Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 10, Year C

July 15, 2007

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Bentonville

Gospel:

Luke 10: 25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He 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." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus 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. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He 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. The 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.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

Jesus, in conversation with the lawyer, acknowledges the wisdom contained within the law we heard in Deuteronomy: “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.” 

This would seem enough – enough of a challenge for anyone desiring to live a Godly life, but the lawyer pressed on, inspired by his legalistic training, saying, “Okay, love your neighbor… but exactly who is my neighbor?”  But instead of answering the question directly, Jesus tells him the parable of the Good Samaritan.

When we have a parable as familiar as this, we run the risk of thinking we know the point and how it’s going to end. So we don’t really listen to its telling.  We decide in advance that the lesson is something about being kind to your enemies or maybe an expansion of the notion of neighbor. These aren’t easily learned lessons, to be sure, but so readily concluding that this is the message that Jesus is teaching, may compel us to speed past a deeper, less familiar implication.  We run the danger of overlooking that this is the story of a Jew, accepting aid from the enemy – a story in which arrogance is abandoned.

Jesus is always upping the ante - first telling us to be kind to our neighbor, then redefining the concept of neighbor to include our enemies.  And then hardest of all, telling us to accept the kindness of enemies and recognize their humanity.  Jesus isn’t just stretching the idea of neighbor, extending neighborliness to those beyond the confines of our tribe.  Jesus is pushing the listener beyond that.   He is asking the lawyer to first recognize the goodness of the action of the enemy and then to emulate him. – “Go and do likewise”.

As Walter Wink said, “If God is compassionate toward us with all our unredeemed evil, then God must treat our enemies the same way.  As we begin to acknowledge our own inner shadow, we become tolerant of the shadow of others.  As we begin to love the enemy within, we develop the compassion we need to love the enemy without.”

What is so remarkable about this parable isn’t that some religious types passed by a wounded guy in the ditch.  Religious people, like non-religious people, often ignore the need that surrounds them.  It wasn’t even particularly extraordinary that the Samaritan showed such kindness to the half dead man.  It was admirable, but nor unheard of to show kindness to strangers.  The impact of the story, for the lawyer, and for everyone who listened to the parable was that the traveler was a Samaritan, and he was showing kindness to a Jew.  This traveler, considered an enemy of the Jewish people, had revealed himself as selfless, brave, and compassionate – an exemplary human being. 

Being a Samaritan doesn’t mean much to us, but in first century Palestine, it is the fact that this man was a Samaritan that would have garnered his listener’s attention.  In order for us to understand how a Jew in Jesus’ day would have reacted to the parable, imagine instead that the story was told this way:

But a member of Alkaida while traveling came near the wounded American; and when the Shiite insurgent saw the American, he was moved with pity. The Hamas leader went to the American and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then the radical Muslim cleric put the American on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day the Taliban member  took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of this American; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.'  What if instead of Samaritan we read: Iranian, Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, Islamic Fundamentalist, North Korean Communist, all of the people we are taught to believe are our enemies - those people that our government  characterizes as evil, inhuman and incapable of behaving with kindness.  Those we are taught to hate, and Jesus teaches us to love.

The lawyer who came to Jesus had it right.  He knew the law.  He knew that he was asked to “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 the lawyer already knew that he was commanded to love his neighbor as himself. 

But what Jesus taught him was that his neighbor, just to the north of Judea, was also capable of love.  Jesus recognized that the Samaritan worshiped the same god as the Jew.  And Jesus was calling on his followers to see that within the heart of the hated Samaritan was the same God-given impulse to express love and compassion for all humankind. 

During the harsh winter of 2005 thousands of low-income people in Boston and New York were offered heating oil at well below market prices by Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, a man widely regarded by the U.S. government as an enemy. Instead of accepting the offer with gratitude, our government characterized the gift as an attempt to embarrass the current administration – and it might have been.  But I’m left to imagine how relations might have improved between our two countries if we had laid down our arrogance and accepted the offer with gratitude.

This past fall the “Keep a Child Alive Foundation” brought a group of children to New York, the Agape Choir, from an orphanage in Durham, South Africa – an orphanage devoted to the care of children whose parents had died of AIDS.  Their orphanage had burned and the choir, accompanied by Paul Simon, Alicia Keys, and Usher, sang rhythmic South African tunes and raised a million dollars to rebuild their burned out home.  The story doesn’t end here.  Returning to Africa, and discovering that they had more than enough money to reconstruct the orphanage and school, the children decided that they should send a portion of the funds to American children in Louisiana  and Mississippi - children whose homes and schools had been destroyed by Katrina.  An act of unselfishness, of kindness, from children of one of the poorest countries in the world to the children of the richest. A beautiful thing, but I wonder how our government, a government that failed to respond to the basic needs of its citizens in a time of disaster, reacted to news that children with nothing were responding in ways that a government with everything refused to do. 

Now, I have to bring this home a little – from the seemingly remote world of geopolitics to the happenings on West Central Avenue, in downtown Bentonville. Our neighbors, just outside this door, have opened their home to us.  It was only a few weeks ago when Pastor Jean told me that a number of her parishioners had asked, “Why don’t we share our church with the Episcopalians?”  And now we are here.  Our willingness to accept this act of kindness, their hospitality, their neighborliness, will be a measure of our understanding of the depth of the story of the Good Samaritan.  Now we are familiar enough with the Lutherans to know that they are not our enemies.  We know them to be compassionate, generous people.  Our challenge will be to accept their generosity, their hospitality, in a spirit of thankfulness. May we recognize within the Lutheran community the spirit of the Good Samaritan.  And may God grant us the humility to receive this blessing.