Won't You Be My Neighbor? Luke 10:25-37 Proper 10C

Scripture: Luke 10:25-37

As we shared with you last week that we are beginning a journey with Jesus who has now determined to go to Jerusalem to confront the religious, political, and economic oligarchs of his day with his message of peace, hope, mercy, generosity, and love. Jesus is going to Jerusalem to face his destiny, whatever that might be and on the way he uses the journey to teach his followers what it means to be his disciple.

The journey began with Jesus going through Samaria, a region inhabited by half-breed Jews who worship on Mountain in Samaria instead of Jerusalem where they once had a temple of their own until the Jews destroyed it, and who hold holy the same books of Moses as their neighbors the Jews, but who interpret them differently. Over centuries of hateful and violent actions the Samaritans don’t trust the Jews and the Jews don’t trust the Samaritans. Jews passing through Samaria are seen as troublemakers who are up to no good. Jews think of the Samaritans as unholy abominations and they refuse any real community with them.

Last week we read that Jesus sent the 12 ahead of him to prepare the way for his journey through Samaria and that when John and James are met with opposition they want to demand that God rain fire upon the troublesome village that rejected them, but Jesus tells them that hatred for hatred and violence for violence is not his way.

We are not reading it this year, but in the next passage from Luke, Jesus next sends out 70 of his followers to the surrounding Samaritan villages and cities and tells them that their mission is one of peace. They are to offer the blessing of peace to all of the villages and accept the peaceful responses they hopefully will receive. If they are met with opposition they are to leave that village and go on without confrontation or negative actions or words. If they are received peacefully then they are not to take advantage of their hosts but accept whatever gifts of hospitality and food are extended to them. When the 70 return to Jesus they celebrate the great peaceful reception that they have been given and they praise God. There is no question about it, Jesus’ way of peace works.

Then we come to today’s reading in which a scribe, that is a lawyer, an expert of the Jewish scriptures and an interpreter of the law asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. We are not given the location of this story, but we can assume that Jesus has now entered Jewish territory and he may be at someone’s home or even in a synagogue. Karl Allen Kuhn says that the lawyer is engaging Jesus in a common form of public debate known as the ‘challenge-response’ the intent of which I suspect was to show Jesus to be just an unlearned country bumpkin whose knowledge of the scriptures was inadequate and thus he may have hoped to embarrass Jesus in front of those gathered together. From the subtext of the words used we can probably assume that the lawyer already thinks he knows the correct answer to his questions. It was not a test to see if Jesus knew the right answer, but to see if Jesus could match the skills of the lawyer who was trained and proficient in this debating style.

Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer but instead asks the lawyer what the scripture says. The lawyer answers Jesus’ question and appears to have the upper hand since Jesus chose not to quote the law himself. His answer repeats the Levitical Code found in Deut. 6:4-5 spelled out that our supreme commandments are to Love of God and to love of our neighbor as ourselves. Whereupon Jesus, adding nothing to the debate, simply affirms the man’s response and tells him to “do this and you will live.”

But lawyer is not satisfied so he presses Jesus with another question: “And, pray tell me, just who is my neighbor?” You see the Law also addressed who a neighbor is and how a neighbor should be treated. But this man wants to know what the limits are to who a neighbor might be that is consistent to the teaching of the law.

Simply asking such a question is setting up the answer to be one that will be full of boundaries and limitations. Within the Levitical code reasons are given which allow one to ignore and even demean others who are unclean according to the law because of something they have done or simply because of whom they are. Sick or injured people are unclean and they can safely be ignored because the literal interpretation of scriptures seems to assume that they must have deliberately done something wrong which has resulted in their punishment, or, their parents have done something wrong and they are being punished for their parent’s sins.

Simply put, some folk are your neighbors and some folk are not your neighbors. If loving God and loving my neighbor are evidence of my being in a good relationship with God and thus promised eternal life, then I must make sure that I take care of those who the Scriptures define as a neighbor, therefore I must know who my neighbor is and surely I also need to know who isn’t my neighbor. In other words, who do I need to love and who can I reasonably ignore without losing eternal life; that is losing my relationship with God? There must be limits to who I must love. Surely God doesn’t expect me to love everyone in the entire world? The Law clearly lays out who is clean and who is unclean. I know I must love those who are clean, but surely I don’t have to love the unclean in the world, do I? These are the hidden questions within the question the lawyer is asking.

