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| "The Good Samaritan" by Dinah Roe Kendall (b.1923). |
Luke
10: 25-38
8th Sunday after
Pentecost/ 14th July 2013
The Parable of the Good Samaritan—we
know this text so well. Perhaps too well.
So well that it’s difficult to hear anything new. If this is true, then
how do we hear something fresh in such a familiar text? How do we listen for
the Word in the words when we’ve heard these words so many times before?
We might hear something new, something
fresh and relevant and life-giving if we realize and remember one thing: this
isn’t an “example story” with a moral.[1] If
you come away from this text thinking, “The Samaritan did a good deed, go and
imitate,” then you haven’t heard the text.
If we believe that Jesus is essentially a teacher of morality, providing
us with an ethic to follow, to imitate, then we’re not hearing the Gospel. And, I would say, when this happens we’re
very far from the Kingdom.
Yet how many sermons have we heard
over the years, how many Church School lessons have held up the actions of the
Samaritan as the ideal, as someone we should all emulate and aspire to be like?
I agree with David Henson who says we
have made this text “into little more than a mushy morality tale about random
acts of kindness to strangers….”[2]
He insists that, “We have whitewashed this radical parable into a fantasy of
the privileged and wealthy in which we believe Christ calls us only to apply
bandages, throw money at the pain and injustice in the world, and trust it is
enough.” Such a reading, he says, “justifies, but also glorifies drive-by
charity as the pinnacle of Christ’s command to love thy neighbor.” [3] I would add, these moralistic readings reduce
the Christian life to moralism, they reduce the Gospel to essentially an ethic. This approach is insidious, I believe,
contributing to the decline of the Church in the West. It’s also a strategy
used by the Church to get people to behave in a socially accepted manner, as a
tool of conformity and convention. And society loves it when the Church
sanctions convention and conformity. Go to church and be nice to others –
some think that’s what it means to be Christian. Well, it isn’t.
This is not an “example story,” not
a morality tale. It’s a parable.
And Jesus was masterful in the use of them. If we really hear the parable about the
Samaritan it can’t be used by the religious to endorse convention.
Parables pack a punch. Parables are supposed to generate an
experience, touch us deeply, hit us in the
gut, and knock us off our feet. They
are very similar to a Buddhist koan, designed to provoke, such as, “What face
did you have before you were born?”
Parables make us think. They force us to wrestle. They give us headaches and mess with the way
we view the world. They are
intentionally disorienting, which is probably why we want to turn them into
morality tales. But then they wouldn’t
shock us and they’re meant to shock.
The great American writer Flannery
O’Connor (1925-1964), a Roman Catholic who lived and wrote in what she called
the “Christ-haunted South,” that is, Protestant
South, is known for her memorable characters and disturbing images. Her short story “Revelation” is probably the
single best description of the disturbing, unsettling, and transforming aspect
of grace that I’ve ever read.[4] O’Connor said, “You have to make your vision
apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing
you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”
Her stories are hard, “but they are hard,” she said, “because there is nothing
harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.” [5] In order for us to be properly oriented to
reality, disorientation is necessary;
disorientation is required for grace to break through, the kind of
life-changing experience that enables us to be graceful, to show mercy.
Why does Jesus share this parable?
Because he’s being tested by the lawyer and the lawyer is trying to justify
himself. He’s not a lawyer in our sense of
one today. The law in question is not
Roman law or civil law, but the Law,
Torah, the Jewish Law, the Ten Commandments and all the other associated laws
that go with it. The Torah attorney
knows the law; he’s an expert, a professional.
He knows it inside and out. He
knows what the text says and what it doesn’t say. The lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher –
Rabbi – what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Being a good teacher Jesus throws the
question back at him, “What do you read there?” And he dutifully answers,
because he knows the answer. “You shall love the LORD your God with all your
heart,…soul,…strength,…and mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus tells him, “You have given the right
answer; do this, and you will live.” The
Rabbi asked his question, received an answer—sort of. Jesus answered correctly—sort of.
So why did the lawyer not stop
here? Lawyers and trials, tests,
testimonies and cross-examinations have filled the airwaves this week. The Torah attorney should have known better,
“asking a witness in open court without knowing in advance what the answer will
be.”[6] The
lawyer should have remained quiet, but he didn’t because he was beginning to
see that Jesus wasn’t the one on trial—he was on trial. The lawyer asked the question, but Jesus
never really answered it. He responded
with a question and then affirmed the lawyer’s response and then Jesus finishes
up, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Do you hear the shift? You have
given the right answer. The lawyer senses this because then the text
says, “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my
neighbor?’” He goes on the defensive.
