St. John’s United Church of Christ, Union, Illinois
Luke 10:25-37
What is a “Good Samaritan?”
The term is so common that you can find it everywhere. The Good
Sam Club is the largest organization of RV owners in the world. I’m not
sure that has much to do with the parable, except the traveling part. There are
charities, hospitals, and other organizations designed to help people in need
based on this parable in the bible. In Illinois, there is a Good Samaritan law
which says that any licensed medical professional who provides emergency care
without fee to a person shall not be liable for civil damages.
There are stories in the news all the time about Good
Samaritans. For example, here is a story from the Good News Network.[i]
The Melrose family had been in the middle of a 2,500-mile road trip across
Australia last week when their car broke down in the middle of the Northern
Territories. They had left their home with two boats in tow so they could
compete in the national minnow sailing championships in Darwin. Darwin resident
Rodney Sims saw the plea for help on social media, hopped in his truck, and drove
to where the family was staying in a motel. After hitching up their boats to
his vehicle, he brought the Melrose Family all the way back to Darwin, a
staggering 1,200-mile round-trip journey. Needless to say, they were incredibly
touched by the stranger’s act of kindness.
Not all the stories have such a happy ending, however. Two
summers ago, Todd Surta says, he tried to help a woman badly injured when a
boat collided with a personal watercraft on the Fox River. He ended up in
police custody, facing criminal charges and a sullied reputation.
The term “Good Samaritan” seems to mean a stranger helping
someone. But there is an aspect of the parable that is missed in this
description. To the people in the first century hearing this story, Samaritans
were “those” people, on the wrong side of the river. We don’t get along with
them.
The Jews and the Samaritans had shared ancestors, like
Jacob, but they were alienated from each other. There are probably many
different, complicated reasons for it, but suffice it to say, there were
long-standing hostilities between them.
Things are not so different today between different groups
of people. We are constantly tempted to focus on what divides us – the Muslims
and the Jews, the rich and the poor, the women and the men, the red states and
the blue states, the gays and the straights, the whites and the blacks. It is
so easy to fall into “us” versus “them”, to focus on who is “out” and who is
“in”. By our words and our deeds we exclude others, we cast them out of our
community.
I am often given opportunities to emulate the Samaritan —
although the neighbors I help are generally not in the same life-threatening
circumstances as the man in the parable, nor are they likely to be enemies or
others I can’t get along with. My good deeds tend to be of the
helping-out-a-stranger type rather than caring-for-an-enemy type. And no matter
my good intentions most of the time, there are occasions when I have excluded
others, or put a person in my mental category of “other.”
Luke tells the story of a lawyer who wants to inherit
eternal life. Jesus gives him the textbook answer, “But wanting to justify
himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” He might have really meant,
“Who is not my neighbor?” It was a lawyer, after all, who probably liked
specifics, clear lines. Are these people next door, at the edges of my
neighborhood? You’re not talking about outsiders, right, just neighbors?
Jesus replied with a story about a Samaritan, someone who
would definitely have been seen as an outsider by the Jewish community. Using
that story Jesus redefines the meaning of neighbor. You think that person over
there is an outsider, a stranger, an enemy? That person is your neighbor, a
child of God, a member of your heavenly family!
Now when we hear a story, we identify with particular
characters. Maybe, as I often do on a busy day, you identify with the priest or
the Levite. You see something that needs to be done, a person in need, and you
pass it by because you’re too busy or preoccupied, too afraid, overwhelmed, or
exhausted to do anything about it. On a good day I strive to be the Good
Samaritan That is the ideal. I stop to help, I give what I can out of my
pocket, I take the time to be kind.
But what if that is not the character who we are meant to
identify with? Not the robbers, surely. We can’t be the bad guys in the story. We’re
not the religious leaders, who we secretly judge for their neglectful behavior.
But we can’t be the Samaritan, either; the whole point of choosing the
Samaritan as a character is that he is not us. If we too easily and comfortably
identify with the Good Samaritan in this parable, maybe we're missing the
point.
Remember, he was the Other. An enemy of the people hearing
this story. He was the object of their condescension, their hatred, and their
judgment. He was the outcast.
Think about it this way: An Israeli man is robbed, and a
Good Palestinian man saves his life. A Democrat is robbed, and a Good
Republican saves her life. A white
supremacist is robbed, and a Good Black Teenager saves his life. A transgender woman is robbed, and a Good
Christian Fundamentalist saves her life.
The differences which divide people in our world are not
trivial, and have real consequences. The same can be said of the differences
between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus’ time. Each was fully convinced
that the other was wrong. So, when Jesus made the Samaritan a central figure in
the story, it was radical and risky; it stunned his listeners.
A writer named Debie Thomas suggests, “He was asking them to
dream of a different kind of kingdom. He was inviting them to consider the
possibility that a person might add up to more than the sum of her political,
racial, cultural, and economic identities. He was calling them to put aside the
history they knew, and the prejudices they nursed. He was asking them to leave
room for divine and world-altering surprises.”[ii]
So, if we can’t identify ourselves with the priest, the
Levite, OR the Samaritan, who are we left with? “A man was going down from
Jerusalem to Jericho.” The beaten man, half-dead on the side of the road is the
only character left. He is the only character in the story not defined by
profession, social class, or religious belief. He has no identity except that
he is in need. This is the character Jesus means for us to identify with – the
one in need of mercy.
You see, when you’re lying in a ditch, it doesn’t matter who
helps you, whether or not you agree with their politics or religion. What
matters is that someone, anyone, stops to show you mercy before you die. What
matters is how quickly you swallow your pride and grab hold of that hand.
“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked. Your neighbor is the
one who has compassion. Your neighbor is the one who unexpectedly smiles on you
with a fresh image of God. Your neighbor is “The one who showed him mercy.”
Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Amen.
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