"Neighbor"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE GOSPELS Luke 10:25-37 Click here to watch the Sermon "Neighbor"

There are certain words and phrases that have become so embedded in our popular lexicon that many people say them without knowing that they are quoting scripture. They’ll talk about some insignificant thing being a “drop in the bucket” without realizing that they’re quoting the prophet Isaiah, or warn that a “leopard can’t change their spots” as they quote Jeremiah. Thorton Wilder once wrote a play that won the Pulitzer Prize called "The Skin of Our Teeth.” The tile comes from the book of Job. Many people not only fail to heed “the writing on the wall,” they don’t know that the phrase itself comes from the book of Daniel. This morning’s reading is another prime example. I can remember the first time I saw a sticker for the Good Sam Club when I was in elementary school. The red circle with the beatific face wearing a halo intrigued me. Good Sam is short for Good Samaritan and the club was founded to offer a network of support to travelers, particularly the nomads and campers traveling by RV or motor coach. I don’t know how many of the people who’ve been served by that club over the years know the story that it’s based on- about a traveler in need of assistance. All fifty of the United States and the District of Columbia have enacted some form of what are called Good Samaritan laws. These are laws meant to protect people who offer assistance, often emergency assistance, from liability should their help result in some form of unintended harm. Basically, they exist to remove a barrier that might prevent someone for giving assistance like the person in Jesus’ story does.  Most people don’t even know that the phrase “Good Samaritan,” like the phrase “Prodigal Son,” isn’t actually in the bible. Those are just the popular names that have attached themselves to these stories of Jesus. When most people hear, or use the phrase “good Samaritan,” they’re talking about a good person, someone who goes out of their way to take care of someone in need. Fred Rogers is often quoted in times of disaster, remembering how his mother would allay his fears when something scary happened by telling him to “look for the helpers.”  It would be easy then, to conclude that this story Jesus tells is some kind of moral instruction about the importance of doing just that, being one of God’s helpers. We might even think that Jesus is telling us that if we’re good like this good Samaritan then God will love us and welcome us into heaven when we die. And we would be wrong. Not just wrong, to read this as a simple morality tale is to miss the point of what Jesus wants us to see by telling the story in the first place. Because unlike some of the other parables Luke records, this particular story does not come out of nowhere. It comes in response to the dialogue that precedes it.  

I just read the verses, so I won’t rehash the whole thing, but it’s important to highlight a few details. First, the lawyer who comes to question Jesus is not a lawyer as we understand that word. He’s a student of God’s law, a person of faith who reads Torah and takes what it says seriously. And like a lot of super religious people his inquiry comes in the form of a leading question, and not a very good one at that. “What must I do to inherit eternal life,” he wants to know. Let’s take a pause for just a minute to hear once more Matthew’s admonition that the phrase “eternal life” in the context of Jesus and Judaism of the first century has nothing- NOTHING- to do with after life. This lawyer is not asking Jesus what he has to do so that he can go to heaven when he dies. The whole formulation of such a  question would have sounded strange to Jesus and any of his contemporaries. Eternal life is the life that Moses spoke of choosing in his last sermon to the Hebrews before they crossed the Jordan and entered the land. What’s more, nobody does anything to inherit something. Inheritance implies some kind of familial line, or the gift of a bequest. The point is that by the very nature of the word you can’t do anything to inherit. You simply stand to inherit by reason of your relationship to the one from who you inherit. A person can’t do any more to inherit eternal life than they can blue eyes. For such a smart guy, it’s kind of a stupid question that he’s asking. But since he’s likely only asking it so that he can give his answer, Jesus is kind enough not to point this out and gives him the opportunity to show everyone how smart and devout he is. When he does, Jesus even tells him in front of everyone that he’s given the right answer. Well done. You win the prize. If only the point of faith was having the right answers. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.  

No. He wanted more than to be told that his answer was right, he wanted to be right, wanted someone to back him up on this. His follow-up is telling. I mean he’s just given what is considered the bedrock commandments of biblical faith: love God, love your neighbor. But clearly, something is bothering him, and it’s not the part about loving God. It’s that second bit, about the neighbor. Just who are we talking about Jesus? Now, Jesus could have explained that the two are inseparable. To love our neighbor is to love God. If we want to love God we must love our neighbor. It’s Les Miserables, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” The crazy thing is that the question and the story Jesus tells in response are STILL RELEVANT two thousand years later. Clearly, we are in a moment when there is just as much concern and debate about who is our neighbor and who isn’t as there was back then. Then as now, foreigners were distrusted. Romans, Greeks, Samaritans. Surely, they aren’t my neighbor? Right? I mean, don’t we need to take care of our own first, Jesus? 

