Luke 10:25-37
This morning’s Gospel reading, the parable
of the good Samaritan, is one of those stories we probably know too well, as a
friend of mine likes to say. We think we
know it, but there’s a lot going on here.
So, let’s take a minute to unpack it.
The reading opens with “a lawyer,” an
expert in Jewish law, throwing a question at Jesus to test him and put him in
his place. The question and answer are
simple: How do I inherit eternal life? You love God and neighbor. There are no other commandments greater than
these, as Jesus says elsewhere.
But the religious expert pushes back, asking,
“And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). He’s
trying to justify his own practice of faithfulness. He wants to make it clear that he’s checking the
boxes on God’s commandments just fine, thank you very much. “Sure, the commandment is to love … but that
doesn’t mean everybody, right?”
So, Jesus begins his parable. First, we’ve got a man traveling between
Jerusalem and Jericho who’s been attacked, robbed, and left for dead. Other than that, we know nothing about this man;
I’ll come back to that later.
Then we’ve got the priest and the Levite, both
of whom served specific roles in Temple worship. To do their jobs, the priest and the Levite were
obligated to follow the Jewish purity codes, which you can find in the books of
Leviticus and Numbers – a wonderful glimpse into the history of Jewish piety and
a great cure for insomnia.
Here’s a little background. You had to be ritually pure in order to
participate in Temple worship, and out-of-the-ordinary life events would leave you
ritually unclean – things like contact with certain dead animals, or childbirth,
or skin diseases, or a woman having her period.
And there were special purity requirements for those leading or
supporting worship – complicated and time-consuming practices to remove ritual
impurity and prepare you for service in the Lord’s Temple.
Well, one sure-fire way to lose
your ritual purity was to have contact with a dead body. Simply that action would take you out of the
game for seven days (Numbers 19:11). And
if you failed to go through the rites of purification before coming back to lead
worship, you would defile the Lord’s tabernacle for everyone and put yourself
at risk of ostracism and possibly death (Numbers 9:13). So, avoiding contact with a dead body was a
higher-stakes situation than we might think.
And it helps explain why the priest and the Levite in the parable not
only fail to help the half-dead man but go clear to the other side of the road
to avoid him.
Then we have the Samaritan. Now, you probably know that the people of
Israel held the Samaritans in contempt – the kind of contempt reserved for family
feuds. The Samaritans were descended
from the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which had split from the Southern Kingdom after
the death of King Solomon. The Jews, the
descendants of the Southern Kingdom, saw the Samaritans as neither Jews nor
Gentiles exactly – the branch of the family you avoid at all costs. There’s no one quite so impure or unclean as
someone who’s related but definitely not one of “us.”
Of course, the crux of Jesus’ story is that
it’s this alien, this Samaritan of all people, who stops and cares for the half-dead
man at the side of the road. And he does
that because the Samaritan sees not a problem there but a person. Moved with compassion – which means, literally,
to suffer with someone – the Samaritan treats the man’s wounds, lets him ride
on his donkey, takes him to an inn, gives the innkeeper two days’ wages to pay
for the man’s lodging, and promises to pay for whatever else the man’s care requires.
So, what’s going on with this parable? First, we might notice that Jesus very carefully
doesn’t answer the religious expert’s question.
Instead, Jesus raises a much larger question: What makes you righteous? Is it keeping obligations?
We might think about it in our own context,
both in terms of secular law and religious observance. Let’s say we pay our taxes, and we observe
the speed limit, and we keep the trash container neatly behind the fence in our
yard. And, let’s say we’re actively part
of a church community, and we pray for our own needs and the needs of others,
and we give to God 10 percent of what God gives us. How’s that, Jesus? How are we doing at inheriting eternal life?
Now, Jesus would never have said to the religious
expert, or to us, “You don’t need to bother with the requirements of the law.” That’s what defined being part of God’s
covenant community back in the day. But
Jesus certainly would have said to the expert, and to us, something like, “It’s
necessary, but not sufficient.”
Following the law, keeping our obligations – that’s not what puts us in
right relationship with God. Behaving
righteously is what puts us in right relationship – doing justice, loving
mercy, and walking humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). And that requires not just knowing who counts
as your neighbor but acting as a neighbor.
And what does that take, to act as a
neighbor? I think it requires not just
legal observance, and not just politeness, but love – the action of love. If you’ve ever loved someone for real – if you’ve
had a spouse or a child or a deep soul friend – you know that love involves not
just action but costly action. In Jesus’
parable, love for the half-dead man would have cost the priest or the Levite not
just time but some exclusion, distance from their official roles and from the
community life that gave them status.
