Samaritan

Propers: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 15), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

You’re traveling along the road, far from home; a different state, perhaps, a different country. It isn’t a particularly safe road—it comes up in the news a little too often for comfort—but you have business to attend at your destination. So off you go, telling yourself not to be paranoid. And not to make eye contact with strangers.

But then, alas, your worst fears come to pass. A gang of ruffians, of thugs, catches you all alone and at their mercy, of which they have none. They lay rough hands upon you, kicking, punching, jeering. They hit so hard you can smell the pain. Stars dance across your eyes and you can’t even cry out any longer, the wind knocked out of you. They strip you of your money, your clothing, your mementos of home, and they discard you, like a piece of trash, at the side of the road—naked, humiliated, vulnerable, afraid—left for dead.

Time passes. Everything hurts. You can’t move, can barely stay conscious. You’re so thirsty. And then along the road—thank God!—comes a priest in a fine black suit, well-pressed, crisp creases. He has expensive shoes. You try to call out to him, but can’t manage much more than a moan. Your vision swims. And he sees you—and recoils, like he’s gotten a whiff of bad milk. He crosses over to the other side, assiduously looks the other way, as if you aren’t there, you aren’t real, and you’re left there, bereft, terrified, barely able even to weep.

Hours go by. The sun burns. Your skin cracks with dust and dirt and blood. Then, miraculously, another traveler upon the road, a local official this time, whitened teeth, well-coifed hair. And you try to reach out but your fingers hardly twitch. You wonder if some of them are broken. And he immediately looks the other way. You aren’t even there to him, a grotesquery best to deny. He leaves you for dead, just like the bandits, just like the priest, as though you’re not even human, just a piece of trash on the road, some filth to be avoided and ignored.

Hope has left you now. You fade in and out of consciousness, but even passing out doesn’t dull the pain, the throbbing of your head. It’s hard to breathe, your lungs starting to rattle. Yet you are distantly aware of hoofbeats. Are you delirious? You can see someone—foreign. Different skin, different hair. Different religion, probably. Smells a little funny. Someone with whom you would not associate in polite company. Someone you would ignore. Oh, God, he’s coming over this way.

And he runs to you, earnest, excited. He calls out, betraying an accent, asking if you’re alive, if you can talk. You can’t. His hands are rough, like the bandits’. But they don’t hurt. They don’t steal. Instead, he cradles you, gently, covers your nakedness. He cleans your wounds, washes away the black blood and the muck, and anoints them, bandages them, salves them. Then he lifts you—with some effort, but he is surprisingly strong—and drapes you carefully across the back of the horse he rode in on.

You can’t say anything. It’s all you can do to keep from vomiting. But he brings you to a hotel, lays you on the bed. What’s he going to do? What does he want? Nothing, it seems. Nothing but to heal you, to feed you, to let you rest. He tends you all day. In the morning you are well enough to speak again, well enough to stand. And you find that the room, the board, the medicines—they’re all paid for. He’s taken care of everything, even as he had to continue along his way.

Who was the neighbor? Who saved your life? Not the pious priest, conscious of his class. Not the glad-handing politician, so respectable in his office. No, it was the stranger, the foreigner, the one to whom you would not otherwise have spoken. He was the unexpected savior. He was the messenger of the mysterious mercies of God.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan would almost certainly have offended Jesus’ intended audience, or at least left them squirmingly uncomfortable. It’s not simply some anodyne children’s story about being nice, being kind—though the value of kindness is hard to overstate. But Jesus chooses a frankly offensive hero, an intentionally provocative protagonist. Good first century Judeans would have revered Temple priests and Levites as exemplars of sanctity and holiness, upholding the ritual and moral Law of God.

But Samaritans? They were half-breeds, heretics, hillbilly cousins. No decent Judean would associate with a Samaritan, backwards and back-bred as they were. And Jesus of course is making a point. This entire story is told in response to the question of a lawyer, a well-educated, well-respected, appropriately religious fellow, who wants to know what to do in order to inherit eternal life.

And Jesus says, “You know the Commandments. Love God with all your heart and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s doable. Anyone can follow the Commandments of God. Not perfectly, mind you. We all screw up. But God’s will is straightforward, accessible, and simple. Love God and love your neighbor, not to check items off a list of Laws, but to embody the love and the mercy of God so that it seeps into your very bones—this is eternal life.

Then, of course, the lawyer shoots back, “But who is my neighbor?” To whom do these laws apply? To my family, my city, my clan and tribe and nation? Where’s the limit of my mercy, the limit of God’s love? And this isn’t some abstract question. We have these debates today, within our own society. Whom should my tax dollars help? Should we bail out banks, but not students? Should we care for veterans, but not asylum seekers? Where do we draw the line? Who counts as my neighbor?

And so Jesus tells the story above, or something rather like it: the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Today we could call it the Parable of the Good Undocumented Migrant, or the Parable of the Good Republican Farmer: whatever offends us the most, whatever pushes us to recognize the love of God in the faces of people we would not consider our friends. Because that’s where God is. He is in the face of the other, the need of the neighbor, the kindness shown between human beings who have nothing in common other than the fact that we are all of us sinners, we are all of us loved, we are all of us children of God.

Christ is exploding the whole concept of neighbor, pushing it far beyond family, community, or political party. Of course these things are important. Of course it is good to love one’s family, one’s city, one’s country. But we must always be reminded—because we always forget—that all people, and to a certain extent all of Creation, contains the Image of God. All people and all things are upheld in every moment, every heartbeat, every breath, by the love of the One in whom we all live and move and have our being.

And if that doesn’t change us, then God must once again up-end our expectations, free us from our idols, and break the fetters of our in-group out-group codswallop. Christian history is full to bursting with people being outraged, shocked, and offended at the sheer scope of God’s mercy and breadth of His plan. The Jews couldn’t believe that the Greeks got in. The Greeks couldn’t believe that the barbarians got in. Arabs, Vikings, Huns, Slavs, and yes, Samaritans, have all been baptized into the ocean of God’s mercy to the shock and horror of those already on the inside.

And we forget that. We always forget that. God is greater than our tribes.

“Teacher,” quoth the lawyer, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus says, “Love your God and love your neighbor by showing scandalous, offensive mercy to every single human being you’ll ever meet and if you do this—not once but continually, striving every day to find Christ in your neighbor by being a Christ unto him—then you already have eternal life. You already are in the Kingdom of God.”

Christ is the victim and the Samaritan and the keeper of the inn. He is in everyone and everything that startles us with mercy, that scandalizes us with love. And His whole Kingdom is made up of strangers and foreigners and sojourners in the land. And that Kingdom includes you. It always has, and always will. Because when you were broken, some Stranger paid your debts and brought you home.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.