Jesus doesn’t answer that question. Instead he tells this story about a traveler who is beaten, robbed and left half-dead on the side of the road. That’s all the background we get on him too. We don’t know who he is, what he does, or even where he’s from. We don’t know if he’s a sinner, or a saint, or somewhere in between, if he’s a responsible tax paying citizen or a tax cheat. He’s effectively anyone, everyone who has found themselves victimized by a world in which such things happen, a dangerous world. The first two people to come upon the man are a Priest and a Levite. None of the often-cited concerns about ritual purity explain their reason for passing by on the other side. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., reflecting on this story said, “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible these men were afraid. . . . And so the first question that the priest [and] the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ . . . But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” The standard rule of three in a story like this is that the first two get wrong what the third gets right. And in rabbinic tradition the expected third after a Priest and Levite, is an Israelite. If Jesus meant this to be a morality tale about the importance of helping someone in need, he wouldn’t have broken the formula, he wouldn’t have substituted the unexpected for the expected. Not even unexpected, offensive. We won’t go into the long history of animosity between Jews and Samaritans in first-century Judea. Suffice it to say that when the third in this story turns out to be a Samaritan, it would have been a shock and a scandal to anyone listening, including Jesus’ own disciples. 

Now, we could, as many have, cast the Samaritan as the marginalized person who steps up to do the right thing despite all our prejudice against them. What’s clear is that Jesus is not suggesting that we are the hero of this tale. We are not the Samaritans who come to the aid of the poor and the victimized. That’s not to say that we aren’t called to play such a role. It’s just not the point that Jesus is making here. Instead, what Jesus invites us to consider is whether we can imagine the person we hate the most, the one who has given us plenty of reason to despise and distrust them, can we imagine them coming to our aid in our hour of need. Can we even imagine being so desperately vulnerable? Our answer is probably, ‘no.’ It is for me. Friends, Jesus doesn’t tell us stories we want to hear, about things we already believe. Jesus challenges us to consider if the promise of eternal life, the divine life of blessing that God desires for the dangerous world that God so loves, really is for everyone and not just for the people we like, or approve of, or think are deserving, or who have the right answers, and do things the right way (meaning the way we would do them). If loving God by loving our neighbor is how we come to know and experience the divine life of God within us, what gets in the way of that? What gets in the way of loving everyone? Let me count the ways. 

You might remember that just two weeks ago the gospel reading from Luke (that precedes this encounter) detailed how Jesus and his disciples passed through a village of Samaritans who refused to receive them. James and John were so mad about it that they wanted to call down fire from the heavens to punish them for the insult. Instead, Jesus rebuked them. For all intents and purposes, this story is the bookend to that encounter. It’s been noted that the lawyer when asked who was neighbor to the man in need can’t bring himself to use the word Samaritan. That may be, or it may be that the point of the story is that IT DOESN’T MATTER what you call him anymore than it matters who the victim is. What would it look like, how would we talk about immigration and immigrants in this country if, instead of calling them rapists and murders and suggesting that they’re a drain on public resources (all of which are demonstrably false accusations, by the way) we saw them as our neighbors who feed us by picking the fruits and vegetables that we eat. We saw them as our neighbors who do the actual construction of the homes and apartments that we live in. We saw them as our neighbors who do some of the hardest and most essential labor we require in an effort to inherit some of the promises of this land that we so love? We are the ones in need. We are the ones often brutalized by forces far greater who find ourselves aided by the very people we have been told are our enemies. Knowing who our neighbor is has less to do with what we call them, or what they call us, where they were born or how they got here. Knowing who our neighbor is has to do with those who do and do not extend mercy. Plenty of people with a wealth of privilege are happy to pass by on the other side than help the ones in need. And plenty more people who have been vilified for the simple “crime” of working for a better life are ready to come to our aid as the Mexican government did just last week by sending rescue workers to Texas after the flooding of the Guadalupe River. 

May we go, and do likewise. And live.