Year C
July 14, 2019
Luke 10:25-37
“Who is my neighbor?”Today, we hear one of the most well-known parables of Jesus - the so called “Parable of the Good Samaritan.” It is probably one of the first stories or parables of Jesus that most of us learned as children. We know the story. Jesus tells a parable of a man who was beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. The Levite and the Priest walk by without helping the man. The Samaritan, on the other hand, is the one who takes the time, the care, the money to truly care for the person who was left on the road. The genius of Jesus’ parables is that parables cannot be boiled down to one simple moral point. Rather, these stories that Jesus tells should grow with us and continue to challenge us each time we encounter them - even with these stories that are so familiar.
That’s admittedly a harder task for a story - like the Good Samaritan - that we’ve heard time and time again. That task may require us asking different questions of Jesus and of the text. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, proposes this question: what do we look for when we encounter one of Jesus’ parables? Are we looking for the nice, moral point? Or are we looking to be challenged? She writes “What makes the parables mysterious, or difficult, is that they challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives.” Luther would call that the mirror use of the Law - the parables do something to show us something about who we are. Levine continues, “They bring to the surface unasked questions, and they reveal the answers we have always known, but refuse to acknowledge… Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, ‘I really like that’ or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough” (Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, 3).
So this week, I asked myself. What challenges me in today’s text? As I think about the challenge of the text, I find myself returning to the same question:
“Who is my neighbor?”
It seems like a simple question. Growing up, I thought it was an honest question, completely missing the fact that the lawyer is “testing” Jesus and wanting to “justify himself.” By asking who my neighbor is, I’m trying to define who I must love as myself. As an inquisitive kid, I thought it was a fair question. Are we talking about my literal neighbors - the people who live literally next to me? In close proximity to me? Who are my neighbors?
But by asking, who is my neighbor, the lawyer is getting at something else. It is a round-about way of asking - Who aren’t my neighbors? Because if I can define who is my neighbor, I can also define who is not my neighbor. Who do I not have to share love with? What boundaries can I place on love and still meet the “requirement” of my faith to love? Where is the line? The lawyer expects that there is a line somewhere. Or at very least he would like that line to be somewhere. Maybe for him, the line is drawn by faith. Maybe for him, the line is drawn by place/ region/ country of origin. Maybe for him, the line is drawn by long-held prejudices and conflicts.
Because, if we’re honest with ourselves, there are people in this world that we don’t want to love. Maybe we want to put that boundary down in front of someone who has hurt us or our loved ones; we don’t want to love someone who hurt us so incredibly deeply or who took a piece of us. Maybe we want to put that boundary down in front of people that are different from us and thus hard to understand - in front of people who don’t share our language, who have different sexual orientations or gender identities, in front of people who have different skin tones, in front of people with different faiths, in front of people with differing political stances and convictions. Maybe we want to put that boundary in front of people who we’re afraid of, those people that we’ve been told threaten our values and our way of life (and supposedly threaten our lives themselves) - in front of people who are undocumented or incarcerated, in front of people who, we’re told, “are taking away our jobs,” in front of people who, we’re told, are our enemies.
If I’m honest with myself, I’m imperfect in loving my neighbor - even my neighbor that is easy to love. I want Jesus to give me a pass. I want Jesus to tell me that I don’t need to love the people that have hurt me. Even more for me, I want Jesus to tell me that I don’t need to love the people who have hurt my friends and my family. Most of you all know, at this point, that some of my closest loved ones are within the LGBTQIA+ community. And I am super protective and loyal of my friends and family; I have a really hard time loving people who say that my loved ones are subhuman or are deserving of hell. I want Jesus to give me a pass there, telling me that my love doesn’t need to go that far. I want Jesus to tell me that I don’t need to love people that I’m afraid of. I want Jesus to tell me that there’s a limit to who I need to love. I want Jesus to affirm a love that stops short - that stays in my comfort zones. I want Jesus to affirm a love that is easy and requires no risk. No danger. No actual work. So if I’m honest with myself, I too need the lawyer to ask:
“Who is my neighbor?”
Through this parable, Jesus isn’t content with giving the easy answer or giving me (or us) a pass. In Jesus’ response to the lawyer, Jesus picks not the people closest to us as “our neighbor.” But rather, in the parable, it is the enemy who becomes the neighbor. It is the one who is the outsider that shows mercy. The one who, according to the dominant narrative, threaten their way of life that shows unconditional love. Replace the Samaritan in the parable with whoever you thought about a few moments ago. In Jesus’ parable, Jesus redefines who the neighbor is. The very person I don’t want to love becomes the vehicle for God’s love and grace. That’s the challenge in today’s parable: the very person I don’t want to love becomes the vehicle for God’s love and grace.
And it isn’t an easy love. It is an active love. It is a love that risks. The Levite and the Priest, contrary to most interpretations, don’t avoid the man left for dead because of purity laws. But they don’t stop to help because of fear: fear that if they stop they will face the same fate. Martin Luther King Jr., in talking about this parable puts it this way, “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It is possible that these men were afraid… And so the first question that the priest and Levite asked was, ‘if I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ … but then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘if I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him.’” (Martin Luther King Jr., as quoted in Levine, Short Stories, 102). The Samaritan was, literally, moved in his guts (our text says, “moved with pity” - but the emotion is much stronger than that - he feels it in the deepest part of him). In this parable, Jesus puts a human face on the person most hated and demonized, as the Samaritan risks the same fate to show love, to bring about healing, to be the vehicle for God’s love and grace.
The parables of Jesus have this way of inviting us, wooing us, pulling us - perhaps sometimes kicking and screaming - into the vision of the Kingdom of God. What a vision for the world! For a moment, let’s turn to the lawyer’s original question: “what must I do to inherit eternal life.” This is what inheriting eternal life looks like. Or perhaps better said, this is what it looks like to live in response to knowing that God, through Jesus, has already given us the gift of eternal life. Living life eternal looks like living out the grace and love that we have already experienced. Living life eternal has an impact on this world as we "love the Lord your God with all [our] heart[s], and with all [our] souls, and with all [our] strength, and with all [our] minds; and [our] neighbor as [ourselves]."
It looks like choosing life-giving ways over death-dealing ways. It looks like putting a human face on the person or group of people that we most demonize. It looks like crossing boundaries, going where, according to society, you shouldn’t go, loving who, according to society, you shouldn’t love. It looks like seeing our “worst enemy” as neighbor - as beloved by God and as a vehicle for God’s love and mercy - and loving them. It looks like showing a love - reflecting the love of God that extends to us - that has no limit, that doesn’t stop short. It looks like risking harm and stepping outside our comfort zones to bandage wounds, carry them, to bring someone half-dead back to fully alive - embodying and enacting love in real and concrete actions. It looks like the kind of love, the love of God, expanding the boundaries, expanding our idea of who is our neighbor, that kind of love, the love of God, that can transform lives and transform the world.
Amen.
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