Hilton Head Island, SC – October 17, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 10:25-29; Luke 10:30-37
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” – Luke 10:36 (RSV)
The parable of the Good Samaritan is found only in Luke. It is one of the best-loved of all the parables of Jesus, and probably the most widely known. There are millions of people who are not Christians who do not know the details of this story and yet somehow know that the term “Good Samaritan” refers to people who help people in need at considerable risk to themselves. For everyone who didn’t live in first-century Judea, however, we could not be expected to understand the risk the Samaritan took in giving so much assistance to the robbery victim in the parable. Therefore we shall first explore the context of this brilliant fictional story.
Jesus did not tell his parable out of thin air. He told it because of a question asked of him by an expert in the religious law: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Presumably the man really wanted to hear what Jesus would say about that. But, since Jesus somehow knew the man was learned in the Torah, instead of directly answering him, Jesus asked what the law declared about his inquiry. The man quoted two verses from the Torah: You shall love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus commended the man; “Do this, and you will live.” But the man was still not satisfied. Wanting to be sure he was genuinely justified in God’s eyes, he asked Jesus yet another question; “And who is my neighbor?” That question was the context out of which Jesus told this story.
Most people in first-century Judea would be familiar with the Jericho road, even if they had never been on it. The road runs from Jerusalem, at 2500 feet above sea level, to Jericho in the Jordan River valley, at 1300 feet below sea level. So it was a steep road which ran through one of the driest and most forbidding deserts on this planet. Furthermore, and this is one of the most salient features of this parable, robbers frequently attacked unfortunate travelers on that road, and everyone was aware of that. The Jericho road was like the roads in American western movies in which bad guys attacked good guys and gals who were riding in stagecoaches; highway robbery it was.
So, said Jesus, a man started down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho by himself. Sure enough, robbers assaulted him, took all his money and even all his clothes, and left him, naked and half-dead, beside the road. Understand that everyone who heard this story would know that the man in the parable was foolish to walk the road by himself. He should have been in a large group of people for protection. But the same is true for the next three travelers who came down the road: a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan; they too were alone. That would be a detail that was both fascinating and frightening to everyone who heard Jesus tell this story. But they would know, as we also should know, that isn’t the point of the parable.
The priest was a man who, by birth, was someone who had the privilege and responsibility of sacrificing animals in the temple in Jerusalem on behalf of his fellow Jews. When he saw the naked man lying in the road, he “passed by on the other side.” He avoided the unfortunate and perhaps dead man like COVID-19. But why? It was because the man might be dead, and anyone who so much as touched a dead human body was considered religiously unclean. He would have to quarantine himself for a week, and the priest did not want to risk that, so off he went.
The next man who came along was a Levite. Levites were higher-caste priests. So now we realize that Jesus, in telling his story this way, is indirectly making a stinging commentary on some of the leading religious figures of his day. Jesus never hesitated to do that if he thought it necessary. The Levite, for the same reasons as the priest, passed by on the other side of the road.
Then Jesus said, “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion” (10:33). He had compassion! From the Latin, com (with) passio (feeling). He had feelings for this poor soul, who had been robbed and beaten, and was perhaps close to death. He couldn’t just hurry on. So he patched him up as best he could, put him on his horse, and walked the horse to the only inn on the Jericho road. A similar old abandoned building is still on that Jericho road, and the first time I saw it I was with a group of Christian clergy organized by a wonderful rabbi from Summit, New Jersey. Our American-Israeli Jewish guide, Walter Zanger, who had been bar-mitzvahed by our rabbi, Morrison Bial, said there has always been an inn on that exact spot. That may or may not have been true, and there is no way for anyone to authenticate it, but it sounds plausible, and something like that you don’t forget. In telling you this, in my mind’s eye I can still see that inn, at a place Walter called “the Red Ascent.” Every bit of rock and dirt at the Red Ascent is reddish in color.
First-century Jews hated first-century Samaritans. Samaritans were Jews who had broken away from normative Judaism and founded their own heretical religion seven or eight centuries earlier. To Jews, Samaritans were worse than Canaanites or Amorites or Egyptians or Syrians or anybody else; they were us who deliberately chose to become them, and therefore we are supposed to hate them, don’t you understand.
So the Samaritan took the badly beaten traveler, whom he had never seen before and would probably never see again, and paid the innkeeper some money to take care of him. Obviously he knew the innkeeper, because if the Samaritan owed him any more money, he said he would pay him the next time he stayed there overnight.
