Scripture: Luke 10:25-37
One thing leads to another. Last week I tried to describe how Jonah led me to the story about the lame man at the Beautiful Gate and his interaction with the apostles Peter and John. I said that that was not a story about having pity on someone but was about, among other things, empowerment, the empowerment both of the man who was lame and Peter and John. That was a story that was clearly not about charity. Peter and John passed up the opportunity to be charitable and chose to do something else.
Monday, as I thought about what I might preach about this week, I said to myself: there’s another story that’s not about charity, and I don’t think I’ve preached on it at Sojourners, and it’s very well known. Why not reflect some on the story of the Good Samaritan? It’s often worthwhile to take another look at stories we think we know very well, and besides it will help me to keep my words on the short side on the day of a congregational meeting, since I won’t have to spend a lot of time telling or re-telling the story itself. We all pretty much know it. Sort of…
Well, I mean we do know it, and we just had a little refresher, hearing the story read for us. You know the characters. There’s Jesus and there’s the lawyer who knew the teachings of his faith very well but seemed to be looking for a loophole. And then there are the characters in the story that Jesus told as an answer to the question: And just who is my neighbor. There’s the wounded man by the side of the road of course, and the people who passed by—the priest, that would be clergy, people like Lee and Mary and Lynn, and also the Levite, fine upstanding church people like… (though I’m not sure how many of you think of yourselves that way, or want to be thought of that way), and finally the Samaritan who we all know by this time stands for whoever the most despised people you can think of might be. I won’t go into all the details of who the Samaritans were and why they were despised. By this time, probably most of us have been taught somewhere along the line that if we want to get the flavor the story Jesus was telling, then we should substitute our own version of a despised or despicable person: say an Al Qaeda operative, or someone known to belong to the Ku Klux Klan, or an Enron executive, or the politician you most love to hate. I’m not sure that’s how we’re supposed to think of the Samaritan, but I’ll get back to that.
For a long time and to some extent even now, I—and I suspect this may be true for many of you—I understood this story to be about the need to be compassionate and to help people in trouble no matter who they were, and no matter if you could come up with some good excuses why you couldn’t. There’s this person lying in a ditch groaning. Are we going to pass on by because we’re so focused on all the impressive, busy things we have to do that we just don’t see the person, or can at least pretend not to see? Or do we stop and help? Am I going to go through life acting oblivious and self-absorbed, or am I going to be compassionate, be a good neighbor, a good Samaritan to everyone I meet?
Well, I can tell you flat out that I am not a Good Samaritan to everyone I meet. It’s a long time ago, but I seem to remember discussions in my Unitarian Sunday School about whether there might be some times when it would be better to be prudent than compassionate (we didn’t use those words), that is, when it would be ok or even a good thing not to stop and help someone. I can’t guarantee you that these discussions I remember actually took place, but they are quite real in my head, whether or not they took place outside my head. And I have continued to have more adult versions of those conversations all through my adult life, again maybe some of them out loud with other people, others that were just in my head.
There are good reasons not to respond to everyone in need, I have said to myself. After all, our neighbor is not just the person we happen upon by the side of the road. Surely Jesus in our world would want us to recognize that our neighbor is down the street and around the block and across town and in D.C. and New Orleans and Kenya and Congo and Kabul and Baghdad and Beirut.
We would go broke and more importantly we would go crazy if we tried to respond to everyone in need. There are too many neighbors who are in need. We can’t be a Good Samaritan to everyone. Not only can’t we respond to everyone. We can’t really even afford to see. We pretend not to see everyone who is in need, or we choose not to see, and who can blame us. We intentionally avert our eyes. We drive on expressways—this is more true in big cities than in Charlottesville, but we drive on expressways whose expressed purpose is to hurry us along in our busy lives, speeding us to work or to our next appointment on roads where, incidentally, we don’t have to see the people who live all around us, many of whom are obviously in need. We read or listen to the news only so long as it doesn’t trouble us too much. We avoid stopping to even look at all the suffering that can be found anywhere we turn. We have to in order to stay somewhat together.
In Chicago in the neighborhood I lived in at the time, one year there was a succession of incidents where someone appeared to be in need, fell and sprained an ankle, had a broken down car, and someone stopped to help and ended up being assaulted or having their wallet taken or their car stolen. Word got around. Made you think twice about offering a helping hand to anyone. And the official position from police and neighborhood safety groups was “watch out”. Don’t be a Good Samaritan. Call for help if you can, but don’t actually stop and try to help someone yourself. Seemed like good advice. There are lots of times when prudence needs to trump compassion.
