Luke 10:25-37
July 11, 2010
[Thanks to a couple of pastor friends who pointed me to this story on the internet. http://www.ceac.ethz.ch/Program.pdf]
Edward De Bono was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the 50s. One night while attending Oxford he went to a party in London and got back late – after the gates had closed for the night. So he had to climb two walls to get to his room. He didn’t have too much difficulty getting over the first one. Then he came to the second wall and found that it was exactly the same height as the first, so that was no problem. No problem, that is, until he hit the ground and found that he was back outside the first wall. In the dark of night, he had succeeded in climbing across a corner. As he prepared to go back over that second wall again to get inside, he noticed that there was a gate whose height was lower than the rest of the wall and included footholds. So of course he chose to climb over the gate. Just as he was clearing the top of the gate, it began to slowly open. It had never been locked.
As a result of this experience, De Bono developed a concept called “Lateral Thinking,” and established “The Edward De Bono School of Thinking.” He began hosting seminars to help people learn to think in more productive ways. For example, he helped a corporation in New York City that had too few elevators in the sky scraper in which it was located which caused much frustration to impatient employees. The company had tried staggering work shifts, accelerating the speed of the elevators and even thought about building a new shaft outside of the building to install more elevators. Finally, at De Bono’s suggestion, the company installed mirrors around the elevator doors. People started seeing their images in the mirrors and seemed to forget about how long they were waiting for the elevators. That is called “lateral thinking.” Instead of attacking the problem head-on, you move to the side until you find the open gate.
De Bono may have invented the term “lateral thinking,” but to hear Jesus tell the parable of the Samaritan, I think it was “God logic” long before he invented it. I think it was lateral thinking Jesus used to break open something new for the lawyer. So often we see lawyers on T.V. who are trying to trap other people in their own thinking. But here was a lawyer who was trapped in his own thinking. He was stuck in this pursuit of climbing mental walls to earn his way to God. The question he poses makes this abundantly clear. He asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Here is a lawyer asking how he can do something to “earn” an inheritance. Since when are inheritances earned? The fact that he is trapped becomes even more clear when Jesus asks him how he reads the law, and he quotes Scripture very accurately. He knows that he needs to love the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength, and with all his mind; and his neighbor as himself.” But he seeks to justify himself by asking Jesus to clarify who he must consider as his neighbor. He is desperately searching for the way to get over the walls and to climb into God’s eternal promise.
So, Jesus does what he does so often and so well. He tells a parable to try to set a mind free to glimpse an image of God and God logic. But how is it that a story that breaks open God logic for one generation can be used to shut it down for another? We think we know how to apply this story of the Good Samaritan, don’t we? The scout who helps the old lady cross the street and earns a merit badge. We call him a good Samaritan. He earned it. A good Samaritan is the person who sticks around after work to help a co-worker jump a dead battery. A good Samaritan is someone who gives a homeless person $5 so he can buy a decent lunch. A good Samaritan is someone who does a good deed and earns the title. Right? Absolutely not! And if this is how we read this story, then we have taken a parable that was intended to open our minds to the gate of God’s realm and turned it into more walls to scale in our attempt to find our own way in.
If we could hear this parable with the ears of first century Jews, this would not be a nice Christian moral story. It would be a shocking and offensive wake up call that might cause us to evaluate why we want to follow this Jesus guy anyway.
This isn’t just an example of a person doing something good. Most of us do good things. The lawyer did good things – undoubtedly willing to help out his neighbor in need. Even the priest and Levite, while we might want to judge them, aren’t necessarily bad people. They weren’t doing anything I don’t do every day when I come to church and work on the bulletin or sermon while there are countless people lying in metaphorical ditches all around me. This isn’t about whether we’re good or bad – we’re all both good and bad. This is about an attitude adjustment – a whole new way of seeing things.
Listen carefully to the question and the answer in this passage. The lawyer asks, “who is my neighbor?” Then after the parable is told, Jesus asks the lawyer to answer his own questions. But notice, the lawyer doesn’t say the neighbor is the man who was robbed. That’s how we usually hear it, isn’t it? He’s the neighbor – he’s the one we are supposed to love, just like the Samaritan loved him: the guy in the ditch, the person with a flat tire, the kid lost in the mall. But Jesus framed the question back to the lawyer in such a way that the lawyer couldn’t give that answer. Jesus asks the question in a way that there’s only one possible answer. He says, “who was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
The lawyer was stuck. He couldn’t get away calling the wounded man “neighbor”. The one Jesus makes the lawyer label the Samaritan as “neighbor”. It’s a trick. He has to say it – it has to come out of his mouth. “Who was a neighbor?” Jesus asks. “The Samaritan,” the lawyer answers correctly. We don’t know the tone he used when answering. It might have been contemptuous, resenting having to utter the words. It might have had a hint of hope as something new was revealed to him. We don’t know, but I promise, it was hard to say the words.
