This
is an iconic passage, so much so that its traditional title—The Good Samaritan—has
entered the lexicon, describing anybody who does a good deed. And like any of Jesus’ parables—indeed like any good wisdom story—there are multiple
interpretations, multiple levels of meaning, that can be accessed and
profitably used. There's the level we
all learned as children in Sunday School, perhaps the most simple message: as
Christians, we should be like the Samaritan, we should help people. This message is
in line with the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.
A
different spin—or more accurately, one with a bit more depth—involves the
question of who one’s neighbor is. It's the “presenting question,” that sets things
up, articulated by the lawyer, who functions as a literary foil, to allow Jesus
to get to the meat of the issue. And as
a lawyer, he knows very well what the law says, and he is testing Jesus to see
if he does, and if he interprets it rightly. And I don't think we should read anything particularly sinister in
this: that’s the lawyer’s job, examining those who claim some kind of authority
to see if they know what they’re talking about.
The lawyer is like the person well-versed in Presbyterian theology—there's
one in every Presbytery—who grills candidates for ordination. Obnoxious?
You bet. Irritating? For sure, especially to nervous 25-year-olds
fresh out of seminary. But that she or
he does a necessary job.
That’s the lawyer: like the Presbytery
know-it-all, he's testing Jesus too, just doing his job, you understand, and his
opening question has to do with eternal life: “Teacher,” he says, “what must I
do to inherit eternal life?” And
following good debate form, Jesus turns the question around on him. Suddenly, the tester becomes the tested:
“what does the law say? What is written in the law?” And being a lawyer, an expert in the law—elsewhere
he would be called a scribe—such things are right in his wheelhouse. The first part of his answer is the Shema: “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”, which Deuteronomy says should be kept on the doorposts of
every Jewish home, so they will always remember this most important of commands. But the interesting thing is that he doesn't
stop there. He couples the Shema with another commandment, this
time from Leviticus: love your neighbor
as yourself. And Jesus tells the lawyer
“you’re right! Do this and you will live.”
Now, if it had ended there, it would be very
simple; after all, as Jesus says elsewhere, on these commandments hang all the
law and the prophets. But the lawyer asks
for a clarification, and Luke tells us he’s trying to justify himself, to build
himself up little, but it does
provide the set-up for Jesus to define the notion of “neighbor.” And so he's off: there was a man going down
from Jerusalem to Jericho who was set upon by robbers . . .
And at the end of the parable Jesus
turns it around on him, again: instead of answering it himself, he asks the
lawyer to respond. But what’s more, he
turns the question around as well: instead
of asking the man “who do you think is
your neighbor,” he asks “who do you
think was the neighbor to the man in the ditch?” And the lawyer knows the answer all right, he's
not stupid, but he can't quite bring himself to say the name “Samaritan,” he
can't quite bring himself to admit that a hated enemy has schooled him on how
to love. So to Jesus’ question “Which of
the three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the
robbers” he simply says “The one who
showed him mercy.” And Jesus’ response
is equally simple: “Go and do likewise.”
And as was the case last week, where
Jesus told the Seventy he sent out to do only two things—heal the sick and say the kingdom is
near—what he tells the lawyer seems awful simple: go out and show mercy. No “accept me into your heart,” no “believe
in me and you will be saved,” just “show mercy.” To inherit eternal life, do one thing: show
mercy. Thus, Jesus demolishes—in advance, before it even happens!—two thousand
years of theological elaboration, and sums up the Gospel in two words: show
mercy. Or as other translations have it,
be kind. And I went to seminary for that?
Well . . . yes. According to Jesus, in
the parable of the Good Samaritan, to inherit eternal life, be kind. Love the Lord your God. And
your neighbor as yourself. But if it's
so simple, why is it so hard to do? Or
let me rephrase that: not speaking for anyone else here, why is it so hard for me to do? Well, “love your neighbor as yourself” points
the way. As scholar Cynthia Bourgeault
points out, though we usually interpret the this comparatively, as in “love your neighbor in
the same way as you do yourself” or “as much as yourself,” that's not how Jesus sees it. He sees it literally as yourself, “those two apparently separate selfhoods interchangeably,
indivisibly one.” Thus, we can love our
neighbor because we and our neighbor are not two but one.
