“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

This is probably the best known parable in the Bible. The story of the Good Samaritan. Seeing it listed in the lectionary for today gave me pause. After all, people have told this story before. They have talked about the Priest, the Levite and the Samaritan until they’ve become almost a bad joke. People have argued that this parable has the same formula as that of a morality play.

And yet, this parable isn’t your typical morality story, is it? I mean, if this parable really was just another morality tale, I think the Samaritan would be the guy in the ditch. Then we'd have a classic "love your enemies" story. You know the rules: help those in need and get bonus points because it's a Samaritan. But that's not the way Jesus tells it. In Jesus' version, the Samaritan is the one who notices – who actually sees – this beaten man and by seeing him is moved to pity. The Samaritan, that is, is the one who recognizes that when it comes to the question of who is our neighbor, there are no rules. Our neighbor, it turns out, is anyone in need. Where does such vision come from? It apparently doesn't come from one's ethnicity, one's religion, one's training, or one's station in life. How else can we explain that a Samaritan saw this when the priest and Levite did not? Having the eyes of faith to see all people are children of God and anyone in need is your neighbor must be a gift of God, it must be a matter of faith, it must start with seeing, and only then move to doing.

That I think is worth talking about. And to talk about the Good Samaritan, we must start with the lawyer who brings this parable about. He asks what was foremost on his mind “What must I do to get to heaven?” Its a question many of us have asked at one time or another. Jesus turns the question back upon the lawyer, as he tends to do, and asks what the Law says. The lawyer gives the textbook answer “You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus says “See? You know the answer. So do it”

But then the lawyer gets crafty. “Yes, but who is my neighbor?”

My neighbor.

Now, for the lawyer who tests Jesus, this identity draws lines around people and protects us from one another, but it also puts some reasonable limits on the possibly unreasonable demands of the Jewish Law he cares so much about obeying. Give me some parameters, he says to Jesus, I mean, who would it be okay not to love? After all, I'm only human…just give me a list of which people I have to take care of and who's on the outside of that line I need to draw around my community of care. Yes, yes, of course I know that I need to love God – that's a no-brainer – remember, I knew the answer to your question when you asked me what's in the Law (I am a lawyer, after all), but give me a break, okay? Who all do I need to love just as much as I love myself? Who is this neighbor whose needs and welfare need to be as important to me as my own? The question itself implies, of course, that there are people who are not my neighbor, people whom it's okay not to love.

Now, we can’t expect this question to have a simple answer.  Do you think the Jesus we know from the Gospels and from the past two thousand years of a church struggling to be faithful and from our own personal and communal relationship with him, is going to say, "Well, if you can manage to love your family and friends and maybe throw a coin at a beggar every once in awhile, that's pretty good. Just be sure to worship regularly at the temple, obey all the religious laws, and pay your pledge every year. Then you're all set – or as you put it, you'll inherit eternal life, and you'll go to heaven when you die, because, after all, you will have earned it."

No. Instead Jesus tells this oh so famous parable, which never answers the lawyer’s question. Instead, following the parable, Jesus asks a new question: "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" Jesus' question is challenging, but it is not even in line with the question asked by the lawyer. The question is no longer who my neighbor is, but who acted as a neighbor to another in need. Neighbor is no longer about classification, but about specific action.

According to N.T. Wright, "He wants to know who counts as 'neighbor.' For him, God is the God of Israel, and neighbors are Jewish neighbors. For Jesus (and for Luke, who highlights this theme), Israel's God is the God of grace for the whole world and a neighbor is anybody in need"  Jesus shifts the focus in his parable from the intent of the lawyer's question: the issue is no longer love of God and love of neighbor, but exclusively the issue of love of neighbor.

Don’t worry about who your neighbor may be. Worry instead about whether you are acting as a neighbor; especially when the likelihood, the strain, even the scandal of being one pushes us far beyond what seems desirable or imaginable. This, Jesus says, will be the benchmark of whether we love God and love our neighbor. Fail this? Walk by? Then disdain our enemy who loves when we don’t? And we expose just how little interest we have in following Jesus, and in doing what Jesus both does and commands. By extension, we also make clear what little interest we have in the reality of eternal life: Gods’ love-suffused Kingdom.

We all know the old joke: A minister had just been preaching about the need for world peace and humanitarianism. After the service, one member remarked to another on the lawn outside, "I love mankind. I've got a real heart for humanity." Then she added: "It's just PEOPLE I can't stand!" We laugh, but I think we can all relate to this on some level. Yet Jesus’ vision sees us as we are and as we are not. Love the world, but fail to love as the neighbor we are meant to be on any given day – not least towards the marginalized, the inconvenient, the unacceptable – and we fail in what matters most.

