samaria lies squarely between them and their destination. They have a choice. They can either pass through the land of their enemies, or they can make a wide detour around it.
Jesus decides to go straight through. He sends messengers ahead to the first village, to announce to the Samaritans he's coming. But the people refuse to receive him. The doors of the houses remain locked and bolted. The best the disciples can find to eat or drink is some water drawn from the well.
James and John are outraged by this breach of hospitality. Do these Samaritans not realize whom they are dealing with? Do they not know that this is the greatest of all teachers of the scriptures? Do they not understand that Jesus is sent from God, to enlighten all the peoples who call Moses their ancestor?
At this point, James and John suggest a course of action that's perfectly consistent with what other great Israelite prophets might have done -- especially those two mighty men of power, Elijah and Elisha. "Lord," they ask, running up to him breathless, "do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" But Jesus only rebukes them for their misplaced zeal. They leave the Samaritan village and move on.
Along the way he teaches, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." The life of a disciple is hard, in other words. Followers of Jesus will encounter rejection as much as they do acceptance. He wants them to be hard and tough, seasoned campaigners who aren't troubled by the rigors of the road.
As they move out of Samaria and enter back into Jewish territory, people are constantly coming up to Jesus, asking if they, too, can follow him. But to each one, Jesus says that only utter and complete obedience will do. One he does not permit to go back and bury his father; another he refuses to allow to say farewell to the folks back home. "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." You can't plow a straight furrow if you take your eyes off that tree on the horizon you're using for a reference point.
As chapter 10 (the chapter of the good Samaritan) begins, Jesus is constructing his first organizational chart. He selects seventy of the best out of the great crowd that's following him around, and sends them out two-by-two, to make ready for his coming. To these advance men, he urges radical simplicity. They are to travel light, depending on the hospitality of those they meet. If anyone treats them as the Samaritans have just done, refusing to welcome them, they are to shake the dust off their sandals (a Middle-Eastern gesture of contempt), and move on to the next town.
It is after the seventy -- Jesus' advance team -- return, reporting on their progress, that a certain "lawyer" stands up, to "test" Jesus. This lawyer is nothing like a lawyer of today. He has more in common with a seminary professor than with a practicing attorney. What the man really is, is a scholar of religious law. He's a true believer, who knows the law of Moses (both Torah and its commentary, Midrash) so intimately that others come to him for advice.
This lawyer is certain that this country-bumpkin rabbi from Galilee is no match for his towering intellect. So he asks Jesus a condescending question, one to which any Jewish schoolboy would know the answer: "Teacher," he asks, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
Jesus turns the question back upon him: "What do you read in the law?"
The lawyer beams. He's on his own turf now. Even though the question is not terribly complex, he will have an opportunity to demonstrate his learning and erudition. He recites the familiar words of the Shema: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." (Well, he added "mind" to the traditional list of heart, soul, and strength, but no matter.)
Then the lawyer goes on to add another thought: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." It's a brilliant theological move: to pair the words of the Shema, the commandment to love God at all times, with the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself, found in Leviticus 19:18. The lawyer's just starting to pat himself on the back when this Galilean rabbi congratulates him on answering rightly. "Do this," he tells the lawyer, "and you will live."
"Imagine" -- the lawyer thinks to himself -- "the sheer nerve of this Galilean: presuming to inform me whether I am right or wrong. But no matter: because, with this answer, I've got him right where I want him."
The lawyer turns to Jesus and asks, "And who is my neighbor?" He's posing, now, an abstract theological question that the most learned scholars of the law have been debating for centuries. "When Leviticus commands the love of neighbor, is this love to be limited only to the people of Israel?" Some rabbis would say yes. Others would go a little further, declaring that the sojourners -- those green-card holders from other lands, officially sanctioned to live and work in Judea -- may also be classified as neighbors. No one, but no one among the learned elite would dream of suggesting that the word "neighbor" also includes Gentiles: the non-Jews who refuse to place themselves under the law of Moses.
It is at this point that Jesus launches into the parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable would have been shocking and surprising to the lawyer -- and, indeed, to anyone and everyone listening to Jesus that day. All of them take it for granted that God has established rigid boundaries that separate one people from another. For Jesus to make the man's rescuer a Samaritan is more than just radical. It's provocative, paradigm-busting -- and possibly even insulting to the lawyer, who seems as shocked as anyone else.
