A Sermon on the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37)

(A word to the reader: I don’t usually post sermons, mainly because I believe sermons make little sense when abstracted from the gathered assembly where they were preached. For me, sermons are as much experiential as they are intellectual. Consequently, this sermon was written to be spoken and heard, not necessarily to be read. Nevertheless, several people asked me for the manuscript today, and so, here it is…only slightly edited so that, hopefully, it will make as much sense for the eye as for the ear.)

The lawyer asks a straightforward question.

Except it isn’t.

For one thing, as we read the text, we have no idea the emotion behind the question. While Luke conjectures the lawyer asks the question for his own benefit (so that he may be “justified”), we are left to wonder.

Did he ask the question out of exasperation?

Or curiosity?

Or cynicism?

Or anger?

What words in the question did he emphasize?

How would it have sounded?

Did he ask,

“WHO is my neighbor?” Or,

“Who IS my neighbor?” Or,

“Who is MY neighbor?” Or,

“Who is my NEIGHBOR?”

Then, Jesus complicates the entire situation by telling a story instead of just giving a straightforward answer.

If Jesus has been an Episcopalian, he would have known the correct answer to the attorney’s question is, “Everyone is my neighbor!”

Of course, Jesus knows the human condition. He knows that if “everyone” is our neighbor, then no one is. The love of neighbor is either lived out in relationship and proximity to another person, or it’s no love at all. The story we have before us today is one of both relationship and proximity.

The challenge for us in hearing the story yet again is to resist our certainty about it. First and foremost, the story is NOT a morality tale. Jesus is not simply telling the lawyer and other listeners to “be kind to the downtrodden.” While the world could certainly use LOTS more kindness, and Christians certainly have failed in the kindness department through the centuries, this sort of reductionistic summary completely misses the scandal of the story. And in missing the scandal, we ourselves become a scandal to the Gospel.

The first thing to remember is this. The hero in the story, the good neighbor, the Samaritan, was a member of an ethnic group the Jews hated. Oh, and to be clear, the Samaritan, as a representative of his ethnic group would have happily returned the favor of distrust and hatred towards the Jews. The animosity between Samaritans and Jews went back for centuries. The Jews of Jesus’ day had such disdain for the Samaritans that when traveling from Judaea to Galilee or vice versa, they would literally cross the Jordan river twice in order to walk entirely around the region of Samaria — just so they could avoid getting Samaritan dirt on their sandals.

The second thing to remember is the heartless people in the story are the supposed holy people. — the priest and the Levite — and they were the victim’s own people! A fellow Jew had been robbed, beaten to within an inch of his life, and they simply walked on by. Every time I read the story as a professional religious person, I can’t help but wonder who I’m walking past day in and day out.

The third thing to remember is everything about being neighborly in the story was time-consuming and costly. The Samaritan delayed his own journey, offered first aid, provided transport, arranged for room and board, and paid the bill. Mercy is a hallmark of neighborliness. And mercy isn’t simply a feeling of pity! Mercy is a series of definitive acts for the benefit of the one who is helpless, and who will likely be unable to repay the mercy shown by the benefactor.

Now, here’s the hard part about this parable. Whenever we hear it, we immediately want to identify with the Samaritan. And why not? He’s the hero! We want to think that, faced with a similar circumstance we would behave like he did — that we would be helpful to the person in pain. Or that, at the very least, we would dial 911! Right?

Plenty of sermons on this text have exhorted us to be more attentive to the needs of others. I’ve preached my fair share of those sermons through the years. Plenty of sermons castigate the religious hypocrites, and exhalt the virtues of the Samaritan. In these sorts of sermons, though, the victim becomes little more than a prop. The victim loses his personhood as we hustle to distance ourselves from the hard-hearted religious people, and embrace the virtue of the Samaritan.

But what if there’s something more subversive going on in Jesus’ story? Something more unsettling?

What if we’re meant to identify with the victim?

Think about it for a minute. Try to imagine yourself lying in a ditch beside the road in the scorching heat of the midday sun. You know you’re bleeding. You think you have a couple of broken ribs, maybe a broken nose, and perhaps even a dislocated shoulder. Your eyes are swollen. EVERYTHING HURTS! You are thirsty.

And you simply can’t move.

Then, through the haze of semi-consciousness, you begin to feel the touch of hands. You feel the sting of wine being poured into your wounds followed by the soothing feeling of oil. Bandages are applied. You are hoisted onto the back of a donkey, and you are steadied in the saddle by your rescuer as you weakly wobble back and forth. After a while, you are laid in a bed. Exhausted, you drift off to sleep.

When you awaken, still in pain, you are confronted by a detail which had not mattered to you when you were in the ditch. The person who has been so attentive to your needs is a SCUM DOG Samaritan! You hate those people! They are infidels! They don’t worship the right God! They are racially inferior! There is nothing about them that is good!

And now…now you owe your life to one of them!

…This would be what folks in the social sciences would call “cognitive dissonance.”

Now, think about this: bring the story forward 20 centuries.

Who are the people we don’t want as our neighbors? Who are the people from whom we’d prefer not to receive mercy? Who are the people we simply cannot abide?

What color are they?

What nationality?

What religion?

What political party?

Who are the people we’ve so demonized as evil that the thought of even being in the same room with them fills us with fear, or hatred, or both?

Who are the people we have so dehumanized with various sorts of labels that their suffering barely registers with us, or worse, we somehow believe they brought their suffering upon themselves?

Today, at the southern border of our country, hundreds upon hundreds of people are being detained in conditions which are unhealthy and inhumane. In spite of the tireless work of numerous non-profit agencies and legal aid groups, the practice of separating children from their parents continues almost unabated. And today — this very moment, in fact — in cities across our country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, under orders from our government are undertaking massive sweeps with the goal of arresting thousands of undocumented immigrants. Under the rubric of upholding the law and protecting our citizenry, innumerable lives will be upended because “illegals” simply cannot be our neighbors.

God have mercy on us all.

In today’s Gospel story, the wrong sort of person turns out to be the hero. The religious folks are impervious to a fellow citizen’s suffering, and fail to live up to their own espoused ethic. And the helpless victim is restored to wholeness because of the mercy of a passerby who, had the tables been turned, would have likely been left to die by the very person he rescued. Rather than a simple story about being nice, this is a complex narrative of the human soul.

The challenge in the story is to sit with the discomfort it evokes…

The story compels us to explore our own tendency to ignore those who lie helplessly in the ditches of life, and then to justify our inaction by blaming the victims for being in the ditch in the first place.

The story dares us to think deeply about the groups and individuals we’ve cordoned off as unworthy of our neighborliness.

The story implores us to confront, with honest humility, our preference for the ease of generalizations over the time consuming effort of relationships.

The opportunity in the story is to see it, not as a call to “do better,” but as an invitation to repent — to seek God’s mercy and forgiveness. Only when we begin to see how our tribalism, prejudices, and hatreds have wounded our own souls, will we be able to receive the balm of Christ’s healing.

Our repentance can begin right now, in this place, around this Table. The One who feeds us with the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, will strengthen us to do the work of mercy in a broken world. Wounded as we are, we can still bind up the wounds of others in Jesus’ Name, and in so doing, begin to bind the wounds of the world. Having experienced God’s mercy, we can begin to live as people of mercy.

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”