Amos 7:7-17; 8:1-12
July 18, 2010
Sometimes the bible is like a punch in the gut. In the last couple of weeks, I have been trying to convey in the sermons that the texts we were reading point not to judgment but to new ways of looking at things and new possibilities. Too often we think we hear judgment in a passage of scripture but it’s not there when you read closely enough. Stories that have come to make us feel guilty because we’re not doing enough, good enough, Christian enough aren’t meant to make us feel guilty at all. They’re meant to free us from guilt and judgment.
Then, along comes Amos – and to me, it feels like a punch in the gut. As you just heard, this passage drips with judgment. And the closer you read it, the more judgment you hear. You can’t escape it here. The bible really can be harsh – and not just the Old Testament. There are plenty of tough passages in the gospels where Jesus is condemning people to the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Now, you need to understand something: Often we are “shielded” from such passages. With some exceptions here and there, I follow the lectionary – passages chosen for each Sunday by a learned group decades ago. Each week there is an Hebrew Bible passage, a Psalm, a reading from the epistles and a reading from the gospels. It runs on a 3-year cycle and then starts over at the beginning. A big part of the reason I follow the lectionary is to avoid the problem of me just choosing things from the bible I like so I get to say things in my sermons that I like. If I just chose what I like, it would be the Word of Kirsten, not the Word of God. Having to read passages someone else chose keeps me honest because many times they are passages I don’t like or don’t know how to preach without really studying it – and even then it’s hard.
But you what? The lectionary cheats. If you follow it all the time, there are horrific passages that would never be read, from both the old and new testament. The lectionary shields us from some of the most difficult parts of the bible. But they’re not the only ones doing this. I cheat a little, too. We are given four passages each Sunday, and I pick and choose between those four. And I do it in part to “shield” you when a passage like Amos comes along. I probably wouldn’t have preached on this if someone in our church hadn’t suggested that I do. But, the shielding is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s necessary in fact because of the nature of our worship services and how we do sermons.
The way we do things has left many, if not most of us hearing itty bitty passages without knowing how it fits in to the larger story. The fact is, if our only exposure to the bible comes on Sunday morning, then we are barely getting a glance at it. If we read the lectionary every week – all four passages - we would read 3.7% of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. 3.7%. And even though the number is much higher for the New Testament, we still only read 40%! We miss out on more than half of the New Testament. And let me tell you, there’s some pretty disturbing stuff in the other 60%. (http://catholic-resources.org/Lectionary/Statistics.htm)
And frankly, because of this, the bible story comes off smelling pretty rosy, when in fact it’s probably more like compost: smelly, but good in the end. If we’re not reading 97% of the Hebrew Bible and 60% of the New Testament, there’s a pretty good chance we’re missing important parts of the story. And, as we know from reading any book, itty, bitty, individual passages only make sense as they are part of the whole story. We would never expect that if we read 3% of a novel, we are going to really know anything about the story. And the parts we did read are pretty meaningless without knowing the whole story.
It’s almost laughable for us to pull out these 22 verses in Amos from a 25,000 verse story and make any sense of it at all. And that’s one main reason why I “shield” us from these passages. We might hear something dripping with judgment and condemnation and think we know what that means and what it says about God – and we might get a terrible picture of God because we aren’t reading the whole story. Then we act on that terrible picture, and, well, terrible things happen.
But, today we are going to face Amos. We could ignore it because it’s one of those “terrible” passages. But what if ignoring Amos because he’s so difficult is just an analogy for us today when we only listen to the prophets who tell us what we already believe and agree with? That’s the danger of being shielded from the hard stuff – our beliefs are never challenged and God begins to look more and more like how we want God to look, and we hear less and less of what God wants for our lives and world. But, we need to be very, very cautious of any conclusions we draw from this very harsh, difficult text. If it is not read within the context of the whole Hebrew bible – the whole story of ancient Israel, we might come to all sorts of false conclusions.
Amos is relentless. It was hard listening to Tom read on and on and on about God’s ruthless judgment. It was uncomfortable hearing such a long passage where God seemed to say only one thing: You failed so you’re finished. And if we read all of Amos, we’d see that unlike some of the other prophets, Amos doesn’t even give the people a way out. The people have been indicted, found guilty, and now the sentence is being handed down. And it seems Yahweh is pro death penalty. Sometimes the bible feels like a punch to the gut.
But remember that Amos lived in a particular time and place, and he has only a slice of the larger, more complex story of the Jewish people. When Amos lived, gloom and destruction we’re looming large for the Israelites. They were about to be destroyed by their enemies. It’s easy to make this about “divine judgment”. But, Walter Brueggemann, a theologian who has read 100% of the Hebrew Bible, points out, this isn’t so much about scolding or reprimand or shame; that’s not what the prophets are about when you look at the whole story. “The poetry of Amos – the poetry of so many of the prophets – is meant to bring us to the reality around us.”
