Proper
10
Year C |
But wanting to justify himself,
he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" —Luke 10:29
The Good
Samaritan.
If one were to
pick the most famous, most familiar parable that Jesus told, this would most
likely be it.
We name hospitals
after this parable.
We name laws
after this parable.
We complement
kind people by calling them this.
There is probably
a temptation to say ”Ah, this story,” when the passage is read.
Time to zone out;
check email or scores on the phone.
We know what this
one means.
In fact it’s easy
to think that we’ve over-mined it for meaning.
Weeks ago when I
saw this was the passage for this week, I jokingly thought for a moment about
what it would be like to stand in the pulpit, repeat Jesus’s last line—“Go and
do likewise”—and sit back down.
That thought did
not last long, and it certainly cannot stand when there is blood running in the
streets.
Honestly, blood
runs daily.
But this last
week in particular.
500 dead or
injured in Baghdad as ISIS bombed a shopping district full of people
celebrating the end of Ramadan—and the bombing of the Istanbul airport three
days before that.
And closer to
home—two African American men—Alton Stirling in Louisiana and Philando Castile
in Minnesota—shot to death by police within a 24 hour period. Their last moments of life caught on video
and broadcast to the world. The videos
are harrowing to watch. The spread of
blood; the last gasps of breath.
And then Thursday
night. 12 people were shot at the end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest,
by a sniper who was particulary targeting police officers. Officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa,
Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens died in that attack as they tried
to protect protestors, making it the most deadly day for law enforcement since 9/11/2001.
I am personally
haunted by the image of a Dallas police sergeant being comforted by a doctor or
a nurse at Baylor University’s hospital.
The sergeant is African-American, probably over 6 feet tall, crying,
being hugged by a petite white woman.
When I see those stripes on his arm, I see my own father, who wore those
same stripes for so many years before being promoted.
All of this
stands out from a level of background violence that should shock, but it does
not seem to anymore.
Issue the
‘thoughts and prayers’ and we move on.
And wait for the
next shooting.
May God forgive
me for even for a moment thinking
that there was nothing left to say on these of Jesus’s words.
Because, like the
lawyer before Jesus, so often we ask who our neighbors are in the hope that we
might find some exception.
Let us look
again.
Maybe we can see
something new.
But maybe we
should start somewhere else.
The parable of
the Good Samaritan comes in the tenth chapter of Luke.
But let’s look at
chapter 9 for a minute.
In Chapter 9(:51-56),
Jesus is heading to Jerusalem for the final week of his life. Along the way, he and his disciples pass a
Samaritan village. When they inquire
about staying at the village, the village refuses. This is not all that surprising. Jesus and the disciples were Jews, and the
Jews and Samaritans hated each
other. Feeling the sting of the
village’s refusal, the disciples James and John ask Jesus if he wants them to
call down fire from heaven to consume the village. Jesus gives that request a firm ‘no’ and
rebukes the disciples. I wonder what he
said there.
I mention this so
that when we talk about the Good Samaritan, we can keep in mind that this
wasn’t simply some polite rivalry, or disagreeable cold shoulder that the Jews
and Samaritans mutually give to each other.
These disciples of Jesus were ready to lay waste to an entire village of
Samaritans—men, women, and children. That is the level of hatred we have to keep in mind when we read about
Jesus talking about Samaritans around his people.
The fact that, at
the end of the story, the lawyer could not bring himself to say the word
Samaritan bears witness to this hatred.
When he has been trapped into admitting that a Samaritan was more kind
than the religious leaders of his own group, all he says is “the one who showed
kindness” through clenched teeth.
But all week as I
read this passage I kept coming back to the exchange before Jesus tells the
story—and the motives behind the lawyer’s question.
But wanting to justify himself,
he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
He wanted to
justify himself.
How often are we
doing the same?
“I may have
sinned this much, but this other person is worse.”
“This other
person is wrong.”
How often do we
grasp for something that says we are righteous compared to others?
More correct
compared to others?
How much do we
long to find ourselves deemed okay?
Approved by
others or our ideologies?
Saved?
Well-adjusted to
our living situations?
In terms of our
existence, we know that there is much wrong with the world.
What do we grasp
at to give us some assurance that everything will be okay at the end?
"Am I right with
God?"
"Can I know that separate from being able to name those who are not?"
"Do I have
purpose?"
"Can that purpose help me
determine who does not have purpose?"
"If I am not
greater, am I lesser?"
This existential
anxiety is—I think—at the root of the lawyer’s question.
It is a sense of
not knowing what to trust to take us to paradise—on earth or elsewhere—and so
we either search for what will guarantee our reward—or we seek to create and
control it here.
But we are also
finite beings.
We have limited
energy, limited knowledge, limited intelligence, limited resources, limited abilities,
limited perspective.
Overcoming any of
these takes time—which is also limited.
In the face of
our finitude, we wonder if we have done enough.
"Did I hustle
enough to make it to the next payday?"
"Did I save enough
for retirement?"
"Will that medical
bill end me?"
"Will my children
be successful?"
"Will I coast on
fumes into the Kingdom of Heaven?"
"If we have done
all we could with what we have, Oh God, please let it be enough."
And how do we
know we’ve done enough?
How do we know we
didn’t misuse our precious limited time on something that didn’t count?
"Jesus, will
helping this particular person be on
my final exam, or can I skip over them?"
So, wanting to justify himself,
he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
If
love of neighbor is the way to eternal life, then, the lawyer asks, how do I
set the brackets around those who are my neighbors?
How
do I categorize people correctly so that I do not waste my time helping the
wrong people?
