Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered July 15, 2007
25Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27He answered, “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.” 28And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” 29But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30Jesus replied, “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. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Parsing the Law
The flood of June 18 struck here in our home town just as our Covenant Presbyterian Church mission team had begun to tear sheetrock and wiring out of homes in New Orleans as part of our Gulf Coast flood relief efforts. We called our neighbors, friends and families to find out what had happened, who had lost their loved ones, and what kind of damage we would find when we returned. Casey’s apartment is in a flooded area, so the irony took on another dimension as he depended on our friend and neighbor Ron Roberts to tend his flooded apartment even as we worked on somebody else’s flood-damaged home.
Though we didn’t say it aloud, we felt it – shouldn’t we be home with our neighbors instead of here in New Orleans?
Those hundreds of miles of separation from our home brought to a point Jesus’ answer to the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?”
The story of the Good Samaritan is like a lawyer joke and a clergy joke all in one.
In Jesus’ time, there were stories about Samaritans that were roughly parallel to Aggie jokes in Texas. The difference is that they weren’t good natured, and they weren’t published by Samaritans the way Aggie jokes are published by Texas A & M University press. They were hard-hitting ethnic jokes that took no prisoners.
The funny thing about Jesus’ parable is that it turns the joke around. It’s more like an ethnic joke I ran into in Ecuador that sounds like it’s about a group of people called Pastusos, (people from the area of Tulcan, near the border between Ecuador and Columbia,) but then it has a reversal at the punch line. Here’s my favorite:
A Pastuso bought a brand new car and drove it to Quito, the capital of Ecuador and parked it downtown. A man in a uniform ran up to him and said, “You can’t park there, it’s not allowed!”
“Sure I can,” the Pastuso said. “Nobody else is using this parking place.”
“No, you don’t understand,” the man in the uniform said. “The politicos are meeting today and they will be here any minute.”
“It’s O.K.,” the Pastuso said. “My car has a security alarm!”
In Jesus’ culture, when somebody told a Samaritan story, the people would expect that the Samaritan would be the butt of the joke. The surprise here comes when a lawyer asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered with the story of the clueless clergy (the priest and the Levite) and the Samaritan who stopped to help the robbed and beaten man left for dead. The clergy get skewered for putting their fear of losing their ceremonial cleanliness standards above the law of loving neighbor, and Luke pokes fun at the lawyer for trying to parse the law. He had just recited the Great Commandment, “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself,” but lawyers must have had the same reputation then as now. His question is a way of searching for a loophole: “Exactly who is this neighbor I must love as myself?”
If you say the phrase to me, “Story of the Good Samaritan,” I immediately think of what Jesus said at the end of the story: “Go and do likewise;” in other words, go and be kind to neighbors in need, as the Samaritan was. The obvious point of the parable that leaps out is the answer to the questions, “How do we act?” and “What should we do to be good Christian neighbors?” That’s a good thing to keep in mind, but in leaping to the ethical demand of the parable, I wonder if we fail to address the deeper question Jesus answers. It’s not “How?” or “What?” but “Who?” “Who is my neighbor?”
When Jesus tells the story of the clergy walking past the injured man and the Samaritan stopping to help and asks the lawyer, “Who, then, was the neighbor?” the obvious answer is, “The Samaritan!” But, the man cannot bring himself even to say the word “Samaritan.” He can only say, “the one who showed kindness.” Whereas Jesus described the Samaritan in relation to his culture and religion (different from Jesus, different from and despised by the man to whom he was speaking, and probably everyone who was overhearing) the lawyer could not bring himself to say “Samaritan.” He could only describe him by his behavior, “the one who showed kindness.”
I’ve been trying to find a parallel in our society for a Samaritan. The difference between Jesus’ audience and the Samaritans was ethnic, class, religious, and political. The Samaritans were the descendants of the people who had been left behind when, five hundred years before Jesus told this story, the Babylonians deported all the members of the educated and privileged class and left behind only unskilled and illiterate laborers. While the deported exiles were in Babylon writing down the oral tradition of the Psalms and the stories of Genesis and such, the Jews left back in Samaria were intermarrying with Babylonian conquerors and coming up with innovations to worship that mixed in the traditions of their new family members’ many gods. So, when the exile was over and the scholars and architects, lawyers, doctors and clergy came back to Jerusalem, they looked over at their Samaritan cousins and said, “You are not part of us and we are not part of you. We don’t even recognize what you believe as Judaism. So, you stay over there and we’ll make our home here, far, far from you.”
