Opening Illustration: Peter Hawkins helps a troubled man in Manhattan. He had
attended Alec Macgowan’s One Man Gospel According to Mark.
This story highlights a question that seems to bedevil people today: What is my
responsibility to those less fortunate than I am? How far am I required to go in
order to be considered a person of authentic faith? Translation: How much must I
help other people in order to fee like I’ve been a good Christian?
The problem is often in the way we’ve phrased that question. We want to know how
much to do so that we feel like our obligations are met. Jesus is asked this
question during a discussion of the Law of Moses. As I said last week, those
laws were supposed to determine how people acted toward one another.
Since those laws were given by God to Moses, they were supposed to be
unquestionable. The problem is that some of the meanings of the words could be a
little vague. So experts in the law constantly debated the meaning and
interpretation of the law, trying to figure out just what God meant.
One area of debate dealt with the well known commandment that people should love
their neighbors as themselves. This is the verse on which Jesus is quizzed by a
lawyer, probably trying to get Jesus to make a mistake and show himself to be a
novice.
He asks Jesus for a legal definition of the word “neighbor.” Who is your
neighbor? Now the correct legal response, according to the law, would have been
to say that for Jewish people their fellow Jews were to be considered as
neighbors. They were not required to treat anyone who was not a Jew as a
neighbor.
In other words, Jews did not have to love people of other races as themselves.
There were a set of laws detailing how they were supposed to act toward
gentiles. But they were not required to treat them as well as they treated a
fellow Jew.
Now Jesus could have just said that. It would have been the end of the
discussion. That’s where a god-fearing Jew’s obligation would end. If they loved
their fellow Jew as themselves then God would have been happy with them.
But in the Gospel of Luke Jesus is described as someone who disagrees with that
interpretation of the law. He thinks their reading of it is too restrictive. In
Luke, Jesus teaches his followers that God loves everyone equally, regardless of
race.
Contrary to what most people would have expected from someone who was a Rabbi,
Jesus associated freely with people of other races and didn’t consider himself
to be impure because of it. He heals a Roman centurion’s servant and constantly
reminds his followers that their Jewish descent doesn’t guarantee t hem any
special status in God’s eyes.
And if God loves everyone equally, then those who follow Jesus must love others
the way they love themselves. That kind of love and inclusivity reflects God’s
own love. But Jesus couldn’t just say, “Well, you have to love everyone as your
neighbor. If he had, the lawyer would have called him on it and Jesus would have
looked like an amateur.
What Jesus needs to do is show just how ridiculous it is to ask yourself, “Who
does God require me to love? Who don’t I have to love?” Sounds like a dumb
question, but the lawyer did a great job of making it sound like an important
one.
Jesus responds instead by telling a parable, a fictional story with an intended
religious meaning. The story he tells is the famous story of the Good Samaritan.
Many of you have heard this one a hundred times.
It‘s a story about a man who sets out to travel eleven miles east from Jerusalem
to Jericho. We don’t know why, but the fact that he’s from Jerusalem implies
that he’s Jewish. On the way he is attacked and beaten. His attackers take his
clothes and leave him on the road to die.
Three people pass him on the road. The first is a Jewish priest. The priest
probably would like to help, but he realizes the tremendous burden he would be
placing on himself by touching this guy, who he probably figures is dead anyway.
If the priest touches him, the priest will be rendering himself impure, which
means he won’t be able to carry out his priestly duties. The priest will be
required by law to go through an arduous cleansing process before he can return
to work at the temple.
That means loss of income, a jostling of the schedule at the temple, and a lot
of headaches just to help a guy who he may not have able to help anyway. The
priest walks on the opposite side of the road so that he doesn’t get anywhere
near the body.
A Levite, who is like a priest’s assistant, also walks by and sees the guy, but
fore the same reasons the Levite decides not to get involved. The Levite also
walks by on the other side of the road.
Now these two were supposed to be the good guys. They were godly Jews who helped
their people atone for their sins. They acted as intermediaries between the
people and God. So if these two good people decided they couldn’t love this
neighbor as themselves, then this guy was really in trouble. Or so it seemed.
Then along comes someone who was considered one of the bad guys. He was a
Samaritan. Samaritans were another group to whom the Jews were related, but the
Jews looked down on them because the Samaritans’ ancestors had intermarried with
gentiles hundreds of years earlier. So to the Jews these people were half
breeds. And definitely not their neighbors.
On top of it, this Samaritan seems to be one of those merchants who sells oil
and wine at greatly inflated prices. This guy is carrying olive oil and wine,
two huge exports of the Samaritans. He has so much that he has to bring a pack
animal along to carry all the stuff.