So Jesus finished his pithy, short, incandescent parable by asking the expert in biblical law, “Which of the three characters in this parable, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” And the legal expert responded with the only possible answer, “The one who showed mercy on him.” To that Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
But do you see how clever Jesus was in making up this story on the spot to respond to the religious lawyer? Jesus is the Master Parable-Teller of all time. The lawyer wanted Jesus to explain the limits for everyone the Torah required him to perceive to be a neighbor, and the parable Jesus told him did not answer that! Jesus reversed what the man asked of him! By implication, Jesus said that we must love people as neighbors who are the last people we would want as neighbors! That was a zinger, something the religion lawyer never expected to hear.
Therefore Jesus asks us, “Who are your neighbors?” His parable says they are all those we come across who are in any need --- any kind of people in any kind of need. Biblical love should never seek to limit itself. It goes the extra mile, it gives the cup of cold water, it loves the unlovely and the ugly and the outcast.
Do you see how radical Jesus was? And therefore does his outstanding story make you a little uneasy? Do you hear him asking you to be neighborly to people to whom you might not be at all inclined to be neighborly? Does he upset your world a tad? If you’re a liberal, might he be asking you to be neighborly to conservatives? If you’re a conservative, might he be asking you to love liberals? If you’re a Christian, might you hear him saying you should be neighborly to Taliban Muslims or Narendra Modi Hindus or Richard Dawkins atheists?
Jesus of Nazareth was a revolutionary, and his parables are revolutions in miniature. He was incredibly courageous in what he said, especially considering the time and place in which he said it. The Romans feared him, because they thought he might be a political revolutionary (which he wasn’t), and the Jewish authorities feared him, because they thought he might be a religious revolutionary, which he was. As Julius Caesar said of Cassius in the Immortal Bard’s immortal play, so it might be said of Jesus: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
In writing about the Good Samaritan, William Barclay said, “In the end we will be judged not by the creed we hold but by the life we lead.” Do you suppose too many of us believe too much and do too little? Are we “all thought,” and “no action”? We must do more than feel sorry for people who need help; we must help them; and do too few of us do that? I know I am guilty of that tendency. Might you be also?
If he is to be successful, Jesus needs to get under our skin. He needs to shake us up. He wants to cause us constantly to re-think who we are and what we are doing. Are we doing enough? – Never! Will we ever do enough? – Never! Might we do better? – Always!
I read a news story about a newly installed bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro. Thirty percent of the people in Montenegro are Serbs, and they didn’t like it that a Montenegron was made head of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro. When the new bishop was installed, there was a riot, and many police and ordinary citizens were injured. In 2006 the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro declared itself independent from the Serbian Orthodox Church in Serbia, and ever since, the Serbs in Serbia and the Serbs in Montenegro have been angry. Nobody knows better than the Balkan nations how to become Balkanized. Tito kept them together with an iron fist in a velvet glove, but once he died, they once more Balkanized to a fine-fare-thee-well, with assistance, of course, from the USA. Are there any Good Samaritans in the former Yugoslavia? Who is my neighbor?
This month Pope Francis has established a synod which will hold meetings for the next two years. Women, especially nuns, are wanting to have a place at the table, and Francis is doing his best to accommodate them, but it is a tough slog. The women are pressing him, and the Vatican misogynists are pressing him hard from the other direction. No doubt the Pope is asking himself, “Are there any Good Samaritans in Rome - - - or anywhere else?” Who is my neighbor?
The relationship between Mainline Protestant Christians and Evangelical Protestant Christians has been declining for decades, in part because of religious differences, but mainly because of differences over politics, and a particular politician voted out of office, and vaccinations, and abortion, and a whole host of other such issues. God and Jesus are wondering whether there are any Good Samaritans among American Protestants. And who are our neighbors?
This past Wednesday morning at 3:48 AM I was awakened from a dream I had, the contents of which I will avoid telling you. But tangentially it had to do with the subject about which I was just telling you. In my dream I was steamed by something which had happened. When I woke up I quickly formulated what I would say in response to my dream, and because it was merely a dream, that was utterly ridiculous. When I am awake, why should I formulate another scene in my dream? But then, an hour or so later as I was working on this sermon, I had to ask myself, “Who is my neighbor?” I had to answer myself, “Among my neighbors are those with whom I have very strong political, theological, and ecclesiastical disagreements.”
There is a British children’s hymn whose opening line says, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild/ Look on me, a little child.” It’s a pleasant thing for children to think that about Jesus, but it a misplaced delusion for adults to ask him to treat us like that. We may want a gentle Jesus, but that’s not the Jesus we get. Jesus was very strong-minded, and he strongly resisted ideas and attitudes he knew were wrong-headed.
Who are our neighbors? They are those we come across who are in any kind of need --- any kind of people in any kind of need. When such people cross our paths, we must do everything we can to assist them to escape the burdens and obstacles life has thrown into their paths. Not to do so is to ignore the teachings of the greatest revolutionary the world has ever known. But when we truly do love all of our neighbors, to do so is to lift up our crosses, and thereby to follow him.