But Jesus doesn’t engage the lawyer in debating the finer points of the law contained in the scriptures, instead, as was often his way, he simply tells a story and leaves us to figure out the answer for ourselves.

Jesus begins the story by telling about a man, we can reasonably assume he is Jewish so that his audience can identify with the man, who is on a journey to Jerusalem and he must go down through Samaria. Going through Samaria is bad enough all on its own with the animosity between the Samaritans and the Jews that have raged for centuries about the proper place to worship God and the correct scriptures to use and how to interpret those scriptures. We often argue the most with those who share our fundamental faith, but who differ from us in minor ways. The audacity of anyone who agrees with us only partially but not totally galls us to the point that we consider them to be our very worst enemies. We tend to think that our fundamentalist Christian friends are hypocrites who can’t see how hateful they are being toward us while at the same time they are preaching love and acceptance of others on behalf of Christ; and at the same time they think that we are horrible sinners because we don’t agree with their interpretations of the very same scriptures we both use. Guess you could say that things haven’t changed much over thousands of years.

But the trip through Samaria is much worse because of the geographical situation. The road rises some 3,000 feet over 20 miles making it extremely steep and very physically challenging. The road went through a rocky landscape filled with many caves where bandits could wait and pounce upon unsuspecting travelers. It rightly earned it’s name in ancient times as the “Bloody Pass.” No one in his or her right mind would travel this road alone, but that is the story Jesus tells us.

The man is attacked and stripped and beaten and left half dead lying in the road. Understand that because his clothing has been taken away from him there are no longer any identifying marks to tell you who he is or where he might be from. To anyone looking he’s just a bloody body lying in the ditch.

Along the road comes one who is thought of as one of the most righteous persons in all of Israel, a priest on his way to Jerusalem to take part in his assigned duties at the Temple which are rotated among the Priests. The Law tells us that to touch a dead body that doesn’t belong to a relative would make you ceremonially unclean and therefore the Priest would not be able to perform his expected functions in the Temple until he had gone through an elaborate process of becoming clean again, and he would therefore miss his assigned duties in the Temple and have to possibly wait another year for the privilege of serving again. Actually, just touching blood would have made him unclean even if the man were still alive. But, hey, why take the chance of missing my assigned duties in the Temple. This is my time to shine in front of family and friends and all of Israel! But then, if the man has been attacked by robbers, maybe they are still nearby and will attack me, too, if I stop and help him, so the Priest passes by without helping the man.

The next person to come along the road is also from a group renowned throughout Israel as righteous, one who follows the Law of God to the letter, a Levite, also an officer of the Temple. The Levites served the priests, led the singing of the psalms and did all of the construction work within the Temple, while performing many other tasks. They, too, had rotations of service in the Temple and this man was also most likely on his way to the Temple to serve in his assigned tasks. Jesus’ listeners would have known these things, so Jesus didn’t have to delineate their responsibilities as I am doing for you. Rather than risking becoming unclean by the blood or a dead body, or attacked by the robbers, the Levite also passes by the injured man without offering help.

Both the priest and the Levite seem to be asking the question of themselves: What will happen to me if I stop to help this man? How often do we walk by persons in obvious need and indifferently go on our way without even thinking about how we could help them? Take a walk through the University District, Capitol Hill, or downtown, early in the morning and you can see many who have spent the night sleeping on the street. But do you really see them and if you could would you ever help them? Or do you avoid looking them in the eye for fear they will talk to you or ask you for something as you scurry on your way to your place of service and duty?

Just as we have our expected characters in certain story situations like the Joke I told earlier, so, too did the stories told by people at this time. Everyone is expecting Jesus to fill the formula for the story by telling them that the next person to pass by is a simple Israelite, a humble person like themselves who ends up doing the right thing that the Priest and Levite wouldn’t do.

But not so in Jesus’ story. Instead of a humble Israelite, Jesus says that the next person to come along the road is a hated and despised Samaritan. After centuries of retelling this story in more modern contexts you and I think of the man as the Good Samaritan, the one who does the right thing, but that is not how those who heard the story from Jesus would have thought of the man.

