Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
BCP - Proper 10 C – Sunday 15 July 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 9-14
Colossians 1: 1-14
Luke 10: 25-37
Picture: "The Good Samaritan" by Luca Giordano,Neapolitan painter, 1634-1705, active in Italy and Spain. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France.*****
May your good news, O Jesus,
Impel our hearts to flow with love,
For you, and for our neighbor. Amen.
*****
The Evangelist Luke gives us one of the richest and most beautiful passages of the Gospel here. It encompasses (a) the Golden Commandment, (b) one of the most memorable parables of the Gospel and (c) a fireworks display of challenge and riposte debating.
Let me put Jesus’ encounter with the lawyer and the so-called “Good Samaritan” parable into context as we re-visit what Jesus is teaching us today.
Once more, Jesus is surrounded by a crowd. The Seventy have just returned with amazing accounts of successful preaching, healing and lots of baptizing throughout the region. Not everyone in the crowd is rejoicing with Jesus and his friends, though.
Jesus is teaching things that don’t please too many of his fellow Pharisees. Yes, he was probably a Pharisee himself; Jesus was born and bred in that tradition, he demonstrates the skills of that caste and he is reported to wear some of their signature vestments (the fringed robe, for instance).
Many Pharisees feel they have to stop the ascent of this unorthodox teacher. So, many of them engage him into a well-honed exercise of gauging whose honor trumps the other’s. The one who wins the challenge and riposte match has gained honor; the one who loses sees his honor diminished. If Jesus’ honor is publicly diminished often enough, the offended Pharisees think his teaching will go away or at least will become less and less attractive to the populace.
One Pharisee lawyer (or scribe) decides this public moment is a good one to try to shame Jesus; and he issues a challenge. The challenge takes the form of a question. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
In Jesus’ time, a direct question in public like this one is recognized by all present as a challenge. Rather than answering the lawyer’s question, Jesus retorts with another question. He appeals to the lawyer’s knowledge of the law and his ability to read. This reference to the ability to read may be an extra pique in the style of “If you can read, you should know this one”.
Jesus’ retort is strong enough that the lawyer feels complied to answer directly in order to re-establish his credibility. He combines quotes from Deuteronomy (6:5) and from Leviticus (19:18) into a single statement of the two highest commandments of the Law.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
In doing this, he shows that he knows his stuff. Jesus congratulates him as a satisfied teacher: “You answered correctly. Do this and you will live.” Do I discern some ironic condescension in our Lord’s comment here?
I want to point out that, in his conclusion, Jesus does not say “…and you will live eternally”. That was the lawyer’s question, wasn’t it? It rather seems to me that Jesus’ answer elicits the vision of fullness of life. “Do this and you will live fully.”
Our lawyer is discomfited but he doesn’t give up yet. After all, his honor is at stake. He has one last card to play. Rabbinical discourse has since the time of Leviticus tried to determine who is on the “in” and who is on the “out” of this “neighbor” designation.
Many traditional interpretations of the time would support a restrictive understanding of “neighbor”. It would cover one’s kindred and the kindred of fellow Israelites. Some would even include sojourners, or resident aliens – that’s great for a green card holder like me: maybe I would have made it into the neighbor category.
So our Pharisee lawyer thinks he can re-establish his street cred by making Jesus stump on the delimitation of who’s our neighbor. By now, Jesus could ignore his thwarted challenger and move on. But he chooses to take this up and turns it into another teaching opportunity.
*****
And Jesus continues to turn the heat on his listeners by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is difficult for us to re-discover how shocking this parable must have been to its hearers. The whole parable plays on the concept of purity; who is clean and unclean, who is pure and impure. No one wanted to live and interact with people considered impure. Doing so made one impure and required difficult and onerous ritual cleansing to regain one’s status.
In Jesus’ time, Jews considered Samaritans unclean and would not deal with them. Blood and dead bodies were also one of the many, many things deemed unclean.
But let’s get back to the road from Jerusalem to Jericho; it dropped over 3400 feet over about 15 miles of hilly terrain. It winded through narrow passages much beloved of highway bandits (usually disenfranchised farmers and farmhands). These highway bandits ambushed travelers without escort or travelers who might still be on the road as the daylight dwindled. One tactic for ambushing travelers was to put a decoy injured person on the road.
The unfortunate traveler is ambushed, stripped, robbed, beaten and left unconscious on the road. Such as he is, he has become untouchable to most Jews: he is naked and therefore his social status cannot be determined (whether a Jew or not, of what rank); he is bloody and unconscious on the ground (his exposed blood makes him unclean and his being unconscious makes him appear dead - yet another source of impurity).
The priest and the Levite both make the decision that this unfortunate soul is more trouble than is worth expending. Both may be wary of the potential ambush. The priest particularly may be concerned that touching the man would make him unclean and would either make him unsuitable for the temple service he is going to Jerusalem for or would rob him of the sanctity of coming back from such holy service. In his mind, the liturgical service of God takes precedence over charity. In either case, the priest and the Levite steer clear of getting close enough to the man to ascertain his health and social status.
Our Samaritan traveler on the other hand throws caution to the wind and approaches the injured man close enough to have compassion (the word used in Greek denotes a gut-instinct to help and care).
Coming close is essential; he “came near him” says the text. It reminds me of Moses being addressed by God only when he has turned his attention to the burning bush. It seems that getting closer and paying attention is paramount in our being able to relating to God. And remember, that’s what’s going on here; loving our neighbor is loving God. Coming close is important; it is also what we do in meditation and prayer; we come closer and pay attention to God.
It is in this initial movement of attention that the Samaritan finds all the necessary humanity to deal with the injured man. He draws from his own resources to clean, bandage, transport and put up the man at the inn.
The fact that he’s good for credit at the inn may indicate a trader who travels the road regularly; trading is yet another despised occupation in the purity laws. Also, Jews in good standing would not stay at public inns but stay with kindred.
So our Samaritan is marginal to Jewish society in nearly all manners of looking at it. It is not impossible, that the injured traveler coming to his senses might partly resent the impurity that befell him in being cared for by a Samaritan.
Yet that’s only one more risk the Samaritan took to help his neighbor.
And this is where Jesus delivers the sting of this parable: “Which one of these three (that is the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan) – Which one of these three turned out to be a neighbor to the one who fell among bandits?”
If your life depended on their help, who would you consider the neighbor worthy of your love? Anyone? Everyone? Well, there’s our program as Christians; that is whom we are to be open to love, otherwise our love of God risks weighing as much as the words that describe that love.
*****
Paraphrasing some of the scripture we heard today, let us pray:
O God, you love us irrepressibly, regardless of what we say or do. May your love impel us to lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as we bear fruit in every good work and as we grow in the knowledge of You, our Beloved.
Help us to recognize that our hope is in the love of our neighbor; the love we receive and the love we give. You taught us to recognize our neighbor in every one who might help us in our time of dire need. The Samaritan traveler, silenced objections to good work, went to his fellow man, had compassion on him and helped him.
May we go and do likewise. Amen.
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