As soon as Jesus asked the question, the lawyer knew he wasn’t being told to act like the Samaritan and see the guy in the ditch as a neighbor. He was supposed to see the Samaritan as a neighbor and then love him as much as he loves himself. And let me tell you, for the people Jesus was talking to at that time, asking that was far more extreme than asking them to help out a man left for dead on the side of the road.
The Samaritans were not just enemies. They were not just the “other”. They were not just “different” from the Jews. Make no mistake: the Samaritans were worse than that. They were beneath them. They were the ones that warranted no attention at all. They were not worthy, they were not acceptable, they were to the Jews what the untouchables are to the Brahmans in a caste system. They weren’t worthy of enmity. They weren’t worthy enough to be noticed at all. And they certainly weren’t good people who did good things. They were filthy, rotten liars.
It’s not the “good” Samaritan – it’s the “gross” Samaritan. And these are the people Jesus loved as much as – if not more at times – than his family. These are the people Jesus loved like he loved himself. The ones who were beneath everyone else. Beneath the religious folks. The Samaritan is the person who comes in to the church smelling of smoke, asking for money while they talk about their four dogs and their broken down TV. They are the ones who spend $50 a carton and then ask for help with utilities. They are the ones who drink and cuss and yell at their kids. Samaritans weren’t good people.
And here the lawyer is being asked to love the Samaritans as much as he loves himself – as much as he loves his family, his children, his friends. He’s being told that when this person shows up at your door, you don’t give them a little bread and send them away. You invite them in to have dinner, play with your kids, stay the night. In fact, you are to see them as being even better than you. Like I said, it’s extreme. It’s not how the Jews did things with the Samaritans and of course, it’s not how we do things with the people we think are beneath us. And if that makes us a little uncomfortable, we’re probably feeling exactly how the lawyer did.
And it’s hard not to feel judged for this, condemned and outside of God’s forgiveness when we realize how far we are from such a life. I mean after all, if we are anything like the lawyer, we just found out that we can’t inherit eternal life.
But remember, Jesus is using God logic…lateral thinking. It’s shocking in order to make the point that none of us earn eternal life. The point is that the way we’re doing things and seeing things is tantamount to climbing a wall when the gate is already open.
But oh, how we seem to like the walls. And why? Because unlike the Oxford student, I’m not sure we always want to scale the wall and get to the other side. Not needing to get to our dorm room, we see no reason to get to climb over the wall. When things are pretty okay on this side, why do I need to see what’s over there? Jesus’ parables show us what’s on the other side, and give us the motivation to try to get there. But more than that – in the brilliantly told parables, he also always shows us the gate. Being motivated by judgment is like scaling two walls only to find you’re back where you started. Instead, Jesus makes us uncomfortable, exposes something about ourselves we don’t really want to see in order to reveal how much better it can be – for us as well as others.
He doesn’t just tell the lawyer, “Samaritans are your neighbors so love them like you love yourself.” I don’t think that would have broken much open. Instead, he tells a story that casts the Samaritan in a new light – in God’s light. Maybe the next time the lawyer sees a Samaritan, he’ll see the image of someone sacrificing himself to help a dying man, instead of images of filthy, rotten, liars. Jesus simultaneously exposes the man’s prejudices and shatters them.
If we read the Good Samaritan the way it is traditionally read, I can conceivably come off pretty good because I’m willing to give some money to help the poor, I’m willing to visit people when they’re sick, I’m willing to help someone change a flat tire. In other words, I have, from time to time, been a good Samaritan. But, that’s not how the story is meant to be read. That’s regular logic – it’s not God’s logic.
I am not the Samaritan. I’m the one who ignores the Samaritan. I’m the one who thinks the Samaritan is beneath me. I think I’m good when I help people. But the people I help – not to mention those I choose not to – they could never be so good. They don’t have the ability to help others. They are too preoccupied with their own lives and crises that they certainly wouldn’t stop to help me if I were stranded by the side of the road. They can’t sit all high and mighty in their temple office and mete out money according to their standards. So I don’t have to treat them as if they would.
I’m not the Samaritan in this story.
The best I can hope for is to be the lawyer. What I can hope is that this parable with its lateral thinking, its God logic, can not only help me get around the walls but can help me break them down forever. What I can hope for is that this story can reveal to me what’s on the other side of the wall – God’s Realm, where the ones I thought were beneath me, less than me, I thought needed me, are shown to be my neighbors and a neighbor to others. They are shown to be just like me: sometimes good, sometimes bad, though almost always an odd, funny mix of the two.
On the other side of the wall we’re united in caring for each other and for the ones lying in the ditch dying. Samaritans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, upper class, lower class, Americans, Iranians. “Who is our neighbor?” we ask Jesus. And Jesus answers, “You’re all the same – and you can all show mercy to one another and to everyone.” Amen.
