Who is the Good Samaritan?

Mayfield-Salisbury Church, Edinburgh, Scotland

WHO IS THE GOOD SAMARITAN?

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge                                                  Easter IV, May Day 2005

 

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Last spring one year ago almost to the day, I arrived in Edinburgh for my first visit in fifty years. I was totally enraptured with everything and wandered around in a daze of delight. On my very first full day in town I spent several happy hours in the National Gallery. As I was walking back to my B & B in Mayfield Gardens, disdaining the bus and feeling on top of the world, suddenly my shoe caught on a rise in the pavement and down I went face first on the concrete with a mighty thwack. The main blow was to my nose and chin. There was blood everywhere. I could not tell if I had any front teeth left. I lay there trying to process what had happened to me.

 

A little crowd gathered immediately. Two young men and a young woman instantly came to my aid. They offered strong arms to get me on my feet and tissues to stanch the bleeding. They were most solicitous and were trying to figure out how to get me to the hospital. I was bleeding profusely but I did not think I was hurt badly enough for such a desperate measure. I convinced the young men that I was able to go on to my B & B without assistance, and they went on their way, but the young woman would not leave me. She walked along with me for three or four blocks (the opposite direction from the way she had been going). My most urgent need was for a bandage to stop the bleeding, but I did not know the local terminology. When we arrived at a pharmacy she went right up to the saleswoman and said, “We need a plaster” (I would have called it a Band-Aid). And then—this is the detail that really stays with me—without hesitating she pulled out a five-pound note to pay for the box of plasters.

 

I was alert enough by then to forestall her move and I paid for the plasters myself, but it was her readiness to take out her own money that made such an impression on me. By now you will have seen what I am driving at. This young woman went out of her way to escort me to a place of assistance and then offered to pay. It was just like the Good Samaritan. She will live vividly in my memory for the rest of my life and I will seek to emulate her actions whenever I can.[1]

 

But now we need to make a correction in our perspective. I have heard many sermons on the Good Samaritan in my life and they all had more or less the same message—look at what a wonderful thing the Good Samaritan did; now we must go out and do the same. But with all deference and gratitude to my young lady, this interpretation does not even come close to conveying the subversive power and threat of Jesus’ story. We must never forget that Jesus’ parables enraged people and, in the end, contributed to his death. They were not nice little moral lessons. Privileged persons who heard these stories could tell that their high opinion of themselves was being challenged. So let’s take another look at the story of the Good Samaritan, because it is far more radical than we think.

 

A lawyer stood up (this doesn’t mean “lawyer” in our sense. A nomikós was a learned teacher of the religious law) to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “What do you read in the law?... And he answered (with the perfect correctness that one expects from a scholar), “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all... your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.” The implication here is not flattering to the lawyer. Jesus seems to be saying that religious knowledge is of little use apart from a life governed by the love of God.

 

But the lawyer, desiring to justify himself...Encounters with Jesus could be unnerving. The lawyer has picked up the implication in Jesus’ rejoinder. He realizes he has been challenged. [He] said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” We need to understand that the definition of the neighbor whom one was commanded to love was not a settled matter. It was a subject of debate. Jesus himself, in another context, refers to the conventional wisdom that one was to love the neighbor and hate the enemy. There were certain types of people who were considered beyond the boundaries of neighborliness. This debate continues today. For instance, in Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh mystery, The Sunday Philosophy Club, the amateur lady detective sees a young man pushed to his death from the gods [top balcony] at Usher Hall. She wonders if she is obligated to pursue the case. She ponders the question, Who is my neighbor? She decides that the young man has a claim on her because she was the last person to make eye contact with him before he died. This is a humane thought, not to be denigrated, but the revolutionary quality of Jesus’ parable is not in view.

 

Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. Now what we want to notice here is that this is the time-honored way of telling a story in threes. We are all familiar with the story about the minister, the priest, and the rabbi; the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scotsman; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. So anyone listening to Jesus’ parable would have expected him to tell about the priest, the Levite and the scribe—in other words, three people in the same category. Otherwise the story is thrown wildly out of balance, as if you were to say a soldier, a sailor, and a terrorist; or an Englishman, a Scotsman, and a child molester.