The closest I can come to a modern analogy is something going on in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. In Hoover, which is to Birmingham what Highland Park mixed with upper-crust Plano would be to Dallas, some of their new immigrant neighbors want to build a place of worship. They’ve been in borrowed space. Now that they’ve reached ninety members, they want to build a place of their own, and they’re getting vocal and even vicious resistance. They are Shiite Muslims. They want to build a mosque.[1]
It’s not a perfect analogy. The Shiite Muslims have only been in Hoover for a few years, so the feelings of resentment against them are more from fear of the new and unknown rather than a generations-long ethnic hatred. But, if we can understand the feelings of the long-time Hoover residents, how they feel resentful, threatened, angry and fearful of their Shiite Muslim neighbors as they contemplate living in the shadow of a minaret towering over their neighborhood, we might get some insight into how Jesus’ audience felt when they heard the word “Samaritan.”
Who is your neighbor? Jesus’ question continues to stand at the center of Christian discipleship, since love of God and love of neighbor are cited by Jesus as the summary of the law and the prophets. When we think of the question as Jesus answered it, with the part of neighbor taken by the Samaritan, the other, the rejected and despised, it makes us think of the possibility of indiscriminate neighborliness. Jesus points us toward our neighbors down the street and those on the other side of town, those who speak our language and those who do not, those who believe as we do and those who do not, those who live near and those who are far away.
A couple of months ago, a New York City construction worker named Wesley Autrey lived out his fifteen minutes of fame. You may remember the event that landed him on CNN every fifteen minutes for a whole news cycle. He was standing
“on a subway platform with his two young daughters, ages four and six, waiting on a train. Suddenly another man on the platform, [first-year film student Cameron Hollepeter,] apparently suffering from a seizure, stumbled and fell off the platform down onto the subway tracks. Just at that moment the headlights of a rapidly approaching train appeared in the subway tunnel. Acting quickly, and with no thought for himself, Wesley Autrey jumped down onto the tracks to rescue the stricken man by dragging him out of the way of the train. But he immediately realized that the train was coming too fast and there wasn't time to pull the man off the tracks. So Wesley pressed the man into the hollowed-out space between the rails and spread his own body over him to protect him as the train passed over the two of them. The train cleared Wesley by mere inches, coming close enough to leave grease marks on his knit cap. When the train came to a halt, Wesley called up to the frightened onlookers on the platform. "There are two little girls up there. Let them know their Daddy is OK."[2]
I think what is so extraordinary about this story, more than the fact of the racial difference between hero and rescued, is that until that moment, Autrey and Hollepeter had never met.
A story like this makes us wonder. Would I, could I, should I, do the same thing in similar circumstances? It’s almost too frightening to consider. And, it raises all kinds of complex ethical questions. If Wesley Autrey had had time to think through all his options and the danger in which he put himself, and the possibility of leaving his daughters fatherless, he might well have acted differently. As it happened, he had no time to think things through. Unlike the lawyer to whom Jesus addressed his parable, Autrey had no time to think, “Hmm, I wonder, does this white guy having a convulsion qualify as a neighbor? Does he live here, or is he maybe a visitor or an illegal immigrant? Do we have the same religion? I wonder if he has a confederate flag hanging in his apartment. He could be racist for all I know. Will he be grateful?” If he had wanted to, he could have found all kinds of reasons to talk himself out of it. But, he didn’t. He acted as a neighbor on the spur of the moment.
Very few people will find themselves in the circumstances of having to choose whether or not to jump in front of a moving train to rescue a stranger. But, the story Jesus tells places before us a question all of us answer every day, “Who is my neighbor?” And in much more subtle ways, our answer to that question can determine how we treat the strangers we meet.
When we heard of the flood in Sherman, and we were in New Orleans, we couldn’t help but wonder, “Should we be back home instead?” But, when we walked into a restaurant, sweaty and grungy and covered in gypsum from the sheetrock, the local people stood and applauded. “Thank you for helping to rebuild our home city,” they said.
Last Friday, I got a telephone call from a representative from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. He said, “Just want to let you know I’ll be back in Sherman and Gainesville next week to look at how we can help with long-term recovery. Be thinking about how we can be a good neighbor to you.”
We struggle when we hear the story of the Good Samaritan, to wonder when it happens to us, will we be the priest and the Levite, walking by on the other side to stay out of trouble, or will we be a neighbor and do what Jesus calls us to do?
But, there’s another part of this story. It’s nice to know, too, when we are the guy in the ditch, beat up and left for dead, that a neighbor is a neighbor, Jesus said, near or far. And all that Jesus calls us to do, he has already done for us, and continues to do for us, through the hands and hearts of neighbors near and far.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] The Rev. Shannon Webster, personal email, July 15, 2007.
[2] The Rev. Dr. Thomas G. Long, “Meeting the Good Samaritan” Day 1 July 15, 2007. www.day1.net.