A Modest Proposal

"Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.^* ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ²⁶He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ ²⁷He 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 neighbour as yourself.’ ²⁸And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ ³⁰Jesus 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. ³¹Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. ³²So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. ³⁴He 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. ³⁵The 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.” ³⁶Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ ³⁷He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’"  (Luke 10:25-37)

I am not usually one to call for traditional forms of symbolic action like calling your congressman or writing to the appropriate powers-that-be to voice your desire for change. But today, the stakes are too high. 

I’m going to ask you all this morning, before it’s too late, to sign a petition I am starting, since in this case there is no congressman, no representative, no senator, nor even a president to whom it would make sense to write.  And the thrust of the petition I am starting is this:  I think the only safe, sensible course for us is to cut this story out of the Bible.

This story, today’s story, the one from Luke chapter 10 that we commonly call “the Good Samaritan.”  I think, given the world we live in, and given the tensions in our country in these days, the only sensible, prudent, safe, risk-free thing to do is to forget we ever heard this story Jesus told, a story about mercy showed by an unexpected, undocumented foreigner to a respectable insider. The story is dangerous.  It is subversive.  It is downright revolutionary.

I’m only thankful that we have all heard it so often, that we have thrown around the phrase “Good Samaritan” so loosely to refer to any token act of niceness, that we have lost the edge, the shocking punch, of Jesus’ original story, so that it no longer pokes at us, generally speaking.  I’m relieved that we, you and I, fine, upstanding, respectable, restrained, religious folks like you and me, that we don’t take Jesus’ story very seriously.  If we did, my goodness, we would be awfully different people. Risking getting to know people who are different from us.  Daring to receive help from someone you thought was your enemy.  Refusing to jump to conclusions about whole groups of people because it is easier than actually getting to know them. Daring to offer care to someone else and see their face, their actual human face, rather than just making them part of some faceless abstract “them.”  Daring to see Jesus’ kind of love shown to us through people who we thought were outside the boundaries of people Jesus could use, or love, or accept.

My goodness, if we actually did those things, we wouldn’t be nearly so comfortable and insulated as we are.  I am so glad, so very comfortably glad, that we don’t take this story of Jesus very seriously anymore.  It might just break us out of our comfortable routines if we did… and, my goodness, I don’t like being shaken out of my comfort zone at all… especially when it comes to people I have already predetermined I am not going to like.

That’s one of the advantages, of course, that we have in the twenty-first century, compared with the people who first heard Jesus’ story: we have the luxury of being removed from Jesus’ story by 2,000 years, and so it’s easier for us to miss—either intentionally or unintentionally—how shocking it would have been to Jesus’ first hearers.  We have fooled ourselves into thinking that everybody expected Samaritans to be good and generous in Jesus’ day, and so for us, our shorthand for someone who does something kind and unexpected is to call them “a good Samaritan.”  We even have “good Samaritan” laws that protect well-intentioned do-gooders who help out when someone is in trouble.  We have forgotten—or maybe we have chosen to ignore—the fierce hatred and rage between Jesus’ own ethnic group, the Jewish community of the 1^st century, and the group they called Samaritans.  We are distanced from the ways these two groups eyed each other with suspicion, and how each was sure that the other was the enemy, responsible for countless cruelties and injustices against their opposites, Jews against Samaritans, Samaritans against Jews. 

We forget—and who can blame us, I suppose—that the line between Judaism and Samaritans wasn’t just a matter of polite disagreement between denominations like between Lutherans and Methodists or Catholics and Baptists.  These were people who saw each other as entirely different religions, with different cultures, different customs, different places of worship, and different allegiances.  The history of hostility and estrangement had gone back so many centuries that nobody could really remember who “started” it, only that Jesus’ fellow Jews would all have been sure that they had always hated Samaritans and that Samaritans were the cause of the troubles.  The Gospels tell us that it was customary for Jewish men and women to have nothing to do with Samaritans—you wouldn’t go into their neighborhoods, you would get uncomfortable if you happened to see one walking down the same road you were coming the other direction.  You would clutch your purse or your wallet a little more tightly, walk a little faster, maybe cross over to the other side of the street to avoid eye contact with them.  Good faithful Jews didn’t just want to keep their distance from Samaritans—they didn’t want to let them into Jewish territory, and they wanted to keep close tabs on letting any of them cross the borders into Judea.  These two groups, Jesus’ group of Jewish people and the Samaritans, they feared each other… and as so often happens in history, because they feared each other, they hated each other.

We, luckily, have been spared having to think about all that—we live in an age where there aren’t Samaritans around for us to be afraid of, so we can choose to ignore the shock value of Jesus’ story when the hero—the one who comes to the aid of the man beaten by robbers—is one of those people… a Samaritan. We, lucky for us, don’t have any side notes from Luke the Gospel writer giving us the commentary of all of Jesus’ first hearers when they finally picked their jaws up off the floor after he told this story.  We don’t have to hear how subversive it must have been for them.  And we don’t have a single one of their Facebook posts from the first century, all in a rage about how dare Jesus make a Samaritan the focus of his story.  You can imagine them for yourself, surely:  “Why does Jesus make one of those people so important in his story?  Doesn’t he think that regular people… you know, people like us, can do heroic things, too?  Doesn’t Jesus applaud all the fine, good upstanding things that we respectable Jewish people do?  Don’t our lives and actions matter?  Don’t all lives matter to Jesus?  Why, then would he make a story that deliberately pokes a stick in our eye by making the enemy into the hero?”

All of a sudden, we get a better picture of why people were always picking up rocks to throw at Jesus.  He dared on a regular basis to take the people labeled as public enemy number one and make them the heroes of his stories—and more than that, the example for his own group to follow! 