The people of Jesus' day would have heard the parable very differently from the ways we are accustomed to hearing it. First of all, the traveler who's stripped and beaten and left for dead (presumably a Jew) has lost a lot more, in the robbery, than merely his purse and the robe he was wearing. The man has lost his very identity.
In a society as class-conscious as first-century Judea, this is a crisis of the first order. There this man is lying unconscious by the roadside. The robbers have stripped him of his outer garments, which means he could be Jew, Samaritan, Roman -- anyone. He's "half-dead" -- unconscious -- so he can't simply tell who he is. To anyone who happens by, the man has been reduced to a generic human being.
More than that, he's so badly injured that the casual observer can hardly tell if he's dead or alive. This poor unfortunate could die at any time. For any faithful, observant Jew -- like the priest or the Levite -- who might pass by, there's the very real possibility that, if he should stop and help, he could end up handling a corpse before the day is done. The consequences of that are serious. Any Jew who touches a corpse is rendered ritually unclean. He must go through a complicated series of bathing and purification rituals, lasting several days, before he is permitted to enter the temple, or even a synagogue. For a religious official like the priest or the Levite, this means several days of not working at all. Far better, instead, to pass by on the other side.
Those various details -- the victim's nakedness, his unconsciousness, and his nearness to death -- are what is truly brilliant about the parable. Jesus has set the story up in such a way as to not merely answer the lawyer's trick question, but to surround it and devour it with a scenario of his own making.
We are so used to thinking ill of the priest and the Levite in the parable that we may not realize that Jesus' listeners would have seen these characters very differently. Both these religious officials are figures of respect. Of course they wouldn't stop and help the injured man: Temple officials can't afford to dirty their hands with such things. And besides, a half-naked, unconscious man like this could belong to any nation and the law of Moses commands us to treat as neighbors only those who are Jewish (and possibly also the small number of officially sanctioned "sojourners").
When Jesus asks the lawyer a question of his own, after telling the parable -- "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" -- the lawyer suddenly discovers that he's painted himself into a logical corner. Jesus' shrewd question forces the lawyer to admit that the true neighbor of the injured traveler is none other than a hated Samaritan. (Only he can't bring himself to utter the word "Samaritan"; the best he can do is to mumble, "The one who showed him mercy.")
In the great Jewish sport of theological debate, Jesus has won a resounding victory. He's done it with a parable: a story told not as a morality-fable for the ages, but rather as a sharply crafted hypothetical situation right out of religious case law. In citing this case, Jesus has just exposed and overturned the exclusive, racist character of the lawyer's fundamental beliefs. The lawyer has always viewed the human race as sorted into "in" groups and "out" groups, those who enjoy the Lord's blessing and those who do not. What Jesus has done is to melt those religious class divisions before the man's very eyes, displaying the human race as one family, created in God's image.
Prayer For The Day
God of compassion and endless caring,
May we be so blessed as to discover, in our lives,
some small measure of your life-giving, world-conquering love.
In the days to come, as we encounter others --
some of them people like us, others very different --
may our attention linger not only on their external circumstances,
but may we meet also the Christ who dwells within. Amen.
To Illustrate
The love for equals is a human thing -- of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.
The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing -- the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.
The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing -- to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
And then there is the love for the enemy -- love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer.
This is God's love. It conquers the world.
-- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1985)
***
The challenge, then, is to recognize that the world is about two things: differentiation and communion. The challenge is to seek a unity that celebrates diversity, to unite the particular with the universal, to recognize the need for roots while insisting that the point of roots is to put forth branches. What is intolerable is for differences to become idolatrous. No human being's identity is exhausted by his or her gender, race, ethnic origin, national loyalty, or sexual orientation. All human beings have more in common than they have in conflict, and it is precisely when what they have in conflict seems overwhelming that what they have in common needs most to be affirmed. James Baldwin described us well: "Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other."
-- William Sloane Coffin, from The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality (Aldershot, United Kingdom: Dartmouth, 1991)
***
Diversity may be both the hardest thing to live with and the most dangerous thing to be without.
-- William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005)
