Proper 10, Year C
Amos 7:7-17; Luke 10:25-37
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
July 14, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“…wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus,
‘And who is my neighbor?’” – Luke 10:29
Today, the story of the Good Samaritan has become something of a cliché. Even in secular culture, we hear of Good Samaritan laws or of some Good Samaritan performing an unexpected act of kindness on the evening news. With such a familiar story, it almost seems like a waste of time to talk about this parable.
Almost.
Everybody wants to be a hero. We like to think of ourselves as the good guy, as paragons of virtue who always do the right thing. Well, maybe not always, but in the big scheme of things, we’re generally pretty close. We hope. If we saw someone lying hurt by the side of the road, we wouldn’t be like the priest or Levite. We wouldn’t pass by. We would be like the Good Samaritan. We’ve listened to Jesus’ story. We’ve learned the lesson. We would stop to help. Right?
But…what if?
What if we were in a hurry for a really important meeting? What if we were in a bad neighborhood—somewhere with rampant crime, a place where gangs were known to leave out bodies in hope of luring in new targets who pause to help? What if we’d had a really long day or a family crisis or a major financial setback? What if it were just inconvenient? Would we still stop to help?
What if?
What if we recognized the person as someone we hate—a member of a notorious group, someone we think of as barely human, someone whose life, actions, and ideology disgust us to the very core of our being, someone the world would be better off without? Then what? Would we still stop?
The Samaritan did.
In Jesus’ time, Samaritans and Judeans were the worst of enemies. Over the course of generations, what started as a religious squabble developed into a legacy of warfare and hatred. Despite both being equally oppressed by the Roman Empire, the Judeans thought of the Samaritans as ignorant, half-breed compromisers, and the Samaritans thought of the Judeans as religious and ideological terrorists. They endured one another’s existence because they had to, but they were always ready to react to the slightest provocation. So the Samaritan wasn’t just stopping to help some friend laying hurt by the side of the road. Today, the Samaritan would have felt like a lost, unarmed American soldier stopping to rescue an ISIS fighter—in known ISIS’ territory.
So what if that were the case? Would we still stop to help even then?
Maybe we would. Maybe we wouldn’t. It’s hard to say without actually being in the moment. But let’s take our “what if” even further.
What if…?
What if we aren’t the good guy in the story? What if we aren’t even the bad guys? What if we’re the utterly passive character? What if we’re the one bleeding in the ditch?
I ask because I don’t think Jesus means for us to relate to the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan. I think Jesus meant for us to relate to the guy thrown on the side of the road, the one robbed and beaten nearly to death, the one who will die if no one stops to help. We all like to think of ourselves as the hero, but what happens if we’re actually the victim, the person in distress? What if we, despite all our apparent success and advantages, were the utterly powerless one?
Have you ever received help you didn’t want? I remember being in college and being proud to be able to take care of myself. I was a grown up, right? A fully independent, functional adult! Except when I wasn’t. My parents were constantly helping me—sending me money, sending me clothes, sending me food. I remember them sending me Q-tips once because I couldn’t even afford those on my own. Despite my need, I recall feeling a strongly ambivalent sense of both hope and shame any time a package arrived from home. I was hopeful for even more good things than what I needed. But I wanted to feel like I had some power over my situation. Recognizing my own inability brought me a strong sense of shame, and feeling that shame made me angry. It made me want to act out. And that was for gifts coming from people I loved!
But imagine if the assistance hadn’t been from family. Imagine it came from that classmate who bullied me in high school or that pompous professor none of the students liked. How much more shame, hatred, and anger would I have felt? How much more would I have wanted to act out or even to reject the aid?
Most of us Pacific Northwesterners, especially those of us near Seattle, like to think of ourselves as fairly progressive. We want to treat people fairly. We try to be respectful of other cultures. We’re generally well educated. We’re polite—or at least not openly aggressive. We’re open minded. We’re civilized.
But how civilized are we really? How many layers of veneer have we laid around our hearts and lives to protect them from the bumps and scratches of reality? How do we respond when someone steps on our privilege, or even just points it out? I suspect few of us, especially white men like me, are really as “woke” as we’d like to believe.
We all have some sort of prejudice that leaks out, sometimes in big ways, sometimes in subtle ones. Maybe you re-click your car’s automatic door locks before driving through that one neighborhood. Maybe you cross the street or turn around when you see homeless people’s tents lining the sidewalk downtown. Maybe your heart twists ever so slightly when you see a bumper sticker promoting a politician from the opposite party. We all have some sort of bias. We all have some kind of enemy, real or imagined. We all have a Samaritan in our lives.
So what do we do with that? How do we follow Jesus into the role of the powerless in the story without playing the victim in real life? Because all of us—all of us—really are powerless when it comes down to it. We Americans are little different from the Israelites in the reading from Amos. Their society was supposed to have been created on God’s instructions. Like the lawyer who provoked Jesus’ parable, they knew to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Even with a culture built directly on the foundation of God’s own law, their societal structures tottered and swayed toward inequality, injustice, and abuse. In fact, despite their security in themselves, it was so bad that God, through the prophet, announced the decree to raze their civilization flat.
So what if God decides to take a closer look at us? What if—or maybe the better question is “when will”—God decide to do the same?
What do we do with that? How do we follow Jesus into the position of the powerless before the robbers of time, natural populations shifts, and karma force us into the role of the victim?
What if we look to our enemies? What if we look to our Samaritans—the people we hate, to the ones we look down upon, to the ones we selfishly fear will destroy or inconvenience our way of life? What if we work even for their good? What if we learn to recognize our own actions of prejudice and oppression? What if we offer them hospitality and kindness? What if we walk the path of humility and follow God’s way of love? Perhaps by emulating Jesus—by emptying ourselves, by taking the undistinguished role of the least of society, by using what power we wield for the advantage of others, by relying on God’s help instead of pressing our own advantage—will we strengthen our own culture’s leaning walls. Perhaps then we’ll begin to truly recognize, love, and serve our neighbors.
“…wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus,
‘And who is my neighbor?’”