 

I am trying to give you some idea of how startling and offensive it is that the expected third person in the story turns out to be a Samaritan. The relations between the Samaritans and the Jews had not been good for centuries, but they were worse in Jesus’ time than ever. Within recent memory, a group of Samaritans had gone into the temple court at midnight during Passover and defiled it by littering it with human remains. This gives you some idea of the mutual loathing between the two groups.

 

Our Lord continues his story: A Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where [the wounded man] was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ There may be a reminiscence here of the passage we heard from II Chronicles 28:9-15 which similarly recounts deeds of mercy performed by people of the Samaritan territories. Interpreters have always been impressed with the details of the Good Samaritan’s painstaking care. His readiness to help is perhaps his most notable trait. He seems to know exactly what to do, as if he did it all the time. He does not hesitate to use his own cloth for a bandage—perhaps he took off his headwrap or his undergarment. He expends his own oil and wine, and he puts the wounded man on his own donkey which he had been riding; he now walks alongside, holding the man so he does not fall off. He pays for two days at the inn, but he is shrewd as well; he doesn’t put limitless cash in the innkeeper’s hands but promises to pay the rest on his next regular trip along that road. The Samaritan was practical and businesslike; his compassion is not sentimental, but real and effective.

 

Let’s try to imagine the effect that this story is having on our friend the lawyer. He is trying fruitlessly to recover his lost dignity (remember, there were people standing around listening to this exchange). Jesus has taken the lawyer’s two standard questions, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbor?”—questions that were debated by the rabbis all the time—and instead of giving a standard, predictable, legalistic answer, Jesus turns the whole thing inside out. I read a review a couple of days ago of a new biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the great physicist. The professor who presided over Oppenheimer’s oral defense of his dissertation remembered the occasion later. He said, “I got out of there just in time. He was starting to ask me questions!”

 

So this lawyer who is accustomed to having the upper hand has had the tables turned on him. Now, concluding the story, Jesus asks him, Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” And the lawyer said (note this reply), “The one who showed mercy on him.” The lawyer cannot bring himself even to utter the word “Samaritan.”

 

And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” These are the words that have encouraged generations of hearers to think of the parable as a morality lesson. Perhaps it will help us to realize the radical nature of the story if we recall that (in the States, at least) we have had to develop laws to protect people who act as Good Samaritans. And besides, as one of my favorite interpreters, Bob Capon, says, if people went around acting like Good Samaritans all the time, their marriages would come to a speedy end. When Jesus says, “Go and do likewise,” it is tantamount to the call, “Take up your cross and follow me.”[2] This is not a parable meant to inspire us to go out and do good and then feel good about ourselves because we have been good neighbors. This is about entering the way of Christ.

 

            The universal tendency to moralize this parable is upended throughout the Bible, but the classic place to look is in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul writes, “If a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law” (Galatians 3:21). I simply cannot resist quoting from none other than Sir Walter Scott. I was brought up on Walter Scott, believe it or not. This week in Edinburgh I have been reading The Heart of Midlothian. A group of Scott’s wonderful Scottish characters are discussing (what else?) the law, and in particular, the limitations and depredations of the law. A Mrs. Saddletree delivers this dictum [I will not attempt to reproduce the dialect]: “If the law makes murders, then the law should be hanged for them, or if they wad hang a lawyer instead, the country wae find nae faut.” The implication is that the law creates as many problems as it solves. Handing down a new law does not create new people. Something more is required than an exhortation to good works.

 

            For the past two years, ever since the war in Iraq began, a very few people in America (and I emphasize very few) have been trying to get our nation to wake up to the fact that we are doing something that until the eleventh of September would have been unthinkable. We are engaging in state-sponsored torture. A very few of us have been preaching about this for two years, and a handful of journalists have been ceaselessly campaigning, but no one is listening. No one is listening. It has become very obvious that the famously religious American public does not want to know anything about this issue. I have pondered this at length. I believe it is because very few of us can imagine ourselves or a member of our families ever being the victims of torture. We think it could only happen to someone not like us, someone very bad, someone outside the margins.