“But,” the more educated among us might protest “The Priest and the Levite couldn't touch the man they thought was dead. It was against their laws.” Which is true. They had legitimate reasons for acting as they did. Any contact with blood or a dead body would have rendered them unclean according to their purity laws. No one who was “unclean” could enter the holy places of the temple. So, walking over and touching this dying or dead man, even just to see if he was alive, was out of the question. It would have disqualified them from their religious duties.

Believe it or not, we’re not so different from them. Several years ago a group of researchers conducted an experiment in which seminary students were each told that they had been selected to help record a talk about the Good Samaritan.  The problem was that the recording was to be done in a building all the way across campus, and because of a tight schedule they would have to hurry to get there.  On the path to the other building the researchers had planted an actor playing a sick homeless man slumped in an alley, coughing and suffering.  The excited students each hurried across campus for their important assignment, and as it turned out, almost none of them turned out to actually be Good Samaritans.  Almost all of them hurried past the suffering man.  One student even stepped over the man’s body as he rushed across campus to teach about the parable of the Good Samaritan!

The seminary students, of course, were not bad people.  They were just human.  Like the priest and the Levite, they simply had other priorities that kept them from acting with compassion. Knowing the right thing to do and actually doing the right thing are two completely different things.  For instance we all value compassion. Yet how many of us act on that value when we are busy, or distracted, or have other things to worry about?

That’s what sets the Good Samaritan apart. He had plenty of reasons to do as the priest and Levite did, passing by on the other side of the road. This happened in a dangerous area. The dying man could have been a trap used to lure him into an ambush by thieves. Any number of things could have gotten in the way of his compassion yet he stopped. He did the unthinkable. He stopped, putting himself at risk. He touched the man and bandaged his wounds, rendering himself unclean. He put the beaten man on his own horse, slowing his journey on the treacherous road. The Samaritan took him to an inn and cared for him, devoting more of his precious travel time. He paid the innkeeper to take care of him indefinitely, likely costing him a fortune. Remarkably, none of these things got in the way of his compassion.

Rebecca J. Kruger Guadino adds another layer to this story: "If, indeed, the priest and the Levite fear contamination, they do so because of laws that have as their intent the protection of Israel's holiness before a holy God. But at what point does the quest for holiness violate God's commands to love? Certainly all of us in our own communities have regulations intended to safeguard our community. At what point does our allegiance to these laws jeopardize the laws the lives and well-being of our fallen neighbors? Or is it possible that loving God and loving neighbor are at some point incompatible? If the purity laws lie in the background of this story, then Jesus questions laws that purport to honor God while dishonoring God's creation."

What is most important to God? When asked this question, the lawyer didn't respond with the laws of ritual cleanliness. He answered “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself.” That takes precedence over everything else, even the other laws. We follow the law, but this parable is a clear case where you can't follow the Law and this commandment. This commandment is what matters.

Mr. Rogers who taught many of us growing up, talked about neighbors a lot. He taught children how to be neighbors to each other, how to care and how to listen. Mr. Rogers once said: “The more I think about it, the more I wonder if God and neighbor are somehow One. ‘Loving God, Loving neighbor’-the same thing? For me, coming to recognize that God loves every neighbor is the ultimate appreciation!” That is what matters beyond the laws: loving God and neighbor.

I want to take a moment here to look at the victim on the road. Does he seem familiar to you? He does to me. We know that the beaten man comes from a very high place, Jerusalem, to a very low place, the bottom of the road from the hill. He’s risking suffering and death to get there,going alone on a very dangerous road, and he’s eventually stripped, beaten, and left dying. His suffering is even ignored by the religious leaders of the day. I don't know about you, but I see Christ in him.

If you think about it, he is the Christ-figure of the story. For ages Christians have seen Christ in the compassionate self-sacrifice of the Good Samaritan, but shouldn’t we see Christ in the one suffering as well? Jesus did teach that whatsoever we do to the least of these, we do to Jesus himself. Are we not called to recognize the face of Christ in the poor, the needy, the outcast, and the lowly? We may not be able to force ourselves to act with compassion, but we can at the very least open ourselves up to the possibility that Christ is in every lowly, needy, or suffering person we meet. We can seek to put ourselves in contact with more and more people who are living in need. We can be friends to those in low places. This has been the calling of the Church from the very beginning.

We are called to love our neighbors. To be neighbors in a world that turns away. In a world full of excuses about why we can't help, we are called to care. We are called to see the neighbors suffering and to do something about it. This is not an easy task, at all, but one we must work towards. It is to that height that Christ calls us. So in the words of Mr. Rogers: “In all that you do in your life, I wish you the strength and the grace to make those choices which will allow you and your neighbor to become the best of whoever you are.”

Rev. Cara Gee

July 11^th, 2010