That’s at the
heart of the good Samaritan teaching too.
Jesus was being tested by a scholar who thought he knew everything about
the Bible. The scholar figured he had
all the answers and he was right on everything he wanted to talk about. He could quote scripture at the drop of a hat
and might have sounded a little smug as he did so. Maybe he figured he would put this country
bumpkin from Nazareth in his place. He
knew how to play the debate game to win.
Jesus didn’t
want to play the game of “who’s right, and who’s wrong”. Instead of saying, “I’m a smart person too,
and I know the answers better than you, here’s the answer,”, he switched to
asking questions. “What does the Bible say?” Of course that was something that the lawyer
was good at. Without hesitation, he
replied immediately with the Sunday School lesson he had been taught. Just as one of the first prayers we teach
children is often The Lord’s Prayer, the lawyer and Jesus both grew up learning
the Shema to start and end every day, “Hear o Israel: The Lord is our God, the
Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might” from
Deuteronomy 6 vs 4 and 5. For good
measure, the Lawyer also threw in a verse from Leviticus about loving one’s
neighbor. Maybe he heard Jesus preach
about it before. Or maybe he agreed
with Jesus that loving one’s neighbor was also important. But like a good
lawyer, he wanted a dictionary definition, a list of who was in, who was
out? Who was right and who was wrong?
Jesus didn’t
want to give a list. And so, as he often
did, he decided to shock the lawyer out of his complacency. He started with a tale that could have come
out of the local newspaper if they had ones back then. Innocent traveler mugged and robbed and left
for dead. Probably not unusual enough to
even make the front page. Even the
people walking by the victim and ignoring him would not have been the
story. The lawyer, and anyone else
listening in, would have understood that the priest had more important
priorities than to stop for what appeared to be a dead body. The same went for the Levite, who might have
been a scholar of scriptures, like the lawyer.
Priests and Levites knew very well what would make them unclean. They knew what their priority was, preserving
their relationship with God through maintaining the rituals and purity codes
that allowed them to go into the Temple, the holy of holies, with obedience to
the Law as the way to show obedience to God.
Just like the lawyer, they knew what was right and what was good. Nothing shocking here, nothing to see, move
along.
Then Jesus did
it, knocked the socks off, okay the sandals off of everyone listening. Enter the hero. Like most fairy tales, it’s the third time
that’s the charm, the third little pig that builds a house that resists the
wolf, the third brother whom everyone thinks is a fool that kills the giant,
saves the day and rescues the princess from the dragon. Who is this hero we expect, the Arnold
Schwarzenegger or the Tom Cruise or the Harrison Ford who wanders in at the
nick of time to save our poor fellow lying in the ditch?
I wish I had
been there to see the look on the lawyer’s face, or the rest of the followers
faces when Jesus named the hero as a Samaritan!
Nowadays whenever we hear the word Samaritan, we immediately add “Good”
in front of it and gloss over the Samaritan.
The lawyer would never have thought that. Samaritans were a break away group of Hebrew
people. For complicated reasons, they
worshipped the same God, and read the same scriptures. The main difference is that they only read
the first five books, Genesis to Deuteronomy, and they didn’t go down to the
Temple in. The lawyer would have thought
of Samaritans as wrong! Wrong in how
they worshiped, where they lived, and how they talked about God.
It must have
been really frustrating for the lawyer to answer that last question, “Who acted
neighborly?” because he didn’t say, “The Samaritan”, and he certainly didn’t
say, “The Good Samaritan.” “The one who
was kind.” The one who showed love. The one who acted not from a rule book but
from compassion.
We are living
in a world where compassion is seen as silly, where kindness to the ‘wrong
people’ is seen as sinful, where being loving is labeled as soft, or woke. We are seeing outbreaks of childhood diseases
like Measles that are easily preventable, or people banning books for children,
sure that they are right about censorship and vaccinations. As one minister in the states wrote this
week, “To remain tender in a world like this is an act of spiritual resistance.
This is how we will survive this time: not by toughening up, but by staying
soft enough to care. By becoming the kind of people who others can turn to. The
kind of people who, even in fear, choose to become refuge.” In other words, we need to double down on
being kind to our neighbors, especially when we think we are right and they
are wrong. We are called to choose not
being right but being loving. Love over
hate is not easy and it is not weak. It
takes real courage and determination, and it takes faith, hope and love in God
who is with us even in the tough times.
We are never alone when we love God with all our heart and soul and
strength and mind and love our neighbor as ourselves. May God give us the courage to stay true to God’s
call for compassion. Amen.
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