Luke 10:25-37

Neighbors are Everywhere

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Good Samaritan.   Neither Jesus, nor his audience would have named the hero of his parable a Good Samaritan; that title came in later centuries.   When you are I think of the Good Samaritan, we may think of hospitals, charitable societies or churches.   I got over 14,000 hits on Google when I looked for the Good Samaritan this week.   The Good Samaritan has become any charitably minded passerby who stops to help.   We’ve lost just how radical this story was when Jesus told first told it, how much Jesus would have offended his original listeners.  Let’s see if we can recover some of that.

First of all, Jesus didn’t just tell this story out of the blue.   It was a lawyer who put all this in motion, by asking Jesus a question.  “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”   He calls Jesus Teacher and Jesus acts like a Teacher by answering a question with a question.   “What is written in the law?  What do you read there?”   The lawyer comes back with a really good answer, he recites a verse that sums up the law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”   Good answer!   Then he adds the second part, something that Jesus talked about a lot, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself!”  Jesus said, this is the right answer!  You get the feeling that Jesus is not really that interested in this conversation and is ready to move on.  

But the lawyer, not knowing when to leave well enough alone, wants a legal definition, “Ah!  But who is my neighbor?”   The great Presbyterian writer and Preacher, Frederick Buechner said that “He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something on the order of: "A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever."  Endquote.   That was language a lawyer understood and liked.   Jesus gave him something else.

First of all, Jesus said, it was the Jericho-Jerusalem road.   It was always the Jericho-Jerusalem road.  Seventeen miles long, a change of 3600 feet in elevation over those seventeen miles, twisting, turning, climbing, diving road.   Lots of places for robbers to lie in wait along that road.    If you traveled this road alone, you might as well hang a sign around your neck that read, “Rob me, please!”  Hearing about another robbery on the Jerusalem road?   Like hearing about another shooting in Omaha.   It happened all the time.

So it was a robbery on the Jericho road, the man beaten, robbed, left for dead.    But he wasn’t quite dead, was he?   And three other travelers came down that road and this is what they did.  The first one was a priest, the second a Levite.   Both of them were professional workers in the Temple, with a capital “T” in Jerusalem.  The Temple, with a capital “T”, was the place where the people could encounter God, could make sacrifice to and pray to God and make sure than they could be heard.   It was very, very, important that people who worshiped in the Temple, with a capital “T”, and the even more important that the people who worked in the Temple, with a capital “T” in Jerusalem remain pure, uncontaminated.   What was the main source of contamination?   Other people!  People who weren’t so pure, who didn’t wash carefully, women, non-Jews who didn’t eat pure food, and blood!  Blood was a big source of contamination!   Animal blood, other people’s blood, your own blood!   So much contamination! 

So these two Temple, with a capital “T”, workers were traveling along the Jericho road, saw this poor unfortunate beaten, robbed, barely alive, and they did what they were expected to do.  They preserved their purity for the Temple.   They didn’t expose themselves to this stranger’s wounds, his blood, his contamination.  They passed by.  They may or may not have managed a “Tsk, tsk.”    But they kept walking and kept uncontaminated.

And then a Samaritan came by.  Like I said, Samaritan has come to mean something entirely different to us than it did in Jesus time.  To you and to me, a Samaritan is someone who helps out, who lends a hand.  In Jesus time, a Samaritan was not a person that people in Jesus’ circle spoke of glowing terms.

Some of you may remember a few weeks ago when I talked about Ahab and Jezebel and how they built a new capital city for the Northern kingdom of Israel, that capital city was Samaria.   Eventually, Samaria became known as a name for the entirety of the Northern Kingdom, so Samaritans were Jews, but the Jews of the Southern Kingdom, the kind of Jews that Jesus and his disciples and this lawyer were, didn’t think of Samaritans as real Jews, they were fallen away Jews.   Samaritans didn’t worship in the Temple, like real Jews did.  Samaritans were worse than any Gentile could ever be, they were descendants of Jacob, but they were descendants gone bad, spoiled by generations of falling away from the proper worship of God in the Temple with a capital “T”.

But it was a Samaritan, according to Jesus, a dirty, stinking Samaritan who stopped.   And not only did he stop, he bathed and bandaged the beaten man’s wounds, put him on his own animal and took him to an inn and took care of him.  Then, when the next day, the Samaritan gave the innkeeper some money and told he to care for the man.   He also told the innkeeper to keep track of what he spent and when he returned, he would repay whatever he spent.

So Jesus told this story and turned to the lawyer and said, “Now, which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”   What could the lawyer say?  “The one who showed him mercy.”   Jesus said, “Go, and do likewise.”

Frederick Buechner says, “The lawyer’s response is left unrecorded.”   No kidding.  The lawyer had wanted a legal definition, where does my neighborhood stop?  Jesus gave him a Mr. Rogers definition, neighbors are everywhere?   (Mr. Rogers got his definition from Jesus!)  Jesus has just said quite a lot of very scandalous things in that short little story.  Jesus was very good at that.  First of all, he said that a Samaritan was better than a priest and a Levite, God’s own servants, at showing who God intended for us to love one another.  Jesus was saying that a Samaritan, someone who didn’t even pray in the right place, in the right way, was just as good, no better, at showing God’s good will in how we should treat each other.   That if we truly want to show our love for God, to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength, we could do no better than to emulate a Samaritan, a Samaritan, than anyone else.

I read online this week a story about a test being given at the Harvard Divinity School.  It could be at any divinity school or seminary, I would hope not San Francisco Theological Seminary, but this test was at Harvard. Here’s the story.   “It was a very clever test.  Now, when you go to Harvard, you have to be smart, and these smart theological students took a course entitled, “Christians and Society.”  The professor had created a test that was three hours long.  It was a tough test on “Being a Moral Christian in An Immoral Society.”  Half way through the test, he arranged for a break, where the students could take a ten-minute break.  The students were to leave the room for ten minutes, get fresh air, and then come back and take the last hour and a half of the test.  The students were writing as fast and furiously as they could, writing down all their knowledge of morality, what does it mean to be a moral person in an immoral society.  But now it was break time and the students went out into the courtyard, where there was ice tea and cookies.  Out there in the courtyard was another part of the test, although the students didn’t know it. This was the real test. There was a man, all beaten up, there in the courtyard.  He was there, and the students looked at him and drank their tea and ate their cookies and said to themselves, “What should we do?  We have this test to take.”  All the students went back into the classroom to finish the written part of the text.  The professor flunked them all.”   Endquote.  They failed the test, because they missed what the real test was.  The real test was not what they could write down on a page, the real test was what they would do when confronted by the sight of someone who had been waylaid on the road to Jericho.

We don’t have to be clever Harvard students to miss what our faith requires of us when it is staring us in the faith.   We can all get so wrapped up in studying that we miss the real test.

Last night as I put the final touches on this sermon, the news broke in the George Zimmerman case.   And I could not help but think, of two people who encountered each other on a road, late at night.    How you reach out to a person you encounter with a fist or a gun or a helping hand, can have a very different effect on the outcome of the meeting.   And as I read through of all things my Twitter feed last night, I found a quote from of all people, Tom Crabtree, tight end for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  “How cool would it be to live in a world where George Zimmerman offered Trayvon Martin a ride home to get him out of the rain that night.”  Endquote.  How cool would it be to live in a world where Samaritans and Jews and Whites and Blacks and Asians and Hispanics could all live as if we are all children of a loving God who created us all to be neighbors.   Go and do likewise, that meddling Jesus tells us.  Go and do likewise.  Amen.