But every time I have said to myself or anyone else that this business of being a good Samaritan is not such an easy or simple thing in our world, I can’t help feeling a bit like, quite a bit like, the lawyer in the story, who’s looking for a way out. Could all our reasons for not showing compassion actually be rationalizations—or some of them anyway? I mean all the kinds of thoughts I’ve been describing sound reasonable enough to me—you surely have your own version of the same—but then we humans can be really good at rationalizing. We can make any rationalization sound really quite reasonable. I do know that to be true too.
To this day, when I walk by or drive by someone looking for handouts, when I turn away someone who calls or comes by the church looking for assistance, when I see someone broken down by the side of the road and fail to stop (telling myself that AAA is probably on the way), whenever I do anything like this, and I do things like this quite often, whenever I do, I can’t help but remember the story of the good Samaritan and I hear a voice in my head that says something like: Sure, go ahead, just walk on by, just like the priest and Levite. You’re acting just like them. I hope you’re proud of yourself. It doesn’t take much to cause that voice to go off in my head.
And that’s a good thing. I may not always act like a good Samaritan, and my reasons for acting one way or another in any given situation may or may not be good reasons, they may or may not be consistent from one situation to the next, they may or may not be rationalizations, I may or may not have any reasons at all. But I certainly would not like to think that I have come to the point where I can not pay attention to human need, and not respond in some way to human need without any pang of conscience, with no second-guessing of myself whatsoever, with no voice going off in my head that says “now, now, remember the story of the good Samaritan”.
So I accept this approach to the story of the Good Samaritan and I don’t want to do without it. But…some years ago I came to realize that this might not be the only meaning of the parable. There’s an interesting twist in the story, after all. If this were a story purely and simply about offering help to people and how we ought to do that and how our neighbor is the one who is in need whoever that may be…if all that were all the story was about the Samaritan should have been the one in the ditch, the one who needed help. In a way, we are asked to put ourselves in the position of the people passing by, but also maybe we are asked to put ourselves in the position of the person in the ditch, the one who is in need of help, the one who is wounded. Jesus asked at the end of the story, not which of the three people who were passing by recognized the one in the ditch as a neighbor, but from the perspective of the one in the ditch, which of the three people who were passing by do you recognize as a neighbor. And implicitly, I think he was asking this lawyer he was talking to if he could recognize himself as one who was wounded. Implicitly, he was asking me if I recognize myself as one who is wounded.
And so the question the parable asks us is not only “will you recognize someone in need as your neighbor and offer help?” That is a question which, as I say, needs to be asked. But there is another question as well, and that is “who do you recognize as your neighbor because of what they have to offer to you?” We may be called on to offer help to one who is need, but we do so also as one who is wounded and who is also in need. Our neighbor may be one who is in need, but may also be one who has something to offer us, something that will help us in our own healing. Sometimes, often, we will be the helper and the wounded one all at the same time, and our neighbor will be the one who is in need and the one who comes to our aid all at the same time. I have come to understand the parable of the Good Samaritan as a story that is about that kind of mutuality, not about charity.
And in this way of reading the story, I have come to understand what the Samaritan stands for as being not so much one who is hated or despised. In the society Jesus lived in, I’m sure there were those who hated the Samaritans. But I’m also thinking that there were probably many good-hearted people who didn’t hate the Samaritans so much as just considered them as pitiable, people who needed help. The Samaritan in the story, I’m thinking, may not have been so much a hated person as a person just who had no stature, no standing, a person who just didn’t have very much to offer. And the reason Jesus told the parable the way he did, I’m thinking, is that our neighbor is not only one who is need but is also one who may have more to offer us that we had ever imagined.
Just one more thing, quickly. There is often a character in the stories of Jesus who may not be exactly a stand-in for God, but who may be meant to draw us in to thinking about God. The father, for instance, in the parable of the prodigal son, who runs out to meet the son who is returning home, is generally thought to suggest an image of a God who joyfully embraces people who are finding their way home. In this parable of the Good Samaritan, is it possible that the Good Samaritan is meant to evoke some thoughts in us of what God may be like? Is it possible that the neighbor is not someone to be pitied or helped, but is someone in whom we may see the face of God? Is it possible that it is the very nature of God to be a kind of mysterious source of healing but who also tells us, as the Samaritan told the innkeeper, to take care of each other?
I think it is possible. I think it is likely. I think the parable of the Good Samaritan is meant to do much more than keep our consciences tuned to the needs of neighbors all around. Though it is meant to do that too. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 6, 2006