Bourgeault writes that the notion that this
“is the core of Jesus’s radical vision of human identity” and that it “invariably
proves to be the key that unlocks his parables and other challenging teachings.” Thus, his oft-repeated statement that “the
first shall be last and the last shall be first” is not a threat against the
powerful, as in “just you wait . . . you’ll get yours,
your positions will be reversed” but a
statement of fact: in the kingdom of God, the first and last will be literally one. There will be no distinction between them
because they are one and the same.
And remember: Jesus taught that the
Kingdom of God is amongst us—i.e., already
here—and more radically still, that it is within
us. Thus, it is already that way for us,
we just don't access it. We
continue to perceive others as separate from ourselves, and this division of
the world into us and other-than-us is the root cause of much
strife and heartache in the world.
Because if we have a separate self, a separate ego, from the other, we
have to defend it—and our stuff, which of course belongs to us, not them. Much of our life becomes dedicated to this,
to the quest to preserve and defend a separate self from those we see as other
than us. And when it's scaled up to
nations, and—ahem!—political campaigns, well . . . all I can say is “oy vey!”
The physical reality behind all this has
been known by scientific types for well over a century. All matter is a form of energy, some of it simply
arranged differently from others, some of it vibrates at different frequencies. We are made up of the same stuff as that
table, there is no real boundary between me and that table over there, we’re just vibrating at different
frequencies. In addition, everything is
giving off particles of itself all the time, and when we ingest them or breath
them in, those particles become part of us.
And if this is true, if it's true that
everything is losing parts of itself continually—and it is—then things are in
constant flux. That table is literally
not the same table as it was a second ago.
It is a different table. In the
same way, I am not the same person I was when I walked down that aisle, or when
I stood up to preach this sermon, and I will not be the same person I am now a
nanosecond from now, much less when I finish this sentence. The cells of my body are constantly being
activated, deactivated, dying and changing within me; I am literally not the
same person from second to second. And
if this is true, if things—including this pulpit, our dog Callie, my high
school Spanish teacher—cannot remain themselves for two consecutive moments, can
there be anything that can be called a permanent “self?”
Another piece if the puzzle is that we,
along with everything else, are made of elements that are not us. In the past few
moments, different elements have entered us and other elements have flown out
of us. Our existence comes from things that are not us. The carbon in our muscles and skin and heart
come from plants, which get power from the sun, nutrients from the soil, and
make oxygen that we—and the farmers who planted them—must have to survive. Those farmers were nourished by other plants
and animals, birthed by their parents, and those plants are dependent upon the
farmer’s parents in the same way they
are the sunlight and rain and soil, they
are their children as much as is the farmer.
And this extends to psychological
things, such as happiness or sadness . . . We are happy because of something
not us, because of our boss, who praised us or gave us a raise. Because of our
spouse who is happy, and we are sad because he or she is, or because our boss
criticized us, or cut our salary.
Happiness or sadness are not individual matters.
Buddhists call this reality
“inter-being,” and say that we “inter-are” with everybody else. The great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh illustrates
this “nonself” nature of reality using our body as metaphor: the eyes, ears,
nose, tongue, body, and mind cannot exist
by themselves alone . . . “Our eyes,” he writes, “would not be possible
without non-eye elements. That is why [we] can say that our eyes have no
separate existence.” Everything is
interdependent upon everything else.
Of course, this should sound familiar. Paul uses a similar metaphor to describe the
oneness of the body of Christ: “If the
whole body were an eye,” he says “where would the hearing be? If the whole body
were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no
need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” We are all one in the body of Christ.
It's not an accident that Jesus follows
up the lawyer’s assertion about loving our neighbor as ourselves with the
illustration of the Good Samaritan. The underlying
problem, the reason that the Levite and the priest can ignore the man in the
ditch—most likely a Jew like them—is because they regard them as separate, as
other from themselves. And the Samaritan
. . . doesn't.
And I would be remiss in my
pastor-duties if I didn't end by drawing the obvious parallel between the
parable of the Good Samaritan and what happened in Baton Rouge and St. Paul and
Dallas. Sometimes, policemen panic and
shoot folks because they regard them as other than themselves, and thus they are
afraid. They guy who shot those 12
officers in Dallas was enraged at what he thought of as police brutality, even
though those officers, that department had nothing to do with St. Paul or Baton
Rouge. None of this would happen if all
the parties involved are interconnected.
There is no white or black, cop or civilian, Muslim or Christian. Our
neighbor is us and we are our neighbor.
We are one. Amen.
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