And regardless of who stopped to help, once that investment was made,
the cost just would have kept piling up – time, and supplies, and use of your
vehicle, and cash to cover expenses – all for someone you don’t even know. Is a half-dead person at the side of the road worth
the investment? On the world’s terms,
Jesus would say, you’ll never know. Love
’em anyway.
And that brings us to the person at the
side of the road. As I said, Jesus tells
us nothing about him. In the story, he’s
literally no one. So, actually, the first
act of costly love in this story isn’t bandaging wounds. It isn’t even stopping and interrupting your
journey. The first act of costly love is
seeing – really seeing this person. The
priest and the Levite notice there’s a half-dead man at the side of the
road. The Samaritan sees the man with
the eyes of compassion, the eyes of suffering with others. Maybe the Samaritan knows a thing or two
about being ignored. Maybe he’s felt the
slap of silence or watched others’ eyes look away. His eyes of compassion lead the Samaritan to mercy,
to love that costs him something. That’s
fulfilling God’s commandments.
I’m going to take a risk here and ask us
to look at a purity code of our own, one we usually don’t think about. It’s not the Law of Moses. Instead, it’s the Law of Nice. And I feel like I’m the perfect person to talk
about it, because I am the apostle of nice.
Ever since seminary, people have been saying, “Oh, that John Spicer, he’s
so … nice.” Sometimes that’s a
compliment; sometimes, not so much. It’s
not something I work at; it’s just how I’m wired and how I was raised. And, you know, I think I have a lot of fellow
apostles of nice sitting here this morning.
Here in Kansas City, here at St. Andrew’s … we’re really good at Midwest
nice. After all, it’s nice to be nice to
the nice.
But something interesting happened here
last Sunday, showing the limits of the Law of Nice. I preached last week about Independence Day, how
the vision of this nation honors human dignity and how Christian discipleship
intersects with that. Then, at the end
of the sermon, it happened, at least at the 10:15 service: People clapped. Not everyone, of course, but enough to make
it feel like a statement.
That applause broke our purity code, the
Law of Nice. We’re not supposed to clap
in church. We probably know that; but,
as with many old customs, we may not know why.
Theologically, we don’t clap because not clapping helps us
remember whom we’re here to honor. Our choir
may sing an amazing piece of music and offer it with heavenly beauty; but we’re
not supposed to clap because that anthem is not a performance. It’s their offering to the God who’s worthy
of all our praise and who provided the gifts that make their music possible in
the first place.
Now, what I intended with that sermon was
to offer dignity as the intersecting point between Christian ethics and the American
vision. I raised up the crisis of overwhelming
numbers of immigrants at the Southern border, and I said we all believe the
people involved in that crisis are worthy of being treated with dignity,
regardless of our political perspective.
When people applauded, I hoped that meant they were embracing that
notion of dignity being at the core of our identity as Americans and as
followers of Jesus.
Now, the good thing about this violation
of the Law of Nice was that it encouraged several others, later, to violate it,
too, by telling me a truth I might not have heard otherwise. They said the applause made them feel
excluded because they heard it as support for a political agenda they disagree
with, related to immigration and other issues.
It didn’t matter what I intended about the sermon’s message; that’s how
they heard the applause. And it made
them feel like the outsiders in this room, where we’re supposed to come together
as family.
The truth is, I don’t know why people clapped. What I do know is that we each brought our own
meaning to the applause, and we can’t control what meaning others brought. So, in addition to its theological merit, that
purity code about not clapping for sermons has a lot of pastoral value, too,
especially in divided times.
But still, like I said, there was an unintended
benefit in our violation of the Law of Nice.
Just as Jesus asked the legal expert to go beyond checking the boxes of
salvation and to risk even violating the Law of Moses for the sake of loving a
neighbor, I think it’s good for us to go beyond the Law of Nice, and here’s
how: by asking for the perspective of someone with whom we know we’ll disagree.
And then, really listen. Really try to see that person as a neighbor. It’s not about changing points of view, our own
or the other’s. It’s about seeing the
other with the eyes of love and choosing engagement and relationship over
avoidance.
So, in these complicated times, we might each
ask ourselves: Who is the other to
me? What boundary do I need to cross? Whom do I need to hear so I can know them in the
fullness of their dignity? That’s costly
love – the love that turns “me” and “them” into “us.”
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