Good Samaritans

Luke 10:25-37

Like Noah and the Ark, the parable of the Good Samaritan has been tamed and turned into a bedtime story. But as with Noah, the story of the Good Samaritan is downright frightening in the implications it holds for the practice of faith.

Jesus told this story to a lawyer--not an attorney as we know them, but a church official akin to a professor of sacred theology--someone schooled in every aspect of the Torah and the definitions of obedience to its over 600 dictums for the faithful life. The lawyer began by asking Jesus what it would take to live a life that fully walked with God (most English translations render his question as being how to attain "eternal life" which we immediately equate with going to heaven--don't! What the lawyer wants to know is how to live a life full of God NOW). Without answering, Jesus gets the lawyer to intone the Shema (Dt. 6:5ff.) and the subsequent summary of how live within a community in Lev. 19 (love of neighbor). But he lawyer seeks to go further, justifying his questioning. He skips the issues of relating to God--that really is fairly clear--love God with everything you are. He moves to far more messy issues of how to deal with other human beings--that is never clear. "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus, in perfect rabbinical tradition, does give a direct answer. He tells a story.

He tells a story set on the Jericho-Jerusalem highway--a main thoroughfare for Jewish pilgrims going to and from the Temple in Jerusalem. The road winds through the mountains, making it dangerous with a lot of shady nooks and crannies. Robbers found easy pickings among the pilgrims headed to Jerusalem loaded with the cash and animals necessary for ritual sacrifice. Psalm 121 is a prayer for protection from such a pilgrim fearful at the journey on the road.

He puts a Samaritan on the road. It's a wonder the lawyer did not stop Jesus right there and walk away or worse. If Jesus had told the story today in Israel, the Samaritan would be a Palestinian with Hamas or Hezbollah t-shirt on, strolling down the avenue by the Wailing Wall. Not only that, the Samaritan does not make a hasty exit from the road before someone stops to beat him up, he stops to help a Jew left for dead beside the road. What is to stop someone who "belongs" on the road from rounding up a posse and eliminating the Samaritan? No story that he was offering aid would stop them. Bad things happen. But the Samaritan stops. Then, he gives up everything he has for the wounded man--donkey, clothes, money, supplies. And then he goes to a Jewish inn to get the man care, once again inviting a beating himself.

Jesus explains the Samaritan's action--"he had compassion."

The lawyer gets it immediately. That is being a neighbor. He also knows that is frightening.

It should be.

Jesus basically explains that if you want to walk with God, prepare to suffer, for embodying the love found in God means sacrificing everything--EVEN LIFE.

Oh, my...he wasn't kidding about meeting your own cross if you follow him.

This story scares me every time I read it. I am no hero. I certainly never intend to be a martyr. So, am I lost? It is why I stopped reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer decades ago--as he defines the cost of discipleship, I know I come up lacking. I cannot let go of enough to be like him. Will God only be satisfied if I meet an untimely death serving some broken human being?

Go back to the lawyer. As Jesus got him to reveal, the man knew his Torah and what God wants from us--love for God that puts God firmly in the center of our existence; and a willingness to serve others in a self-sacrificial, other-centered love fueled by compassion. He could intone all the right words. But could he live them? That was the intent of Jesus in having two representatives of the institutional faith community pass by the wounded man. The Church has an alarming predilection for saying all sorts of things while actually doing very little.

What matters to Jesus is not who a person is, where they come from, or who their family is, but whether or not they have the capacity to meet other human beings in love. True love, as Jesus defines it, is the willingness to enter the mess of another human being fully with compassion (com-with; passion-suffering--suffering with). In so doing, both can be redeemed. All that matters is making the other well and whole. Everything else is just detail.

So, love one another. Don't just talk it--DO IT.