That response—“And who is my
neighbor?”—opens a window deep into the lawyer’s psyche. The lawyer is not a bad man. He’s smart, well educated, has a respectable
profession. He has standing and
authority in his community. He’s a
religious person, a faithful worshipper of Yahweh. He’s fairly conventional. He’s self-assured
about his place in the world, his perspective on faith and society. His world is clearly demarcated, divided up,
neat, in order: he knows what’s holy and what’s profane, what’s Jewish and
what’s Gentile, who is in and who is out, who is clean and who is impure. And it’s obvious that his religious
perspective helps to make sure that the dividing lines are solid and
clear. So why does the lawyer test
Jesus? Because he senses, correctly,
that Jesus is messing with the status quo.
A lot of Jesus’ ministry and actions are anything but conventional; they do not
conform to values of the moral majority (often the majority isn’t moral). The
guy has funny ideas. On the surface
Jesus’ response to the lawyer is very conventional, traditional in many respects. Indeed, the lawyer looked to the tradition to
make sure concepts such as “love God” and “love neighbor” remained fixed and
stable, “a system of religious justification, and, like most of us, he had
found a sweet spot in that religious system that allowed him to be satisfied
with himself and his life.”[7] The lawyer used his faith to justify the status quo. So that when the lawyer
asked, “And who is my neighbor?” he probably expected Jesus to reinforce things
as they are. And that’s when Jesus
unleashed this bombshell of a parable into his neatly ordered world.
“A man was going down from Jerusalem
to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and
went away, leaving him half dead….” You know the rest. First a priest, a Jewish priest, a religious professional
comes across him, sees the man in the road and intentionally walks on the
opposite side in order to pass him. A
Levite, a religious lay associate, not a priest, comes along and he, too,
avoids the man. Neither wants to be
bothered. They also don’t want to risk
contamination, because if he were unclean, a Gentile, then they would have to
go through a process of purification.
And if he were dead, then they would have to go through an even
lengthier process of purification. They obviously
feel that they have no obligation to him; he is not their neighbor. But then a Samaritan comes along.
We need to pause here to remember that
by Jesus’ time Jews and Samaritans hated each other for a thousand years, a
millennium of political rivalry, ethnic hostility, and religious bigotry seared
into the psyche of this people. They
despised each other.
So this is the real shocker, the
twist in the parable, that it’s this religious outsider, this unclean nobody—from
the lawyer’s perspective—this untouchable, this nonhuman who comes near the man
in the road.[8] “And when he saw him,” Jesus tells us, “he
was moved with pity.” The use of the word pity
is a weak translation of the Greek, splagchnizomai,
meaning to be moved in one’s gut. It’s a gut-wrenching emotional response. It’s a depth of feeling toward what he
encounters along the road. It’s not
reason or thinking that moves him to action, it’s feeling that moves him to action.
With little thought he goes to the man in the street and risks
contamination by touching him and caring for his wounds, pouring oil and
wine. He puts him on his own animal, potentially contaminating
his animal. The Samaritan provides
lodging for him. Gives the innkeeper
plenty of money to care for him (two days’ worth of salary)—trusts the innkeeper, who’s under no
obligation to him. “Take care of him…,” he says, and when I return, if you need
more money, I’ll give it to you then. “Which
of these three, do you think was a neighbor…?”
The lawyer gets the point, although did you notice that he can’t even
bring himself to say Samaritan, an unclean word? He simply says, “The one who
shows him mercy.” Go and do likewise.
Can you see why this isn’t an
example story or a morality tale? Can
you see that it’s not really about the Samaritan? It’s not about imitating the Samaritan. Our
focus needs be upon the lawyer, the one who hears such a disturbing and morally
offensive story such as this. Focusing
on the lawyer helps us to see that at some level we are all just like this
lawyer, intent on justifying ourselves.
We’re on trial.
Tom Long is one of the best
preachers and writers about preaching in the church today. His sermons and his analysis of any text are
stunning. He teaches at the Candler
School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. I’m grateful I had the
opportunity to study preaching with him when I was a student at Princeton
Seminary. This week I read his take on
Luke 10, which, when I was finished, left me breathless. I was tempted to just read his essay instead
of write my own sermon this week. In
fact, Tom’s sermons are often plagiarized.
