7th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Deuteronomy 30: 1-3, 9-14, 191
1When all these things have happened to you, the blessings and the curses that I have set before you, if you call them to mind among all the nations where the LORD your God has driven you, 2and return to the LORD your God, and you and your children obey him with all your heart and with all your soul, just as I am commanding you today, 3then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you, gathering you again from all the peoples among whom the LORD your God has scattered you. … 9and the LORD your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the LORD will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors, 10when you obey the LORD your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
11Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. 12It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” 13Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” 14No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. …
19I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live….
Gospel – Luke 10: 25-372
25Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27[The layer] 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.” 28And [Jesus] said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
29But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30Jesus 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. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34He 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. 35The 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.’ 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37[The lawyer] said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
“Do This and You Will Live.”
Today’s scripture readings all come down to asking, and then answering, two questions: “How are we supposed to live together in this world?” and “Who is my neighbor?” We see how Jesus answers that second question; but you and I probably could think of all kinds of stories to tell that might try to resolve both of these questions. Elie Wiesel, someone who survived the Nazi death camps of World War II and is the author of Night, The Jews of Silence (along with numerous other books), quotes from a Midrash told by Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai:
A man is on a boat. He is not alone but acts as if he were. One night, he begins to cut a hole under his seat. His neighbors shriek: “Have you gone mad? Do you want to sink us all?” Calmly he answers them: “I don’t understand what you want. What I’m doing is none of your business. I paid my way. I’m only cutting under my own seat.”3
Wiesel, who’d been focusing in this article on the dangers of fanaticism in the world today, comments: “What the fanatic will not accept, what you and I cannot forget, is that all of us are in the same boat.” Trying to come to grips with jihadists and other fanatics in our world, it’s important that we try to understand those relationships that we’re called to have beyond the borders of our own family, our own community, our own country. In the light of shifting populations all over the world, the word “neighbor” has become a very complicated concept these days, hasn’t it? Wiesel goes on to say,
If religious fanaticism hides the face of God, so does political fanaticism destroy human liberty. In fact, there are some who, seeking to combat religious fanaticism, battle it with another kind of fanaticism that is equally evil.4
One thing that we need to recognize about today’s gospel parable is that the Samaritan was in as much need as that robbery victim. A social outcast, he was as much shunned as the man lying in the ditch by the side of the road. But he doesn’t let that stop him. He finds a way to be there for another human being who needed help. In moments when you or I are aware of our own helplessness we’ve got to remember that the root of compassion is recognizing that that other person is just like me – with needs that must be met or we both will die. To be someone in need is to know what it means to love our neighbor as we do ourselves. We’re more alike than we care to admit. What we’ve got to learn how to do is to not let our accidental differences get in the way of understanding just how alike we really are.
“Who is my neighbor?” The answer is simple, really: “A neighbor is anybody who has a need.” But we want to make things more complex than that – that’s just what the lawyer in today’s gospel lesson was trying to do. Faced with the stark and utter simplicity of the law – that he himself articulates – he tries to find a way to make it more difficult. Maybe he’s thinking that if he just takes a lot of time trying to figure this out, then maybe the situation will go away before he actually has to do something about it. My neighbor is simply anybody who comes into my life. Period. The stunning simplicity of that fact doesn’t make room for excuses. It calls us to do something about it. There are no problems to be solved, here, no solutions to be derived, only a neighbor whose needs must be met.
The truly stunning thing about Jesus’ parables is that they’re timeless; because we, too, won’t dare go near a man lying in the gutter. “He’s just a drunk,” we tell ourselves. “I’ve got enough problems of my own; I don’t need to take on his too!” we rationalize. Does a drunk not count? Does an addict not deserve our attention? And if we actually suspect that the situation might even be worse than that, that we’ve stepped into a murder scene or a gang shooting, or that we’ve come across somebody who’s criminally insane, we find all the more reason to get to the other side of the street – and fast! Or maybe, like the priest and the Levite in our story, we pretend that we really haven’t seen the man at all. We know about the sources of violent crime in our community and at large in the world today. We see it on T.V. and read about it in the newspaper every day. A person would have to be stupid to get mixed up in something like that!
The bitter irony of that moment is that just as soon as we react this way, we’ve already fallen “into the hands of robbers” ourselves. The robbers are already inside of us, inside of our heads and influencing our behavior. Out of fear of them we go the other way. We become their agents. We may not do their dirty work, but we leave them a wide berth so that they can act undisturbed. Then, when we do stumble across the evidence of their dirty work – as we surely will do, because they become bolder by our ignoring them – we turn and walk away. It’s not just that we don’t want to get our hands dirty; we don’t want to mix it up with thieves and thugs. Ironically, though, we then let them get away with it. In no trivial sense, then, we ourselves become part of their gang. We do what they want us to do: look the other way.
