7.14.19
Luke 10: 25-37
Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace, and peace to you from God our Creator and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Good Samaritan. The story with the man in the ditch, the priest with no heart, the Saramatin hero, the timeless question…Who is my Neighbor?
I don’t know when this story, told by none other than Jesus, became commonplace for me. Over the years of Sunday School, maybe. But as a church culture, we do kind of expect that this is one of the stories that you hear again and again. I hope you’ve heard it before, maybe you want to subtly turn over your bulletin and review it one more time.
I think this story really took root in my heart when I was a freshman in High School. This would be the year my Dad decided to step down from running the Performing Arts Center in our little town so he could be home more. He knew it was likely his last year directing the high school musical and he gave it all he had, he chose Godspell that year. If you don’t know your musical theater, that’s ok. Godspell is actually a musical setting of the gospel of Matthew with stunning music and many parables acted out. The 12 students cast as disciples were tasked with reimagining every parable. They had to analyze and study and put a modern, or more engaging style on each parable. They did amazing, creative work.
Watching the older students work wonders with the script, I fell in love with what was re-titled, the parable of the Good Samara-Tin Man! The students had taken the parable of the “Good Samaritan” and reimagined it using the characters of the Wizard of Oz. This new take forever etched the different characters into my heart, the cowardly lion who did not stop, even Toto scurried past, the poor scarecrow beaten in the ditch. It was the Good Samara-Tin man who stopped to help his neighbor.
Why this story? Why is this story so central to the Christian narrative and faith? I don’t think the drama inherent in it is the reason Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. I actually think it is the questions asked of Jesus by the lawyer that tell us why this story is so, so important. So worthy of being heard every year in Sunday School and studied and pondered often by every person of faith.
The lawyer in this story is not a lawyer in the modern day sense. He is an expert in the law, in God’s law to be exact. He would have been trained in a seminary, been tested thoroughly on his knowledge of all that God’s law states in the first five books of the Bible, or the Torah. Knowing that this man was an expert on what was described in God’s law to live a righteous and upstanding life, it is fascinating that the first question he poses to Jesus is this…Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Now, maybe he’s just baiting Jesus, trying to trip him up. But for some reason, when I read his questions right now, I hear a man having a faith epiphany! He knows ALL of God’s law…and yet this question of earning eternal life is still burning within. Maybe he’s been listening closely to all that Jesus is teaching and he realizes that God’s law is as holy as it’s ever been, but the fact that God became vulnerable and took on human form in this Jesus means that God is doing something new. Something bigger, something more than even the law stated in the Torah can hold.
Jesus answers the man’s question, pointing him back to the law. And the lawyer, with all his good learnin’ instantly recites the great commandment, 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 neighbour as yourself.’. Yes! Jesus says…do that and you’ll have it all figured out! Love God, love neighbor. Love God, love neighbor.
But the lawyer is still curious, still needing more because his God-fearing, Bible expert heart is being broken open and he needs help and guidance. Who is my neighbor?
The lawyer is asking heart burning, faith crisis, type questions. Have you ever done that? Have you ever had an encounter in life that leads you to question everything you know and have been trained to believe? If so you know that ache of the heart, the disorienting feeling of seeing the same old story or the same old person in a brand new way. With each new question, the lawyer is trying to figure out again and again how to live out God’s kingdom in the world. Question asking is faithfulness, it is when we think we’ve already figured out the answers that we have begun living like the priest and the levite in the story.
In response to these questions, Jesus tells the story of a lifetime.
A man is beaten. We don’t know where he comes from, the color of his skin, if he’s rich or poor, good or evil. He’s just a man, beaten and robbed and left for dead. The first person to pass by the man in need is a priest! A person who has taken vows to the Word of God — where there are repeated commands to welcome the stranger, to care for the refugee, to love the neighbor as self. Still he passed by. Some scholars think he was following purification laws and that’s why he didn’t want to touch or help the bloody man in the ditch. If that explanation is right, then we know the priest clung to his religion rather than being moved by compassion for the actual person right there before him.
Jesus goes another step further in the story by adding a Levite. Levites came from the priestly line — so not an actual priest but the one tribe that was really religious. Same story, he clung to whatever rules or laws justified him walking past. Religion rather than compassion.
Now here is one more important element to the story. Just in case that poor lawyer wasn’t having enough of a faith crisis as the to law-abiding men in Jesus’ story made a bad choice. Now Jesus says that a Samaritan is the person who showed compassion. Over the thousands of years, the word Samaritan has a positive connotation for you and me, we name elder homes the Good Samaritan just to really show how much we like the title and how it stands for taking care of others. But for that Jewish lawyer and all the other Jews sitting with Jesus that, hearing that Jesus cast the Samaritan as the compassionate one awful, full of ethnic tension, full of hatred and the most wretched reputation. If Jesus were here telling the story he would likely have said something like the Taliban stopped to help the man in the ditch. It was that offensive.
No one who hears this story gets to skate by unchallenged by mercy. All our human folly gets put on that road with the suffering stranger.
Religion versus mercy.
The priest and the Levite had their religion which actually prevented them from helping.
The Samaritan had mercy.
Someone recently said to me that they are spiritual rather than religious, I responded by saying, “Me, too!”. When our understanding of who God is allows us to cling to rules and laws rather than to act with utter compassion and mercy, we are clinging to religion — we are clinging to the system rather than listening to the heart of God.
Brothers and sisters, that distinction is important. It is so important that when a lawyer started asking honest questions about how to live as a Christian Jesus told him to love God and when the lawyer asked him how to do that Jesus told this story. This story that over and over again shows that God’s heart is merciful. To love God is to love the one we’d rather ignore, to love God is to get in the ditch and start dressing the wounds. To love God is to live with mercy.
Being a person of faith is to have a real relationship with the Living Lord. The relationship is not the exact same from your childhood, through adolescence, early marriage to long marriage, loss, sickness, promotion, wealth. The moments of your living will change and challenge your faith. So every day we can wake up and act just like this lawyer. Asking Jesus for guidance, clarification, help, inspiration. And here is the good news…the mercy that Jesus pulls us toward in this story? Is the exact mercy that we are given by God through Jesus. We won’t perfectly love God and love neighbor, Jesus knows that all too well. So we are given mercy…mercy that allows us to then be freed from human division and agenda and instead be moved in the holy, merciful ways of God.
In the story of the Good Samaritan Jesus moves the listener from the law to mercy.
What question would you have to ask Jesus to be moved from law to mercy in your own heart?
What question would you ask Jesus to be moved from law to mercy in your home? In this church?
What question would we ask Jesus to be moved from law to mercy in our country? In the world?
And could we be so faithful as to listen to his holy, transformative response?
If we could have the heart of the eager lawyer and ask those honest, faith crisis type of questions…well, that openness and curiosity might just be the pathway to avoiding the ditches and instead of living a merciful life.
Jesus asked the lawyer and asks of each one of us…Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The lawyer said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’
Jesus says, ‘Go and do likewise.’
Go and do likewise.
May it be so. Amen.