 

            But unless we can see ourselves alongside those who suffer, we are not motivated to take action on their behalf.[3] The lawyer who tries to test Jesus with his questions seeks to present himself as one who does good to others. He can’t imagine himself as the recipient of another person’s help. He cannot imagine himself needing any mercy. He is a doctor of the law, a member of a highly privileged group, a dispenser of righteousness. His posture in life is that of the righteous man before God. Therein lies his fatal weakness.

 

The lawyer was asking, in effect, “What is the extent of my righteous obligation?” If the story had presented the Samaritan as the victim, so that the lawyer could cast himself in the role of the hero reaching out to the hated enemy, that might have been tolerable. It would have been a stretch, but he might have been able to accept it, knowing that he would still be the righteous person in the superior position. But the story does not work that way. If Jesus’ point was just to say “be good to your enemies,” then it would be very distracting to make the do-gooder a Samaritan; it would actually undermine the point. A world of reversal is being called into being here, where up is down and first is last, where the religious elite are the villains and the hated enemy is the righteous one. Jesus is saying to the lawyer, “Do not think first of yourself and your righteousness. Think first of the sufferer. Put yourself in his place as the one who needs mercy, and then you will see that love’s demand knows no limit, and you will be grateful for the help even of a hated outsider.”[4] “The lawyer’s first need was to see that he himself is the man fallen among thieves and lying helpless by the wayside...he has to be found and treated with compassion by the Samaritan, the foreigner, whom he believes he should hate as one who hates and is hated by God.”[5]

 

            Now I want to tell you something. I have been a preacher of the gospel for more than thirty years and yet I have never preached on this famous parable until today. In fact, I have deliberately avoided it. Why is that? The main reason is that I have heard just too many sermons about how we are supposed to go out and be just like the good Samaritan. And furthermore, about how awful that priest and Levite were who passed by on the other side. I worked in New York City for fourteen years where there are hundreds of homeless and derelict people on the streets, and we good Christian folk passed by on the other side every day of the week. So listening to this story proclaimed from the pulpit invariably made me feel more guilty and depressed than before, no more likely than before to stop on the street to minister to someone, no less guilty than before about passing by on the other side.

 

Two things happened to change my mind. First, the young Scottish woman’s intervention on my behalf motivated me. I was so clearly in the position of the one who needed help and received help. And the second thing that happened was that through studying the best interpreters of past and present, I discovered that they all rejected a moralistic interpretation of the parable. For the first time I began to see how the story actually leads away from feelings of guilt and impotence toward the impulse to action. For in the final analysis, this story enables us to see the Good Samaritan as Jesus himself. He is one who stoops down to those who have been brought low. He is the one who incarnates the love of God for those who are hurt, for those who are abandoned, for those who have been pushed to the margins.

 

And so all of this leads me to a completely different conclusion about the young woman who rescued me. The most obvious thing to say about her is that she did a good deed. But that does not get at the heart of Jesus’ parable. The experience of being a helpless person who receives mercy from an unexpected and completely undeserved quarter puts us in mind of our Lord himself. The primary definition of a Christian is not a person who does good deeds. A Christian is one who knows that he is in need of mercy and that he has received mercy from the Son of God. The Samaritan, in the deepest sense, represents the one who was crucified as an enemy of the people, a person beyond the margins, a man who was judged by all the best people and condemned to the death of an outcast. Most incredible of all, he still lives to show mercy not only to the downtrodden outsider but also to those “best people,” to the priest and the Levite, to all the self-described “righteous”—yes, to you and me too.

 

            So suddenly we are freed from the necessity to think well of ourselves. We find ourselves being shaped by the mind of Christ. Instead of thinking of ourselves and our rightful place in the world, we will find ourselves thinking first of the sufferer, putting ourselves in his place as the one who needs mercy, and learning with deepest gratitude and joy that the love of God knows no boundaries whatever and is able to overcome even the resistance of the righteous.

 

What a great and liberating message!

 

                                                                        AMEN.