I mean think about it for a moment.  How would a room full of Trump supporters react if the Son of God told a story where a Hillary voter—or even a Bernie Sanders supporter!—was the one who got it right?  How would a room full of Democrats react if Jesus told a story where a Donald Trump supporter got finished watching Fox News and then saved the day?  Or, let’s push it closer to the punch Jesus’ story had to his first hearers:  it’s like Jesus telling a room full of police officers a story where the chief walks by the man beaten by robbers, and the deputy walks by, too… but then a “Black Lives Matter” activist is the person who actually helps.  Or it’s like imagining a room full of “Black Lives Matter” protestors hearing a story where a white police officer is the hero.  Or it’s like telling a room full of Lutherans in western Pennsylvania a story where a lone Muslim Syrian refugee rescues your grandmother from an oncoming coal truck.

My goodness, Jesus’ first hearers would have gotten all riled up, because his story would have forced them to re-examine their own pet hatreds, their own arrogance, their own closed hearts, and their own blind spots. And nobody likes admitting that they could be wrong.  Nobody likes admitting that the person they were sure was the enemy could be a presence of divine mercy in their lives.

We are so lucky in our day that we don’t automatically all hear that subversive, challenging stuff when we hear Jesus’ story, because we have watered it down in our minds to be a pleasant morality tale that you should be nice to people if you can spare the time.  My goodness, if we heard this story as Jesus really intended it to be heard, we would all get riled up at Jesus for disturbing our comfortable convenient prejudices.

But of course, there is always the chance that if we keep hearing this story—if we keep reading it in worship or reading it in our own Bibles, and really thinking about how Jesus is challenging our understanding of who our neighbor really is—we might still have to think all those uncomfortable unpleasant thoughts.  And then we might actually have to change our attitudes, our perceptions of other people, our actions, our voting, our way of life.  If we really took Jesus seriously here, we might have to seriously re-evaluate the things we are so sure about that we go railing and yelling and criticizing people about on Facebook and on the editorial page. We might discover that God reserves the right to use those people to teach us people about genuine love.  We might even discover that from God’s point of view, there is no those people and these people.  There is no “them” and “us.”  There is only us—human beings, made in the image of God—and we are killing ourselves.

But, oh dear, what a dreadful thought that we might have to seriously re-examine our lives, our choices, our commitments, our politics, and our ways of relating to people who get labeled “the other.”  That would be so dreadfully uncomfortable.  That’s why I urge you to sign my petition today and get us to cut this story right out of our Bibles, so that we don’t accidentally let Jesus make us squirm where we need it.

I mean think about it:  I know it sounds extreme to suggest editing the Bible.  But clearly, it would be dangerous to our way of life if we let Jesus’ story really do to us what he intended. If we believed, as Jesus’ clearly taught, that the people I have already pre-labeled as dangerous, no-good, outsiders could actually be the ones who save me when I am in need, well, I am going to have to see them as actual people, rather than as an abstract faceless idea… and I am going to dare to let God work through people that I had gotten used to hating, or being afraid of, or crossing to the other side of the street in order to avoid.  Or, my goodness, even more extreme, if I took Jesus’ teaching seriously, I might recognize that to someone else, I am the outsider that they have viewed with suspicion, and that it is a gift of grace to me on their part when they dare to let me help them or get close when they are in need.  If I took Jesus’ teaching seriously, I would stop caring about the question, “Why doesn’t anybody give credit to me and to people like me for the good we do?” and I would have to quit whining about Jesus singling out the other as the example and the hero.  I might just be led to sacrifice for people I have never dared to get to know.  I might be called to give up some of my precious comfort, or comfortable attitudes, and to dare to risk, or even give up, my time, my resources, my privilege, for the sake of someone else who is beloved and precious to God.

Well, you can see where all of that thinking would lead.  I mean, seriously, if anybody really dared to love the outsider, the stranger, the unexpected neighbor, the enemy, like today’s Gospel story demonstrates, they might very well end up risking their own life.  The Samaritan doesn’t know if the robbers are still around, or if the man lying in the road is bait in some sort of trap.  The Samaritan doesn’t know if the man lying half dead will be angry that a dirty foreigner touched him, or that someone with different religious and political views came to his aid.  The Samaritan doesn’t know if the man will run up a huge tab at the hotel where he drops him off and end up having to pay big time.  The Samaritan in Jesus’ story could end up losing money, as well as time, as well as his own safety.  Think—if we told this story to the next generation of churchgoers—they might actually dare to show kindness like this and risk their own well-being, their own time, their own personal comfort zones—for people who might never pay them back.  If we told this story to every new disciple who comes dripping from the font, my goodness, they might think that Jesus was calling them to lay down their lives in self-giving love, too.  And, well, if that happened, well, Christians would be a radical and powerful force for good and healing in a violent and hate-filled world.  If somebody really took the ideas in this story seriously, they might end up getting nailed to a cross.

So please, today, if you would like to stay comfortable and unchanged in your thinking, your choosing, your voting, your view of other people, please if you, like me, would just like to stay comfortably and conveniently in a bubble of people who are already like you and me, and to never be pushed to see the face of God in anybody else, please sign my petition for us to cut this story out of our Bibles so we don’t have to deal with the radical love it calls us to.

But… on the other hand… if you won’t sign my petition… and if you do dare to keep listening to the words and stories and teachings of Jesus—and of the cross itself—well, just be prepared to have the living and risen Jesus change you, pull you across lines you thought were fixed in stone, lead you into daring new situations, and bringing you face to face with people you were sure God could not or would not use.  If we dare to keep listening to the story of the man who was beaten by robbers and helped in the name of love by nameless foreigner, we had better be prepared for that love to change us, too.

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.