Amos is saying, “it’s a harsh world we live in – really, really, harsh.” Or more accurately, it’s a harsh world that some people live in – the poor and the oppressed. Further, he says, “I’m going to take a moment to name that – to give voice to that reality. And I’m going to demand that you stop too and see what’s happening in our world. Then, we’re going to grieve for all the suffering and pain we see.
Amos is not primarily judging; he’s grieving the loss of God’s realm. The loss of all that came with the promised land – freedom, justice, community, covenant. The rulers had ignored these things, they were oppressing the poor, they had taken Jerusalem – the holy city – and turned it into hell.
You can almost hear Amos weeping as he utters his words. At the beginning of what Tom read, Amos is pleading with God, begging for God to reverse course – change plans and save the people. But, God does not relent – and Amos feels the pain of what that means. Amos grieves. And grief over what has gone wrong is an important part of the story – it’s an important part of life – it’s an important part of the whole story of faith. If suffering is not acknowledged, and grief is not felt, the story – the great story of the bible, the one that leads to restoration and redemption – would not be able to continue. Amos says it’s time to stop and grieve, and our understanding of the human experience says we must do this before we can move forward.
So, if we listen to Amos, that we need to stop, look and grieve. What do we need to see? What do we need to grieve?
The truth is, we really don’t see reality. Well, we see our reality. But ours is basically a privileged one. We live mostly without seeing the kinds of things Amos was seeing – we don’t see the reality of parts of the world where the suffering is almost too much to bear, too overwhelming to feel. We turn away. We ignore what Amos is calling us to see.
But ignoring Amos isn’t a good idea. There are consequences. If we don’t stop and force ourselves to stand facing some difficult things without turning away, we are just avoiding reality – we’re living in constant denial. Denial is a dangerous place to live. We know this because of our own personal experiences of grief. We know that if, when something happens to us to make us suffer, we don’t stop and grieve before we ‘move on’, we will actually be stuck in the place of pain that the grief tries to name. Even though we think we have effectively put grief away, it doesn’t really go away. If we have not grieved enough, we will, paradoxically, be stuck with that grief until we truly go through it. And that grief that stays with us while we try to ignore wreaks all kinds of havoc.
In the say way, if we don’t see reality, and grieve fully, if we choose denial, the painful, horrific reality we try to ignore will never go away. It will always be with us, we will constantly have to choose to ignore it. We’ll be stuck. Not only that, but when we get stuck in denial, other people get stuck in reality we refuse to acknowledge. Our denial causes suffering to continue.
Many grieved when we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Many wept, and it’s certainly true that many still do. But as a country, as a people, as the media, we have moved on when grief is still needed. We need to grieve because that emotion keeps us connected to the horror of war – and so keeps us more motivated to change things. We grieved, but not for long. The same wars we talked about and marched against and cried about seven and eight years ago are still happening. Yet we have gone back to life as before, no longer thinking much about the daily reality that we are at war; no longer hearing in the media the ongoing body count. No longer getting daily battle reports. Our newspapers show less and less pictures from “over there”.
We stopped grieving, and now we’re stuck in denial – back to business as usual. But while our denial has changed how we see reality, the actual reality really hasn’t changed much at all. Violence, death and oppression endure.
But it’s hard to dwell on the negative when we really don’t have too. It’s really hard to stop and feel the grief, to not shove it under the carpet. And here’s the kicker: we don’t even know where grief will lead, what will be accomplished. We have no idea if our grief will change anything at all.
Well, frankly, I think Amos didn’t know what would happen next either. That’s not his part of the story. He calls us to grieve without knowing yet what’s next. But this is where the larger story comes to bear. Amos teaches us that if we don’t stop and grieve and see reality, the picture becomes quite dire. But the bible teaches us that if we can break through denial and grieve, we open up space for Yahweh – for God – to show us what’s next.
Amos announces that God says “I will never again come to the Israelite people…never.” But Amos was wrong. God came again and again, and then again and again. And each time there was restoration, hope, new life and new possibilities. The people were unstuck. History was unstuck and things moved forward – at least until people forgot justice and mercy again.
So it seems we might be called to grieve those places where we have forgotten justice and mercy . Let’s choose to trust that if we see the pain without turning away, Yahweh’s plan will emerge. It might be hard, but it’s the only way out of denial – it’s the only way we will be able to move on from the terrible picture Amos paints. Amen.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Filthy, Rotten Samaritan
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.
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.
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