Sermon Title: "A New Look at the Good Old Samaritan"
Date: July 11, 2010
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Luke 10:25-37

When Linda read Luke’s Gospel account of the beloved Good Samaritan parable today, I image that many of you focused your attention on the man beaten and robbed and left by the roadside, and the three persons who happened by.  While the term “Good Samaritan” is never used by Jesus, it’s certainly one of Jesus’ most familiar stories.  The term has come to have its own place and meaning in our contemporary society.  There are hospitals called “Good Samaritan.”  There are agencies that carry “Good Samaritan” in all or part of their name.  There are even “Good Samaritan Laws” here in California and in many states which are in place to protect those who serve or tend those who are ill.  The intention of these laws is to reduce the hesitation of those who might seek to help one who is sick or injured, but is concerned with lawsuits or prosecution for unintentional injuries or deaths.  The term has even been commercialized as the Good Sam Club that offers campgrounds, discounts and benefits to owners of camper trailers and RVs.  Yet, there is more to the text and the parable that Jesus tells than good intentions on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.  I invite you today to explore with me some of the background information around this parable that may enable us to take a new look at the good old Samaritan.

The lectionary passage does not begin with the parable itself, but with the attention grabbing phrase, “Just then”—a phrase that cries out for us to look back and see what was going on.  The tenth chapter began with Jesus’ commission of “the seventy” to go out and extend his ministry.  It was “just then,” Luke recounts, that “a lawyer stood up to test Jesus” on precisely what one “must do to inherit eternal life.”

Now we all know lawyers ask a lot of questions.  They are trained to be inquisitive so they leave no fact unturned and may perform their jobs satisfactorily.  But the term “lawyer” as used in the Bible is not our contemporary understanding of lawyer (i.e. litigator) as a highly secular occupation; instead, this is a scholar of the Torah, one who is learned and well-respected in interpreting the Jewish law, which includes the Levitical Codes and purity laws.  These “lawyers” were to read the spiritual revelation from God in Scripture and apply it to life. 

And, indeed, this particular lawyer knows the Torah well.  When Jesus asks him what was written in the law, he quoted verses from the books of Leviticus (19:18) and Deuteronomy (6:5):  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, … all your soul, … all your strength, and … all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus compliments him on his correct answer and tells him “do this…”  If the lawyer departed here and went forth to do that which he already knew, the story would be over.  The four verses comprising this interaction would be so unremarkable it is doubtful it would be selected as a lectionary reading.

But the lawyer does not stop here.  He presses Jesus further:  “And who is my neighbor?”  And that opens a whole Pandora’s box of defining who our neighbor really is.  The persons around us in the pew?  The people who live next door?  Down the block?  In the cubicle or office next to yours?  Passengers on the elevator?  The man who slept last night on the church porch?  What if they are different from us?

Who is my neighbor?  The question is one of boundaries and factions.   It is a question that seeks to define who is in and who is out.  The command in the law seems insufficient in this subsequent line of questioning.  The lawyer’s own response that the way to eternal life is to love God and to love neighbor as self is challenged.  The lawyer wants to know who then does he need to love to gain this eternal life that he seeks.  The question seems minimalist:  who do I need to love at the very least to get eternal love?  The question is not about open arms, but how many doors can be closed.

Jesus then launches into the parable we call the Good Samaritan.  And I hear echoing in my ears the words of a seminary professor long ago who said no one can retell one of Jesus’ parables in as concise a way as he did.  He was a master storyteller.  He tells of a man, likely Jewish, who went down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  On the way, he was attacked by robbers who stripped him, beat him and left him half dead.  First a priest of his own religion came upon him, but he was on his way to an important service at the temple, so he hurried on by.  Next a Levite came by, but being a man who followed all the laws scrupulously, he knew he might be made unclean by touching this naked, beaten man.  So he gave wide berth as he gingerly stepped around the fallen man.  Finally a Samaritan, a member of a different religious sect reviled by faithful Jews, came upon the victim.  He ministered to the fallen man on the road, put him on his animal, took him to an inn and gave him aid.  He gave money to the innkeeper and told him to also take care of the man.

Then Jesus asks the question—Jesus often turned a request into a question—of the lawyer, “Which…was the neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  And I suspect the Jewish lawyer who despised Samaritans could not even bring himself to utter that word.  Instead he answered Jesus, “The one who showed him mercy.”

But there is another interesting twist to this parable which we so often read and preach from the perspective of the Samaritan who helps.  The stunning answer is that the robbed and beaten Jew in the ditch discovered that the Samaritan was his neighbor and that the others—those geographically, ethnically and religiously similar—were not!  When his fellow Jews, the priest and the Levite, could not bother to help him, how will he in the future think of Samaritans?

How do we find places to be engaged with those who are in need?  Can we be moved by compassion in our communities to see ourselves and the presence of God in those who are on the margins of our community near and far?  Can compassion move us in a way that defies traditional stereotypical understandings of people and embraces all as equals, as neighbors, residents of a global community?

Jesus challenges the lawyer to go out and do likewise.  Go out and be a neighbor.  Go out and be a neighbor to the least like individual who should be neighbor.  Are we willing to take an honest look at the world around us?  Are we willing to examine our communities and see who is excluded from our list of neighbors?  Are we ready to open our eyes and begin erasing the boxes and replacing them with one that says neighbor?

One need not look far.  At lunch last Thursday I was having a sandwich at Jack in the Box on Second Street.  While I was eating, a disheveled looking man came in and stood patiently in line.  He had some paper money in his hand.  I overheard him ask for a small order of jalapeno poppers.  He took his order and walked out the door.  As I left, I looked up at the menu and realized they were the lowest priced item—99 cents.  He probably had only one dollar.  I left the restaurant, thinking I could ask him if he wanted more to eat than that.  But he was nowhere to be seen.  I, a minister, was no better than the priest or Levite in the parable.  I had missed my opportunity to be a neighbor to a stranger. 

In John’s Gospel (4:7-26) Jesus engaged in conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well—a woman and a Samaritan:  two taboos in Jewish society.  Jesus said there should be no barriers that separate one from another.  The lawyer wants to know whom to exclude.  Jesus says if a Samaritan can stop to help when the Temple elite do not, then the Samaritan is a part of the neighborhood.

We are all called to be neighbor to all.  The Samaritans are here, living in our cities and our communities.  They are those whom society may have rendered unclean, untouchable and worth less than most.  Go find the Samaritans and welcome them with compassion to the table.  There’s no telling when they someday might be the one reaching out to help you rather than the other way around.