In the original setting, when this story was first told by Jesus, to a Jewish scribe and Jewish listeners, a Samaritan would have been the exact opposite of a hero, he would have been the infamous "bad boy". That is an important emotion-laden element for us to remember as we proceed through this parable. The hero is a bad guy. In the lore of our own Western cowboy tales, the Samaritan was the one wearing a black hat. Ethnically and culturally speaking the Samaritan is the very last person Jesus’ audience would have expected Jesus to hail as an commendable neighbor.

This would have been not only extremely shocking but also greatly offensive to everyone hearing the story that day. How dare Jesus tell the story this way! How could he take a hated person like a Samaritan and make him out to be the hero in the story? Impossible! Ridiculous! Absurd!

But that’s exactly what Jesus does and he portrays the hated and assumed hate-filled Samaritan as taking extensive care and giving immense mercy and all-embracing kindness to the poor traveler even going out of his way by promising to pay extra for his care when he returns from his travels to check on him. It is the Samaritan who asks a different question of himself: What will become of the man left for dead if I walk on by and don’t stop to help him?

The Samaritan didn’t worry about the robbers coming back when he stopped to help the man. He gave up worry about his own safety and about completing his own responsibilities elsewhere. He had mercy and compassion upon the man and he did more than could have ever been expected of him in such a situation. He not only helped the man by cleaning him up and helping him to get to a helpful, hopeful place, he goes beyond the expectations and gives out of his own wealth and promises to give even more if needed.

Remember, throughout this journey with Jesus to Jerusalem we will be taking over the next few months, I will be reminding you that the New Community of God that Jesus keeps talking about is not something that will come upon us some day in the far distant future, but it is a reality that already exists in the here and now. The Samaritan knows this truth already in his life and lives it out by what he chooses to do for the man he discovers lying in the road. Instead of passing by, the Samaritan brings the man into his own neighborhood, into the New Community of God. The Samaritan does what a good neighbor should do for others: he cared and he took action that reflected his caring.

The priest and the Levite felt that to touch the hurt and bleeding man would somehow make them unclean and therefore unholy. The priest would not have been able to go into the Holy of Holies. The Samaritan’s actions tell us that touching those who are wounded by the world is an act of holiness. To touch the brokenness of another person is to enter the Holy of Holies.

As members of the Queer community we cannot let the issues of HIV & AIDS fall off the scale of importance in our communities just because there is an economic problem. Reducing the funding for HIV & AIDS, especially for insurance and medication, is to cause untold agony for thousands upon thousands whose lives might have been saved and extended. The same is true for the health issues of women and children as well as men. Cut other programs, but do not cut programs that give and sustain holy lives.

Let’s make it personal: Jesus' reply not only challenges the premise (of who is my neighbor) but brings a shocking surprise: each of us is to be a neighbor whenever we are needed and (we must) realize that neighbors can come from surprising places.

When Jesus finishes the story he asks the lawyer, “Who was a neighbor to the man?” Finding it impossible to say “the Samaritan” the lawyer simply answers “the one who showed him mercy,” that is the one who put his compassion into action.”

His reply is correct, and Jesus simply says, "Go and do likewise." Put your compassion into action! Jesus' point is: Simply be a neighbor. Do not rule out anyone as your neighbor. Jesus makes the point by emphatically providing a model from a group of people that the lawyer would have excluded from his own description of neighborhood. Samaritans were unclean according to the lawyers interpretation of scriptures.

Jesus’ parable has turned the whole question around. The lawyer asks who is his neighbor, in the hope that there will be some appropriate restrictions on whom he should include in his neighborhood. Jesus, however, replies that in order to determine who your neighbor is; you must become a neighbor to everyone, even to those who you would rather not include in your neighborhood.

To love God means to show mercy to those in need, to put your compassion into action. An authentic follower of Christ is one who loves God and who cares for others. This is a central tenet of discipleship. Men and women fulfill their created role--to love God supremely means being a neighbor to others by meeting their needs.

Neighbors are not determined by race, ethnicity, religious creed, political persuasion, economic or social position, sexual orientation, or gender identity; neighbors consist of anyone made in the image of God who has a need. The world cries out to us: Would you be my neighbor! And we answer them by our words and by our actions on their behalf. Will you be a neighbor today? Will you become holy by touching someone’s brokenness?