We are both robber and victim. That’s the shocking thing about this parable’s message to us. We’ve left whole portions of our church, our community, our world to the jurisdiction of robbers. These aren’t just the back alleys and dark spaces under river bridges and freeway overpasses. They’re the streets that encircle this building as well, because the robbers who intimidate us into avoiding that poor guy in the gutter are the ones in our imaginations more than the flesh-and-blood people who are actually standing just outside there on the street corner. We take away the power from those who would commit violence because of our neglect when our actions declare that this building, this block, this community, our world deserves better – it deserves justice, love, compassion and respect.
There’s a corollary to the story of the Good Samaritan. You won’t find this other story in your Bible; and there are a lot of different versions of it. Maybe you’ve heard it. It’s one that tries to teach us the lesson that simply by using common sense, we could discover the cause of most any dilemma in which we find ourselves. The story goes something like this:
Once upon a time, as a group of people gathered down by the river that flowed near their village, someone was startled to notice a baby floating by in the river, struggling and crying to keep its head above the rushing water. The baby was surely about to drown!
One from the group didn’t hesitate but rushed into the water to save the baby. But then the others along the shoreline noticed another baby coming down the river, choking and screaming for help. Someone pulled that baby out too. But soon more babies were seen drowning in the river and the townspeople were pulling them out as fast as they could. It took a lot of effort and coordination, but they were able to organize their numbers in order to save baby after baby as each came floating down the river. As most of them were busy in these frantic rescue efforts, though, two of the townspeople started to run in the opposite direction along the shore of the river.
"Where are you going?" shouted one of the rescuers. "We need you here to help us save these babies!"
To which one of them responded, "Hang on! We’re just going upstream and check to see who that crazy person is who's throwing babies into the river!”
To keep anyone from ever falling into the hands of robbers, you and I are being called to be the good Samaritans of today by bringing more just and equitable political, economic and cultural structures into our world.
About now some of you might be saying to yourself, “Come on, Doug, get real! Don’t be so naïve. It’s crazy to think that we’re going to make any real difference on the realities of violence and injustice in our world.” But then that reminds me of a poem that I saw just the other day:
Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
….
While some see [these kinds of people] as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.5
Jesus does much more than simply touch our humanity in this story today. He goes way beyond that touch to say that God is involved in humankind – in the ways that we treat each other, deal with each other, and meet each other’s needs.
Years ago I heard a sermon on this parable that claimed to see four different economic philosophies represented in it; see if you can tell which character in the story is represented by each of these economic philosophies: #1, “What’s yours is mine, if I can take it.” And then #2, “What’s mine is my own, if I can keep it.” #3 says, “What’s mine is yours, if you can pay for it.” But then #4 says, “What’s mine is yours for the time being – if you truly need it.”
Now while Jesus probably didn’t intend for this story to be a lecture on economic philosophies, I’m convinced that he did intend to show us that how we value our human relationships is a direct reflection on what we value about our relationship with God. If we want to truly understand our faith in God we need to look very closely at how we interact in all of those other relationships that we’ve been given: in economics as well as in ecology, in politics as well as in love, in food policy as well as healthcare, in immigration as well as in homeland security, in the mundane as well as the creative.
Who is my neighbor? You tell me.
* * *
1 The thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy was written to a people in exile. Scholars date the final edition of the book to the time when the Hebrew nation was captive in Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. This chapter reflects their belief that, if they remain faithful to the Torah, God would make good on the promise to gather the exiles from this diaspora and bring them back to the land of their ancestors. The choice is stunning in its simplicity: do what is right and you will live; do what is evil and the weight of it will destroy you.
2 Jesus knew that people had trouble with their neighbors; and he knew that almost all Jews considered Samaritans to be heretics, outcasts. His people considered them to be untouchables. It was unthinkable that a Samaritan might be compassionate, might fulfill the law when a leader of the religious community failed to do so! A Samaritan is your worst nightmare come true if he should move in next door – the one against whom you’ve been locking your doors and erecting fences, the one who causes you to call the police and against whom you’re considering filing restraining orders. And yet Jesus makes him the hero of this story. If we’re not offended by this parable, then we’re not getting the point.
3 Elie Wiesel, “When Passion Is Dangerous,” trans. Katherine Levin, Parade Magazine, 19 April, 1992, p. 21.
4 Ibid.
5 “Think Different” – Courtesy of Apple Computer, Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach , Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner, Editors (Jossey-Bass Publishing Co., 2003), pp. 209-210.