Wounded Neighbor (1st Sunday of Lent; Luke 10:25-37; March 5, 2017)

Wounded Neighbor

1st Sunday of Lent
Luke 10:25-37
March 5, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

One of the reasons that I made the decision a couple of years ago to use a different lectionary--the Narrative Lectionary-- was that I had been through the other lectionary enough times that it no longer held many surprises. I had preached these texts many, many times. I wanted to cover some unfamiliar parts of the Bible and the Narrative Lectionary seemed to offer me that.

For the most part, I've been happy with the decision. It's been a good experience. It's been fun to have new texts to challenge me.

Of course there are Sundays like today when the text is so completely familiar. What then? There aren't really any surprises here. There is nothing new to see. Biblical scholars have no light to shine on the text in such a way that it suddenly appears as a strange and wonderful landscape. There is just the same uncomfortable story with its pointed questions and its refusal of our easy answers.

The story is set within a controversy story. A "legal expert" has a question for Jesus. (Were the translators afraid of calling the man a lawyer?) He wants to know what he has to do in order to secure eternal life for himself. It's a serious question but he doesn't ask because he wants to know the answer. He asks Jesus in order to test him. This conversation is a contest.

Teachers in the ancient world were expected to be able to win contests like this one. Wisdom contained the notion of cleverness and mental agility. The "legal expert" has put Jesus on the spot.

Jesus answers him in a conventional way: "What does the Torah say?" Well, in reality, the Torah says a lot about a lot of things. People from one end of the theological spectrum to the other use the Torah to support their positions. In answering a question with this question, Jesus puts the matter back in the expert's hands. "How do you interpret it?" Jesus asks. And that, we've found, is an important question. "How do you read [it]?" is a much better question than "What does it say?" How will the lawyer answer?

He could cite the Ten Commandments. That would certainly be an acceptable and common answer to the question Jesus asked. If it had been me, I would have said that the center of the Torah is the statement "Justice, justice, you shall seek!" In the answer to Jesus' question the lawyer will reveal himself as much as the content of the Torah.

"You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself" is what he answered. Interesting. He makes love the center of the Torah. Well, done! (In my own defense "justice is what love looks like in public," to quote Cornel West, so I'm not going to abandon my answer.)

Jesus approves: "You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live." What's the score at this point? Tied, I think.

So does the legal expert. And for him tied isn't good enough. He wants to win, so he asks a follow-up question: "And who is my neighbor?" I'm pretty sure that was really a version of the question, "Who isn't my neighbor?" "Who don't I have to love as myself" is what I think he really wanted to know.

We get what he's implying. I hear it all the time. Someone says, "You know, there are people who go to the Food Pantry who don't really need the food. They only go there because they've spent their money on something else." Loving our neighbors as ourselves is a scary idea. We can foresee that, if we take that demand seriously, we can be entirely depleted and have nothing left to meet our own needs. If we can limit the idea of "neighbor" only to those who live near us and perhaps to a few "deserving" others, then we can imagine that we can keep this commandment and not end up sucked dry.

So what will Jesus say in reply? How can he avoid the dilemma that the lawyer has posed? If we know the Jesus of the gospels we're not surprised that he answers with a story. In this way he is able to turn the legal expert's question inside out.

The story concerns a man who is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. It wasn't far, but it was a dangerous piece of road, infested with robbers. And, sure enough, he was beaten unconscious, robbed of his money and of anything else that could be sold--including his outer clothing. The presence of this victim lying in the ditch poses a question to anyone who sees him, just as a homeless beggar poses a question to the people who walk by her on a city street. How do we respond? What do we do? What does the law require of us? Not the criminal code, but the law of the covenant that we have with God, or perhaps even the implicit covenant we have with all human beings?

Two people answered this question by deciding that they did not have a duty to the man in the ditch: a priest and a Levite. They were both religious professionals, officially engaged in service to the God of the covenant. They both decided that they were not bound to help. They may have had very good reasons, reasons that reflected well on them. I know that, whenever I walk by a beggar, I always have good reasons for not helping. But Jesus doesn't tell us anything about their reasons. At least in the story their reasons don't matter. All that matters is that they went on their way as if they hadn't seen the man or heard his groans. All that matters is that the man went uncared for.

Then came the Samaritan traveler. We don't know what he thought either. We don't know if he consulted any list of rules or duties that were imposed on him by his not-quite-Jewish culture. All we know is that, when this man saw the wounded man in the ditch, he was moved by compassion. Well, compassion is the word in our translation, because we don't have an easy way of translating the Greek word into English. The closest I can come is, "he felt a connection to the man in his gut." So, he stopped, tended the man's wounds, put him on his own donkey, took him to the nearest hotel, put him up in a room, watched over him during the night, paid the innkeeper an advance on whatever the injured man needed, and left the next day with a promise to return and pay whatever extra charges there might be. He paid everything with no co-payments and no deductibles.

Not only did the Samaritan do all of this, but he did it without regard for who the man in the ditch was. We aren't told whether the victim in this case was Jewish or not. That's because it doesn't matter. It didn't matter to the two whose idea of loving their neighbors as themselves was perfectly compatible with letting a man die in a ditch as they walked on. It didn't matter to the Samaritan. The Samaritan felt compassion and he acted. He treated the wounded man as anyone might want to be treated, simply because his gut told him to do it.

"Which one acted as a neighbor?" Jesus asked. And, defeated, the expert replied, "The one who showed mercy." Exactly. Two Jews walked by the wounded man and felt and did nothing. The ones who knew the Torah best found reasons to ignore its demands. It was the one who showed mercy who acted as a neighbor. It was the one who showed mercy who fulfilled the Torah. It was the Samaritan who acted like a Jew.

"Go. Do what he did!" said Jesus, using his rhetorical victory to offer the legal expert life.

I don't have anything brilliant to offer beyond what Jesus said. I am better than I need to be at coming up with excuses for not showing mercy. I know all the doubts that we have about the value of charity. I suffer from compassion-fatigue right along with the best and worst of them. I have no magic solution for the dilemma the legal expert posed.

I only know that, in finding reasons for not showing mercy to those to whom we are connected, we cut ourselves off from a part of us that makes us human. We disconnect ourselves from our "gut" as well as our neighbors. To our own destruction we use our theologies and our moral reasoning to tell us why it's okay not to show mercy when it is in our power to do so. And there is no life in that path, not for our world and certainly not for us.

So let us go and do as the fellow did who didn't know the Torah but was in touch with his own sense of compassion and who let nothing stand in the way of showing mercy when he had the chance to show it.

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