Sermon: “Who Is My Neighbor?”

Text: Luke 10:25-37

15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

July 11, 2009

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is from the 10^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel.  It’s the very familiar “Parable of the Good Samaritan.”  The passage begins with someone called a “lawyer” testing Jesus by asking him, “What must I do to have eternal life?”  The description “lawyer” in this context simply means someone who was skilled in the knowledge and application of the Old Testament law, the Torah.  While Jesus had answered similar questions on other occasions,[1]  this time he turned the question back on the Bible scholar.  “What does the law say?” Jesus asked.  The man must have known his Bible well because he answered with quotations from the Torah—Deuteronomy 6:5 (“Love the Lord your God with everything you have”) and Leviticus 19:18 (“Love your neighbor as yourself”).  “Correct,” Jesus said, “Do this, and you will live.”  So far, Jesus seems to have passed the test.  He and the lawyer were in agreement.

The lawyer had begun the conversation to test Jesus, but then, it seems, his purpose shifted.  Now the lawyer wanted to justify himself.  And he did what lawyers are trained to do.  He sought a definition of terms, asking, “Who is my neighbor?”  He probably felt like he did love his neighbors, but he wanted Jesus to specify who those neighbors were.  “What categories of persons must I love, teacher; and which ones may I ignore or hate?”  As the lawyer knew, for centuries Jewish scholars had debated the definition of neighbor.  The literal translation of Leviticus 19:18 is “You shall love the children of your own people as yourself,” so there would be a good textual argument for limiting the definition of neighbor to fellow Jews.[2]  Later in the same chapter of Leviticus, however, there is a related commandment, extending the obligation of love to non-Jews who were permanent residents of Israel.[3]  As one commentator has written, “Had Jesus and the lawyer really gotten into the meaning of ‘neighbor,’ they could have stood there all day debating which biblical passages controlled its meaning.”[4]  Instead, Jesus answered the question by telling a story.

Sermon.  Even in our age, when so many persons have not been taught the basic stories of the Bible, the parable of the Good Samaritan is well known.  When natural disaster strikes—a flood or a windstorm—and people begin to help each other, the helpers are often referred to as “Good Samaritans.”  There are many hospitals called “Good Samaritan Hospital.”  There’s even an association of RV campers called the “Good Sam Club,”[5] short for Good Samaritan; their logo has a smiling fellow with a halo around his head.  The words “good Samaritan” have become a term of art.  When I type them into my word processor, the spell checker automatically suggests that the words be capitalized.  This story of Jesus really has entered our collective memory.  But the common culture, I fear, has taken the sting out of Jesus’ parable.  We have domesticated it.  Ask a person on the street what is the point of the parable, and they are likely to say something like, “Be kind to people in need.”  And of course, that is correct, as far as it goes.  But Jesus goes much farther. 

This parable is really about boundaries and exclusions in our relationships with other persons.  We so often hear the words “good” and “Samaritan” together that we may assume Samaritans in Jesus’ day were a band of roaming do-gooders.  Nothing could have been further from the truth, at least in the minds of faithful Jews of that era.  Samaritans were the descendants of foreigners, who were relocated to a part of Israel after Israel was defeated by the Assyrians more than 700 years before Jesus.  They intermarried with the defeated Jews who remained and thus were considered half-breeds by the Judean Jews of Jesus’ day, whose lineage was purer.  The Samaritans worshipped at their own temple, which was not in Jerusalem but on Mount Gerizim in the north of Israel.  They had their own version of the Bible, and it excluded everything but the Torah—no psalms, no wisdom literature, no history, and no prophets.  If a Jew needed to travel between Galilee in the far north and Jerusalem in the south, the easiest route would have been through Samaria; but a Jewish traveler on that road would have been subject to harassment or worse.  Thus, the normal route was a detour around Samaria, through the Jordan River valley. 