Who
is within the realm of my care, and who can I ignore?
This
leads to one of the most liberating but frankly aggravating aspects of the
Gospels.
Time
and again, Jesus gets asked for a checklist for heaven.
“Tell
us what to do,” people say.
Am I
in or out?
Have
I filled in enough boxes?
Did I
prove myself good enough.
“I
fed 15 hungry people today, so now I get my heavenly coupon book stamped."
"756
more good deeds to go, and I’m done.”
Jesus
always frustrated that type of thinking, because the goal was never simply
about how much we do. It’s
about who we are called to be.
Time
and again, Jesus refused to quantify the practice of goodness. He simply notes that goodness and perfection
are our destiny as we conform to the image and likeness of God, and asks us to
trust that the faithful seeking of these is sufficient.
Almost
always, the questions Jesus got assumed that there is a minimum that has to be
done.
“Jesus,
what is the minimum we have to do to earn your favor?”
That
is one way of putting the lawyer’s question.
And when
Jesus asks the lawyer to name which character was a neighbor to the man who
fell among thieves, Jesus reorients their conversation away from the lawyer’s
question about limiting one’s responsibility.
The lawyer wants to define who deserves his love, but Jesus suggests
that love seeks out neighbors to receive compassion and care, even when
established boundaries and prejudices conspire against it.[1]
There
is no minimum we can do for a predetermined set of people we define as
worthy. God’s own perfect love is not
like that, thanks be to God. Instead God
asks us to trust that we can be empowered to fight against our own programming,
our anxieties, our prejudices, to show forth God’s love and care.
All of that seems
well and good. There’s no new ground broken here. I don’t think I’m out on a limb in this
interpretation.
But we wish Jesus
had been reasonable all the same.
Theoretically we can get behind the idea that everyone is our
neighbor. But how do we actually
practice this? Our finiteness—our
limitedness—keeps pushing us to set those brackets around those who will
receive are care. More importantly those
brackets define whose is outside of our care.
“We can’t do it
all!” we cry out.
So we set our
brackets.
We hear or we
say:
“Don’t send money
overseas, we have poor people here.”
“Why are they
adopting from Africa, we have orphans here.”
“These workers do
not deserve a living wage because these other workers do not have a living wage
either, and we value the latter more.”
“We feel bad for
all of the shootings, but we need to shut down our media intake and remain
silent until we have all of the facts.”
“Police are part
of a systemically racist oppressive regime and cannot be trusted at all.”
“Black Lives
Matter is a racist over-reactionary movement fomenting anarchy and violence and
cannot be trusted at all.”
These brackets we
set on our care help us categorize our own sets of ‘us’ vs. ‘thems.’
These brackets
become our short hand classification of who we love in reality while we try to
maintain an illusion of loving everyone theoretically.
So, how deep is
our love?
Who consistently benefits from our silence
about the injury of our neighbors?
Who consistently find themselves outside of
our caring, because we just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the
situation?
Who consistently has their issues filed under the heading “not our problem?”
Once we identify
those who consistently fall outside
of our care, we expose the reality of our brackets of care—
Those same
brackets Jesus calls us to expose and obliterate through life in the Holy
Spirit.
What do we do
next?
There are many
things to be done.
Educating
ourselves on the scope of the problem of racism within our society and the
criminal justice system is important.
But even though
study is important, Jesus didn’t tell us to form a humanities club to debate
another’s oppression.
So here is
something more tangible.
Go to your
neighbors.
Your white
neighbors.
Your black
neighbors.
Your latinx
neighbors.
Your native
neighbors.
Your police
neighbors.
Ask them what concerns
them, given the world we share.
Listen to hear,
not to debate.
Listen for the
pain.
Listen for the
fear.
Listen to the
officer who wants to make sure he makes it home to his 4-month old child
tonight.
Listen to the
police supervisor who prays that this not be the night he has to tell his
officer’s wife he died in the line of duty.
Listen to the
black mother whose 13 year old son is about the get the talk—
the talk about
how his responsibility is to make sure he gets home that night regardless of
the disrespect a cop shows him.
Listen to the
black man who thought one night he would die in his own front yard, his keys in
his front door, when a cop drew down on him because the cop thought the pager
in his pocket was a gun.
Listen to the
anguish of the father of a biracial child whose skin is dark enough to change
every encounter he has with people different from him.
Listen to the
Native American talk about the high number deaths in her community at the hands
of police that never make it on the news.
Be vulnerable
enough to name your own fear, to God and neighbor.
You may be
surprised to hear the fear you are carrying if you dared to speak of it aloud.
The commonality
of fear that maintains our brackets will only crumble when we let go of these
fears.
To name these
fears is to rob them of power.
To pray for your
neighbor’s fears is to put them under God’s power and care—and perfect love casts
out all fear.
Ask your
neighbors to pray for you.
The better world
we long for will come when we are willing to show we want to truly break down
the brackets we use to define ‘neighbor.’
If we cannot deal openly with the fear and hatred our legacies of
oppression have left us as inheritances, we will never get beyond a power
struggle that leaves history littered with winners and losers. Our children will inherit that power
struggle. Might we try something
different this time?
We should
continue the story begun in Luke chapter 9 with John and James ready to destroy
a Samaritan village. After their journey
with Jesus on Earth, and after their being given the Holy Spirit at Pentecost,
in Acts chapter 8, Peter and John go to Samaritan villages to love and work
among them, which was only possible after setting aside old dividing lines.
Let us go and do
likewise.
[1] Matthew
Skinner in David Lyon Bartlett and Barbara Brown
Taylor’s Feasting On The Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
2008) 243.
