St. George's Episcopal Church
Le Mars, Iowa
July 8, 2001: Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Father Joe Dunne, Presiding
Donald Wacome, Lay Preaching
Psalm 66
Isaiah 66:10-16
Galatians 6:(1-10)14-18
Luke 10:1-12,16-20

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Last week’s Gospel text contained St. Luke’s account of Jesus sending out seventy of his followers to proclaim, in word and action, the arrival of the kingdom of God. We also heard the debriefing when they returned and excitedly reported that they had been able to exercise power over the demons. The reading did not go on to the next passage, but it supplies the link from last week’s reading to today’s lesson.  Jesus prays, thanking his father who has, he says, “hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants” (10.21).  This sets the stage for the appearance of the next character we meet, the ‘lawyer’ who asks Jesus “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  He’s not of course what we’d call a lawyer; he’s an expert on the torah, the Law. Think of a theologian, a religion professor, maybe a member of the Standing Committee.  We should expect this official expert on God to exemplify the fact that the wise and intelligent do not have a clue when it comes to understanding the God whose kingdom is coming into being in the work of Jesus.  Luke tells us that he asks Jesus this question not because he thinks he needs an answer, but to put him to the test, to get Jesus to say something that will discredit him in the eyes of the people, among whom he is becoming dangerously popular, or at least to get him to say something unorthodox or illegal so the powers that be back in Jerusalem can get the goods on him.

Jesus has no trouble turning the tables on him. He gets him to answer his own question: The lawyer offers what everyone knows is the right answer, expressed in the words of 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; and your neighbor as yourself.” To which Jesus responds: “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” At this point out lawyer must be feeling a bit silly. The one he was supposed to be testing is now evaluating him, and he’s standing there with the question hanging in the air, “Why did you ask that? Are you, the supposed authority on the Law, such a dunce that you had to pass your answer by Jesus, this mere Galilean layperson?”

My guess is that this fellow feels a need to ‘justify himself’ because he suddenly needs a way to stop looking stupid. He asks a new question: “Who is my neighbor?” making it look as though the first, dumb (because the answer is totally obvious) question was just a set up for this technical question about how to interpret the Law. Most everyone took it for granted that when the Law commands you to love your neighbor as yourself it’s talking about your countrymen, fellow citizens of Israel, members of God’s elect people. The word here translated neighbor strongly indicates friend or compatriot; someone near you not merely in terms of location, but in ancestry, beliefs, and conduct.  No one would have been regarded as a neighbor unless he was a member in good standing of God’s elect people.  Disagreements arose on what it meant really to belong to the house of Israel.  The Pharisees, for instance, argued among themselves whether the ordinary Jewish people all around them, the so-called ‘people of the land,’ should be thought of as authentic people of Israel, true neighbors. After all, they did not share the Pharisees’ intense commitment to keeping the Law in all its particulars.  It was generally assumed that, irrespective of an individual’s national and religious heritage, he did not need to be loved as one loves oneself, accepted as a fellow citizen of the Israel of God, if he wasn’t a genuine keeper of the Law. According to one school of Rabbis, heretics, those who associated with the Romans and other wrongdoers were beyond the scope of the Law’s command to love: They were enemies, not neighbors; they “should be pushed into a ditch and not pulled out.” Anyone who was not a Jew at all was by definition not a keeper of the Law. No one would have given a moment’s thought to the notion that Greeks, Romans and other gentiles should be thought of as one’s neighbors.

From our point of view, all this seems wrongheaded, guaranteed to trade the spirit of the law of love for its letter. God tells me to love my neighbor as myself and I respond by trying to figure out where to draw the line, trying to map the exceptions, making sure I don’t inadvertently treat someone who is not my neighbor as though she were. At the very least, we’d think the right response would be to regard anyone I encounter as my neighbor unless I had some compelling reason not to.

Yet this misses what would have been uppermost in the minds of those first century Jews. They are looking expectantly for God to act to redeem his people.  For them, reasonably enough, God’s coming act of salvation, his long hoped for kingdom, was, as it had always been, intimately and inextricably bound up with the fate of the nation of Israel. For them, following the Law and assiduously obeying its restrictions on mingling with enemies without and traitors within was crucial to trusting and loving God, to living a life of faithful waiting for God to save and redeem his people. The Law, with is prescriptions for differential treatment of the neighbor and the outsider, was not a meaningless purity code, but a matter of corporate life and death. The survival of the national identity of the people of God was at stake. Without it the chosen people would surely disappear, like so many other ancient peoples assimilated into a sea of paganism.

So, this lawyer tries to draw Jesus into a debate on a matter that, for him and all those sitting around listening, is neither trivial nor contrived to evade the Law’s clear meaning.  What would Jesus say in response?  He is already suspect, by all reports far too cavalier about the law. Where will he draw the line between neighbor and enemy? That will tell a lot about where he stands.  The legal expert would have been disappointed with how kosher Jesus’ response to his first question had been, but if his aim was to entice Jesus into saying something wild and crazy, now he get his wish.

