If you were to ask me what I believe
our strength is as a church, I would say that we do a good job
helping others in times of need. I believe we do a really good job
being Good Samaritans to those in need. I know that if there is a
family in need or someone needs help, I can say, “Call Bruington
Baptist Church.” and I know that they will find the help they are
looking for.
When we hear the story of the Good
Samaritan, we naturally begin to think on ways we serve or can serve
others that embody the services of the Christian life. It is not
entirely wrong to think on those things or in those ways. I truly
believe the Christian duty is to serve and help others except the
question the scholar of the law asks Jesus is not about how to serve
or why to serve. The question he asks is, “Who is my neighbor”?
While the helping and caring aspect of
the parable are important, we overlook the importance of the question
the he asks and we need to know that the scholar is not in the wrong
to ask the question for a few reasons: 1) The scholar makes Jesus his
teacher by asking a question, “What must I do to inherit life in
its eternal fullness. Throughout the entire story the scholar remains
the questioner and the learner. 2) His question is about what he must
do in the here and now, in his immediate life situation. He sets up
the question to test the man he has chosen as his teacher, something
every student does with every teacher. It is not wrong for the
students to question their teachers, how else is the student to
learn? 3) Jesus and the scholar are in agreement that the Torah, the
law, contains the answer: Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. 4)
Then the student poses the correct follow up question: What does this
mean for me concretely: Who is my neighbor? 5) The student asks a
precise question and he receives a precise answer from his teacher:
Be a person who pays attention and does mercy. This is what it means
to act lovingly towards God. 6) The parable reinforces and makes
Jesus' answer concrete, it is a matter of seeing and doing.
(Schottroff, Luise. The Parables of Jesus
pg 132).
The scholar is not
testing Jesus in the same way several of the Pharisees have; he is
wanting to learn and because he is wanting to learn from Jesus, not
entrap him or prove him wrong, the scholar, like us, wants to know:
what is the action God expects, here and now? What should we do in
the here and now? And who is our neighbor?
Jesus answers the
scholar's question with a story and he begins by identifying who the
neighbor is: “He/she is a certain person, who exactly, I do not
know. I do not know their name. Your neighbor is anyone toward whom
you are neighborly. Your neighbor is anyone who lies in need at
life's roadside.” Jesus does not identify this “certain man” as
a Jew or Gentile or Roman or Greek, or American, or the immigrant, or
Christian, or black, or white. Our neighbor is any certain person,
anyone in need, “one of the numerous Jericho roads of life.”
(King, Jr. Martin L. “On Being a Good Neighbor” Strength to
Love, pg 22). Jesus defines a neighbor, not in a
theological definition, but in a life situation.
The parable of the
Good Samaritan is a rich story showcasing the vast tradition of
active compassion as an expression of God's love; and this expression
is not limited to a certain group. The parable frees us to understand
the ambiguity of the answer to the question “who is my neighbor”
as a story inviting us to see any who are in need, who are down, who
have been beaten, stripped, or robbed. The parable encourages us to
hear the psalmist, “For God stands at the right hand of the poor
man” (Psalm 109:31).
The parable
encourages us to understand that God stands at the right side of
those who need love. Love for God happens when a poor (needy) person
comes to our door. The intensity required by such love is described
over and over again in the scriptures, “He (God) has told you, O
mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but do
justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
(Micah 6:8). As the prophet Ezekiel writes, “This was the guilt of
your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food,
and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” The
problem with our interpretation is we believe mercy to be the obvious
while the text tells us the opposite. The text tells precisely that
mercy is anything but obvious. The parable means to make us see the
miracle taking place: It is possible to love God and other people in
the deepest sense of the word love (Schottroff pg134).
Martin Luther King
Jr writes, “One of the great tragedies of humanity's long trek
along the highway of history has been limiting our neighborly concern
to a tribe, race, class, (religion), or nation. The God of early Old
Testament days was a tribal god and the ethic was tribal. “Thou
shalt not kill” meant “Thou shalt not kill a fellow Israelite,
but for God's sake, kill a Philistine.” The parable of the Good
Samaritan expands our understanding of “who are neighbor” is. Our
neighbor is not just our kinfolk, our friends, our family, or just
members of the church, they are anyone who is need. To love the Lord,
our God, with every ounce of our being, is to love our neighbor, the
one in need, with every ounce of our being. We do this because it is
commanded of us, “This new command I give to you: Love one another,
as I have loved you”; being merciful to those in need is to express
and extend the love of Christ.
In the parables
Jesus includes a “shock” factor, in which he deliberately shocks
the audience listening to the story, and the Samaritan is the shock
factor. We give the Priest and the Levite a hard time for not
stopping. We come up with reasons as to why, and each reason has to
do with obeying the law, the Torah. We claim they do not go near the
man because they do not wish to defile themselves but no where in the
story does Jesus say why, he simply says, “they passed on the other
side.” We expect a priest or member of the church to stop and help
someone in a crisis; but we would not expect a Samaritan to stop. If
we were a part of Jesus' culture we know that the relationship
between the Jewish and Samaritan people was at times hostile, but
Jesus chooses a Samaritan because of their closeness with the Jewish
people.