I once heard Tom tell the story of the time he visited a church one
morning. On his way out after worship he
greeted the pastor and said, “Good sermon.” The preacher was flattered and
said, “Why, thank you.” To which Tom
said, “I should know. I wrote it.”
Tom really opened up the text for me,
especially the way he helped me to see that this text is really about the
lawyer. Again, the lawyer’s not a bad man;
he’s a pretty conventional fellow, he probably looked very Presbyterian (except
that he was Jewish, but you know what I mean).
And yet Jesus is very hard on him because this is a blistering parable
to have to hear. Luke says that the
lawyer “stood up to test Jesus,” stood up and blocked Jesus’ path on his way to
fulfill his calling in Jerusalem. Jesus
knows that convention often stands in the way of the Gospel. Very often it’s not the people on the left or
the right that hamper God’s movement in the world, but the people in the broad
middle, who stand behind convention and religious respectability.[9] With the telling of the parable, Tom suggests,
Jesus actually throws the lawyer into the ditch beside the Jericho road. It’s a striking contrast. Luke says, “Just then a lawyer stood up to
test Jesus,” and then Jesus offers a parable with someone thrown to the
ground. The victim left for dead in the
parable is the lawyer. Tom says, Jesus
“is not doing violence to him; he is, instead, using a parable to disclose the
man’s true condition. He is showing that
this lawyer, who thought he had a righteous place to stand, has nowhere to
stand in his own strength but is in fact, like all the rest of us, lying face
down and naked by the highway. The
lawyer wanted to be seen as already righteous, but Jesus showed instead that he
was simply a member of the human race, in desperate need of rescue. Jesus undermines the lawyer’s standing in
order to show that the lawyer, like all the rest of humanity, needs not to
stand his ground but to see the face of grace, and then to move [with Jesus],
to repent.”[10] We need to be rescued by a Samaritan. This is what grace looks like. It looks like a man who wants to “justify
himself” but is instead rescued from distress by the face of Jesus Christ. Shockingly, Jesus is the Samaritan. The work
and witness of Jesus is like the despised, unwanted Samaritan who comes with
compassion to save us.
And that’s why in the telling of
this parable, “Jesus ironically gave the lawyer a great gift, a work of
kindness, even though the lawyer may not have thought so.” Jesus invited “the lawyer to see himself in a
new way, to see himself not as one who stands at a distance and defines the
term ‘neighbor’ objectively, but as someone who might himself need to be
neighbored—as a wounded traveler in need of rescue.”[11]
“The real answer to the lawyer’s
question ‘who is my neighbor?’ is that you have no idea who your neighbor is
until you, yourself, know how needy you are, and in that need receive the
unexpected grace of being neighbored by God.”[12] Acknowledging our neediness…. Most of us don’t want to admit this. This kind of confession requires help. But the truth is: we are all needy. Everyone of us. It’s only when we stop trying to justify
ourselves, acknowledge our need, embrace our woundedness, allow our wounds to
be tended by God are we then able to have compassion toward our neighbor, extending
real mercy and grace. This way of life is more than simply being
nice to others. It means tending to the
wounds of the people we meet along life’s way, it means even entering into their wounds, whoever they
are, even if they’re “Samaritans.” It means tending to the wounds of the men,
women, and children who now sit beside you, one to the other, showing mercy,
having compassion.
And do you know what? When this happens—and every time it
happens—you discover that you’ve, somehow, stumbled, even fallen into the
Kingdom of God.
[1] As I share later in the
sermon, I am indebted to Thomas G. Long’s reflection on this text, “The Lawyer’s Second Question.” Long’s insights are infused throughout the
sermon.
[2] David Henson’s remarks
continue, “…that, at its worst buttresses the damaging and pervasive charity
industrial complex in American churches.”
[3] David R. Henson, “Jesus Doesn’t Want You to be a Good Samaritan.”
[6] Long.
[7] Long.
[8] The use of the word untouchable came to mind in light of my
recent trip to India, specifically learning about Dalit theology.
[9] This was precisely
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s (1926-1968) claim in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (April 16, 1963), addressed to the religious leaders of the community.
[10] Long.
[11] Long.
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