Jesus’ audience probably was hoping that the attackers would come out and rob
this Samaritan. But instead, the Samaritan turns out to be the good guy. He
takes that oil and wine which he would normally sell and he pours it on the
wounds to stop the infection and pain. Then he bandages up the man, puts him on
his animal and takes him to the nearest town.
He takes the man to an inn, by the way, this is probably not even as nice a
place as some ratty motel out in the sticks. He tells the innkeeper to take care
of this guy. He gives him some money and says, Spend whatever you have to in
order to nurse this guy back to health. I’ll settle up with you the next time I
come through.”
Having said this, he looks back at the lawyer and turns the question around:
Instead of answering the question of “who do I have to love”, he said, “Who do
you think acted like a neighbor to this poor man?” Obviously it was the
Samaritan.
Jesus said, “There’s your answer.” End of discussion. The point is that in God’s
kingdom we don’t ask ourselves who to help and who not to. Our responsibility to
love others as ourselves extends to everyone, not just to people like us. If you
have to ask who you’re required to love, you’ve missed the point.
Now that sounds kind of obvious to most of us, but you’d be surprised at how
quickly even the best intentioned Christians can abandon that principle in a
crisis.
Some years ago a famous experiment was conducted with seminary students.
Researchers gathered a group of ministry students in a classroom and told them
that each of them had an assignment.
Their assignment was to record a talk about the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
The thing was, the recordings were going to be done in a building on the other
side of the campus, and because of a tight schedule, they needed to hurry to
that building.
Unbeknownst to the students, on the path to the other building the researchers
had planted an actor to play the part of a man in distress, slumped in an alley,
coughing and suffering. The students were going to make a presentation about the
Good Samaritan.
But what would happen, the researchers wondered, when they actually encountered
a man in need? Would they be Good Samaritans? Well, no, as a matter of fact,
they were not. Almost all of them rushed past the hurting man. One student even
stepped over the man's body as he hurried to teach about the Parable of the Good
Samaritan!
We should not look down at these seminary students who couldn't put the Parable
of the Good Samaritan into practice, because neither can we. Simply knowing in
our minds what the right thing to do is does not mean we can do it. If we are
going to be Good Samaritans, then this will mean more than a change of mind. It
will take a change of heart. And that's what this parable is about: a change of
heart.
The Principled Politician is the true story of a forgotten Republican Governor
of Colorado who took an unpopular stance against ignorance and bigotry toward
the treatment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. A stance that would
ultimately cost him his career.
Between the years 1942 and 1945, over one-hundred twenty thousand people of
Japanese descent from the West Coast of the United States, most of who were
American citizens, were rounded up and placed in internment camps.
One such camp was Camp Amache in South East Colorado, near the town of Grenada.
Governor Carr vehemently objected to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive
Order 9066, which required any person of Japanese descent to be relocated to
internment camps. Carr believed that such a directive was unnecessary and
violated the Constitutional rights of many American citizens of Japanese
descent.
Governor Carr received threats of impeachment, unrelenting criticism in the
press, and non-stop phone calls to the Governor's residence from scared Colorado
citizens for his outspoken stance on protecting who The Denver Post even
described as the "yellow devils." He was a man of principle - a man who did the
right thing even when it was the unpopular thing.
If he was willing to do so just in order to be a good governor, how much more
should we be willing to love our neighbors, whoever they are, because we want
our love to reflect God’s love?
That is the point of Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan. What the lawyer
discovered-and what we discover, too-is that we cannot stand on the sidelines
and figure out how to be good, defining our terms-is this person my neighbor or
not-figuring out just what we have to do to inherit eternal life.
For all of our religious virtues and attitudes, we just cannot do it. We are
helpless to be Good Samaritans on our own strength. In other words, we are the
person in the ditch, the one who lies helpless and wounded beside the road, the
one who needs to be rescued.
And along comes a Good Samaritan, a Good Samaritan named Jesus -despised and
rejected-who comes to save us, speaks tenderly to us, lifts us into his arms,
and takes us to the place of healing. As Paul said, while we were still God's
enemies, God saw us in the ditch and had compassion, and in Jesus came to save
us.
So, the question is not the lawyer's, "What is the definition of 'neighbor'?"
The question is who has been neighbor to you. Jesus Christ has been neighbor to
you. The crucified one has been neighbor to you. Will his mercy make your own
heart merciful? Then in your heart you will know what this means: Go and do
likewise.