July 10, 2016

“Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall 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.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” Luke 10:25-37

“Two religious professionals neglect a fellow Jew who was almost beaten to death, while a Samaritan was “moved with mercy” to help him. Jesus shocks us with this story. This shock factor reminds me of what Flannery O’Connor said about the gratuitous violence and grotesque characters in her stories. If your audience construes abnormal things as normal and vice versa, said O’Connor, the writer must take extreme measures. “You have to make your vision apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.” She admitted that her stories were hard, “but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.’’

So Jesus shocks us with the oxymoronic “Good Samaritan.” He does the same thing when he makes a Samaritan leper the hero in Luke 17: “Was no one found to return and give thanks to God except this foreigner?”
But that’s not all Jesus intends. He doesn’t merely shock us. There’s no purpose in that. He wants to show us what living the life of God is like. In his speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way. “The priest and the Levite ask, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'” Jesus concludes: “Go and do likewise.” Show mercy.” (“Journey With Jesus” website, July 14, 2013)

Oh, the Good Samaritan parable…the oxymoronic description of the “Good” Samaritan. It is always interesting to come up with a contemporary take on the parables of Jesus, and this one is no different. I was listening to a Baptist Preacher on the radio the other day telling a news commentator that he could not support a mosque being built in his city because, if he did so, he was contributing to these Muslims in their descent into hell. His “take” of course is the fact that in the bible, Jesus says that the only way to salvation is through him. So any other religion, other than Christianity, is a false religion. So, we could look at this bible story and one contemporary take would be to call it the parable of the “Good Muslim”.

I appreciate the conservative take on biblical “truths” by some religious groups, but I do not believe that the G-d of love that I believe in would condemn a whole group of people to Hell because, although they worship the same G-d, they are not convinced that Jesus is the Son of G-d. Can someone square that with me? But, this allows the story of the “Good” Muslim to have a dramatic impact – two pastors walk past someone who is half-dead, because they have to start their Christian worship service on time. But a Muslim sees the man who is half dead, and though he is late for prayers, he stops to render aid to the man. Is this beyond our ability to believe?

A group did a study with seminarians a few years ago. They gathered the seminarians into a room, and had them put together a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Seminarians then had to go down the street to another building to record their sermons. On the way to the other building, the group doing the study hired an actor to lie on the sidewalk with blood on them looking as if they had just been attacked. The question was, of course, would the Seminarians stop to render aid, or would they continue on by so they could do their recording? Most of the Seminarians ran past the man who looked half dead in order to get to the building on time to deliver their sermon.

This is not an indictment on Seminarians – nor is it an indictment on Baptists or Muslims. Instead, we need to remember how to act like a neighbor by remembering that all people are children of G-d, no matter their race, religion, gender or creed. None of us are to judge others – we are to live by two simple commands: love and serve one another, and love and serve G-d. Period. End of story.

Pastor Dave