We have hints in the New Testament of the strife between Jews and Samaritans.  Just one chapter back from our text for today,[6] Jesus had been traveling through Samaria[7] and was not welcomed by the people who lived there.  They knew he was on the way to Jerusalem; and they lumped him in with all the other Jewish pilgrims, whom they despised.  Jesus’ disciples responded to this rejection by asking whether they should call down fire from the heavens on the offending Samaritans.  Similarly, John’s Gospel records a conversation between Jesus and a Samaritan woman in which it is very clear that the woman, at least at first, resents the presence of a Jew.[8]  Also, we know that Jews considered Samaritans unclean and thus would not share a meal or any other object with them.[9]  Even after Jesus’ earthly ministry, in the earliest days of the Christian movement, it may not have been an easy step for Jesus’ Jewish followers to invite Samaritans into the family of believers,[10] although they did.

If the only point of Jesus’ story had been the importance of our helping each other, he surely would not have made a Samaritan its hero.  A third Jew coming down the road could have offered a helping hand.  He would have made a fine neighbor.  Precisely because Jesus made the third traveler one of the despised Samaritans, we know that this was central to his purpose in telling the story.  The travelers who should have had an interest in helping their half-dead countryman did not.  Scholars have debated the reasons why the priest and the Levite may have avoided the wounded man.[11]  Maybe they were afraid of ritual pollution if the man turned out to be dead.  Maybe they thought it was a trap that would lead to their own harm.  Maybe they just didn’t want to get involved.  I don’t think the reason for their avoidance is important, but their identity as fellow Jews of the wounded man is crucial to Jesus’ story.  They were the ones, according to any reading of Leviticus, who were “legally” neighbors to the man in need.  On the other hand, the lawyer who was talking to Jesus almost certainly considered that a Samaritan was not a neighbor.

Did you notice that Jesus never answered the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?”  Even the story that Jesus told is not quite responsive to the question because the story is about who became a neighbor to the wounded man.  The lawyer’s question was about categories of persons, those who are neighbors by their status—family, countrymen, business associates, or persons who live around us.  Jesus’ answer—the parable—was not about status but about action.  The parable reverses the point of view of the lawyer’s question.  Rather than telling of a man going down the road to Jericho and finding several different wounded victims by the side of the road and then explaining which of them was the neighbor worthy to be helped, the parable makes the victim the subject and asks who became a neighbor to him.

More to the point of our common misunderstandings of this parable, neither did Jesus answer the lawyer’s question by giving any legal interpretation, however expansive.  Jesus did not say, “everyone is your neighbor.”  That would have been a legal interpretation—another rule to follow.  And rules can be oppressive, rather than liberating.  Assume that Jesus had made this the new rule and that the lawyer had accepted it.  There is no way that he could ever be a neighbor to everyone.  He would not have had the opportunity, nor would he have had the resources.  He would have exhausted himself trying to save the world.

Rather than announcing a new and more expansive legal rule, Jesus instead invited the lawyer to abandon the categories that allowed him to distinguish among persons.  Instead of asking the legal question, “Whom must I help?” Jesus invited the lawyer to think in terms of “Whom can I help?”  Circumstances placed the Samaritan on the same road with the wounded man.  There may have been other wounded travelers on the road to Jericho, but the Samaritan’s path brought him to this man.  And the Samaritan had compassion; Luke uses the same Greek word meaning “gut-wrenching emotion” that we have encountered before.[12]  He had compassion on the wounded man.  Yes, he was probably a Jew; this was Jewish territory, and the Samaritan was just traveling through.  Yes, he would (as we say) “become involved,” and (being a Samaritan) he might even get blamed for the attack when he got the victim to the nearest town.[13]  But he knew he had the resources to help this man.  And he had compassion.  So he responded by helping.  And the Samaritan did much more than the minimum, making sure that the wounded man was cared for even when the Samaritan had to continue his travels.

Jesus asked the lawyer, “Who proved to be a neighbor to this man?”  The lawyer answered, “The one who showed mercy.”  “Then,” said Jesus, “go and do likewise.”  If you want to have eternal life, if you want real life, then act like the Samaritan—have compassion; show mercy to others; whether they are Samaritans or Jews, rich or poor, black or white, Christian or Muslim, conservative or liberal—those categories make no difference.  If God has placed you in a position where you can help another person, then do it, no matter what their status may be.  This kind of behavior is a sign of the kingdom of God.  It is a demonstration of the gospel.  It is the beginning of eternal life, and it leads to the “abundant life” that Jesus promised.[14]

Who is my neighbor?  The one I can help.