The beloved parable of the Good Samaritan is Jesus’ answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”  We have to keep in mind the context: no one there could have seen Jesus as handing out nice moral platitudes.  We’re used to hearing that the Jews looked down upon the Samaritans, but there’s more to it.  They would have been considered traitors to Israel and to God. They were the descendents of Jews who had remained in the land during the exile and who had committed the worst of all sins, the sin that puts at risk the very existence of the Jewish nation: they had intermarried with the pagans of the region. Further, there was a theological disagreement as to whether, as orthodox Jews had long believed, worship should be centralized in the temple in Jerusalem. Not all Samaritans were good; in recent years, some Samaritans had desecrated that temple, strewing human bones about in it and thus rendering it ritually unclean.  I assume that being a Samaritan was, from a pious Jew’s point of view, worse than being an uncircumcised, pig eating pagan. A Roman centurion, after all, did not know any better; he had no torah and had never had anything but those idols, the false pagan gods. But a Samaritan was no ordinary enemy; he was more hateful: a traitor. I don’t think Jesus could have come up with a more offensive response to the question than to portray a Samaritan as the true keeper of God’s Law.  In their ears what Jesus was suggesting must have sounded like a sheer impossibility. Those who most clearly represent what any right thinking first century Jew would have seen as the rejection of the Law Jesus portrays as understanding it better than the ‘true’ Jews.

Jesus comes to a people whose great hope is that God will at last act decisively to save Israel, to free her from powerful enemies and bring her, finally, into unending peace and prosperity, into the shalom so long promised but so long delayed.  Sooner or later, God would call forth a warrior king to smash the enemies of Israel, to humiliate and defeat them and in so doing vindicate Israel’s claim that her God is the one true God of all the world. Jesus’ story of the despised Samaritan as genuine doer of the law is calculated to subvert this understanding of Israel’s God and his ways. If a reviled Samaritan can be the one who truly obeys God, the question of where to draw the line has become meaningless.  Jesus warns that disaster - judgment and death - not peace and freedom, is on its way unless Israel abandons the old conviction that she will be delivered by a show of divine force.  (Much of this will be misconstrued by later generations of Christians as predictions of cosmic apocalypse.) Israel and her God will be vindicated, but in no way they can imagine.  God himself has come in his Christ and with his coming the time of insider and outsider, Jew and gentile, of clean and unclean, of the righteous who qualify for God’s favor and sinners who are sent away empty has come to its end.  In his words and actions Jesus proclaims a kingdom whose coming is profoundly contrary to expectation.

What Jesus give voice to here is not a universal morality that transcends the tribalism and particularism of the ancient world, telling us that everyone is to be treated fairly and equally irrespective of nationality.  That’s a fine and in some lesser context an important thing, but what Jesus is saying here is infinitely more significant. He’s showing us who God is, telling us what kind of God God chooses to be: the God of self-giving love.  Jesus proclaims a God working in a radically new way.  He calls her to be the Israel of the God who puts aside his power and vindication over those who would contend against him to be, in this very Jesus, the vulnerable God who comes in loving compassion. Jesus calls the people of Israel to a new way of being Israel, an Israel not against the nations but for them. A light to the nations, a house of prayer for all people, the elect people not because they are the saved as opposed to the lost, but because they will bear witness to the God who graciously will be God for all that all will have him: dirty gentiles, arrogant Greeks, brutal Romans, treacherous Samaritans; you and me. Even ___________  -- fill in the blank with whoever you see as least likely, most undeserving. God’s indiscriminate love is as objectionable today as it was then. What kind of God thinks he can get away with letting people get away with so much, with throwing his priceless love around as though it were worthless, so that anyone can have it no questions asked, no strings attached?

Finally, in rejecting the still so common reading of this story that reduces Jesus to a great moral teacher, we should not imagine that there is just this theological point to be made here, and go on as if there were not a call to action here, as if this God who accepts us unconditionally is a God who for does not love us enough to care about what we do, what we make of ourselves or do to one another.

The expert on the Law is, I imagine, too shocked and angry to say anything. Jesus’ audacity must have turned him speechless with rage. But Jesus does not give up on him. Having made his point all too clearly, now he tells him what to do: "Go and do likewise!"  If our acknowledgment of God’s unlimited love for us is to amount to more than fleeting sentiments and empty words, it must be made incarnate in what we do.

Our acts of love are always dubious in their motives, haltingly carried out and uncertain in their consequences, but the God of grace accepts them as our offering to him and, in his time, redeems them as he redeems us.

Some of you might remember that Russian folk tale about a miserable old lady who was notoriously selfish. Beggars who made the mistake of coming her door were sent away empty handed with the miserly woman’s angry words ringing in their ears. But one day a beggar turned up who was especially hungry and persistent; he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Finally she chased him away; but in her rage she grabbed an onion and flung it at him.  In due time the wretched woman died and proceeded to the nether regions of hell. But one day from far above a hand appeared, reaching down, down into the deepest hell. In it was the onion. "Take hold of this and be saved!" called a voice from heaven. She did, and with it she was drawn up out of hell into heaven.

There’s another, darker version of the tale: The old woman is in hell and complaining bitterly to God about it; a respectable woman like her does not, she insists, belong there. God asks her what acts of charity she did in her lifetime. For ages she cannot think of any but at last she recalls one. She tells Him she once gave an onion to a poor beggar. God then lowers an onion into the fires of hell and tells her to grasp hold of it. She does; and as she is being lifted out of hell, others also desperately grasp the onion. She turns to them and screams, "This is for me!" and kicks them off. She immediately falls off the onion herself and drops out of sight, back into hell.

Living into his freely given love for us, sharing in the works of the compassionate God, is all there is to deliver us from the hells we create for ourselves, those places where God is shut out and we sink in our own hate and fear, lust and pride. “Hell,” as Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov accurately pointed out, “is the suffering of being unable to love.”  From that suffering the love of God alone saves us.

One way or another, one time or another, each of us lies broken on the roadside, given up for dead and passed by by those things in which we had put our trust. Jesus alone stops, stoops down to cleanse and bind up the wounds, to heal and make whole, to carry us to a place of safety.

  Amen

Van Gogh, The Good Samaritan 1890

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