The Samaritan
people worship the same God as the Jewish people, except they worship
in different places. The Jews worship God in the temple in Jerusalem
while the Samaritans worshiped (the same God) in a temple on Mount
Gerizim. Jesus knows that the Samaritan also regards the Pentateuch
as a holy book, and he knows his Jewish audience, specifically the
scholar, would be more inclined to expect misbehavior from the
Samaritan than from his own people (Schottroff, pg 135). We are
suggested to consider, as Luise Schottroff writes, “to answer the
question of why the priest and the Levite look away to be closely
bound up with Jesus' challenge at the end: Go and do likewise—do
just as the Samaritan did.” (Schottroff, pg 135). We do not know if
the scholar went and did likewise, and it is good that we do not
because it is here we place ourselves in the story, we become the
scholar and Jesus becomes our teacher. As we become the student we
are confronted with the harsh reality of helping at times and at
others passing by on the other side.
How often have we
fed a family and seeing how the live, simply send them on their way?
How often have paid someone's bill or helped with rent, and send them
on their way without ever offering to go that one step further. In
order for us to really be a good neighbor, we must be willing to
invest in the lives of those we help. Remember the Samaritan does not
just bandage the man's wounds. He picks him up and takes him to an
inn, he then asks the innkeeper to watch over him, promising to
return. The Samaritan invests in the man's life, indeed the Samaritan
continues his journey, he will come back, he will return. We too must
go and do likewise, investing in the lives all of our neighbors so
that we too are expressing the love of Christ through our actions.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a parable which reminds of the
ways we have missed the merciful opportunities and helps us see how
the smallest of kind acts showcase fully our love for Christ.
In his sermon “On
Being a Good Neighbor”, Martin Luther King Jr told this story, “A
few years ago, when an automobile carrying several members of a Negro
basketball team had an accident on a Southern highway, three of the
young men were severely injured. An ambulance was immediately called,
but on arriving at the place of the accident, the driver, who was
white, said without apology that it was not his policy to service
Negroes, and he drove away. The driver of a passing automobile
graciously drove the boys to the nearest hospital, but the attending
physician belligerently said, “We don't take ******* in this
hospital.” When the boys finally arrived at a “colored”
hospital in a town some fifty miles from the scene of the accident,
one was dead, and the two died thirty and fifty minutes later,
respectively.” (King, pg 24).
50 years ago
tragedies like this one were the constant norm (and an argument could
be made that tragedies like this one continue today because of our
failure to see one another as neighbor). Whites had a clear
definition of who their neighbors were. It was a definition that was
spread across White society by politicians, Klansman, and even
preachers. I once preached this same text from the same pulpit a
pastor stood 50 years before me yelling, “God is not a God of
equality.” The members of the church identified the neighbor as a
specific person of a specific race, other members of the church
helped change the identity of the neighbor to include all people, to
reinforce Jesus' words, “A certain person”.
While we have come
a little further since 1963 (not as far as we wished) we still
struggle with who are neighbor is. We struggle with the issue of
immigration and we struggle with how our certain inalienable rights
are still rights that belong only to a specific group. We still
struggle with who are neighbor is and to who we must show mercy. It
is the same struggle the scholar wrestled with and perhaps cause for
his justification. The parable of the Good Samaritan compels us to
continue to wrestling with the question of who is our neighbor; while
challenging us to show mercy to our neighbor, even if we still are
not sure who that is.
The
parable tells us what it means to be participants in the kingdom of
heaven, to be citizens of a Christian community, because it tells of
the failure of those who do not wish to fail, and of an action that
brings the love of God to earth. The wounded man is not released from
the inn as cured; the Samaritan will come back. Thus the parable ends
with an open action and an open conclusion after Jesus' challenge.
The scholar will act; and we the audience will act. (Schottroff,
pg 137).
“More than ever before, my friends,
people of all races and nations are today challenged to be
neighborly. The call for a world-wide good neighbor policy is more
than a short-lived expression; it is the call to a way of life that
will transform our imminent cosmic lament into a psalm of creative
fulfillment. No longer can we afford the luxury of passing by on the
other side. Such folly was once called moral failure; today it will
lead to universal suicide. We cannot long survive spiritually
separated in world that is geographically together. We cannot ignore
the wounded person on life's Jericho road, because they are a part of
us, and we a part of them. Their agony diminishes us, and their
salvation enlarges us.” (King, pg 30).
The parable of the Good Samaritan urges
us to continue feeding those who are hungry, clothing those who are
naked, giving water to those who are thirsty, visiting those who are
sick or in prison. The parable, likewise, urges us to invest in the
lives all who are neighbor, to not only feed them and go on our way,
but to come back and continue to be in community with them. The
parable urges us to see beyond the act of bandaging our neighbor, and
to see how the Samaritan continued to care for the one who was a
stranger but treated as if he was his dearest neighbor.
May the challenge in the midst of an
injustice world be as it was then: Go and do likewise. Go and do as
the Samaritan. Let us no longer see each other as strangers but as
neighbors.
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