Continuing with the last week's worship theme, we acknowledge that the Bible shows that there are two great commandments. The first commandment is to love God with all our being. The second commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Generally, the preception of this Sunday's Good Samaritan story is that the intended moral was to live a Christ-like life and to do good deeds for those we meet along life's highway. And for the most part that is correct, but there is a much deeper meaning to this parable than that.
To understand this deeper significance, one must take a look at the troubled Jewish and Samaratin releationship in First Century Judea where Jesus and his followers lived at the time.
The Samaritans were a mix of Jew and Gentile and the Jews, who followed religious law to the letter, considered them to be spiritually unclean and polluted; so much so that a deep hatred prevailed between the two camps. This, in spite of the fact that the Samaritans were actually considered the first followers of Jesus.
The Good Samaritan Parable was precipitated by a series of rather testy questions posed to Jesus by a lawyer who was an expert in Mosaic Law, not a court lawyer in today's sense. As Jesus was having a private conversation with his deciples, the lawyer interjected by asking:
"Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus responed by asking a question of his own: "What is written in the law?" and the lawyer quickly 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."
"You have given the right answer," Jesus responded... "do this, and you will live." Pushing the issue a little further, the lawyer then asked what many scholars have interpreted as a natural and sincere final question: "And who is my neighbor?"
It is pertinent to clarify that the lawyer was from a class of Jewish people who prided themselves on how carefully they obeyed God -- they, along wth the Pharisees, were fastidious about observing the law in every detail. As a "teacher of the law" he genuinely sought an answer to the neighbor question.
His answer from Jesus came in the form of a carefully worded parable involving a priest, a Levite, a Samaritan, and a badly beaten man who had been stripped of his clothing and left to die at the side of a treacherious stretch of road between Jerusalem and Jericho, called by reputation "The Way of Blood" because so many travelers had been brutally attacked and robbed there.
Jesus intentionally left the beaten victim unidentified. The audience, being Jewish, would naturally assume that he was a Jew. Being in this half dead state he would be unconscious.
Since he was stripped of his clothing, he then was unidentifiable. Historically, a person can be identified in one of two ways: his dress and his dialect. The man in this case was void of ethnic background, void of stature, void of position.
In the Gospel According to Luke, Chapter 10, verses 25-37, the parable unfolds. The Jewish Priest was the first to come across the bloody, crumpled form of the naked man, but rather than get involved, he passed by on the other side of the road; no doubt influenced by religious law implications of purity and the act of touching.
In the priest's defence, how could he be sure the wounded man was a neighbor since he could not be identified? If the person lying there was a non-Jew, the priest could be risking defilement, especially if the person were actually dead.
Priests were supposed to be ritually clean, exemplars of the law. There would be immediate shame and embarrassment suffered by the priest at the expense of the people and their peers for such defilement. If, in fact, he had just completed his mandatory two weeks of service, for instance, he would then need to return and stand at the Eastern Gate of the temple, along with the rest of the unclean.
Furthermore, in addition to the humiliation involved, the process of restoring ritual purity was time consuming and costly. It required finding, buying, and reducing a red heifer to ashes, and the ritual took a full week. The priest was in a predicament. Moreover, he could not approach closer than four cubits to the dead man without being defiled, and he would have to overstep that boundary just to ascertain the condition of the wounded man.
The Levite, a temple worker, followed close behind and he too avoided the helpless victim, perhaps influenced by the same concerns as the priest. The Samaritan on the other hand, governed by the very same same Jewish law and a complete stranger too, stopped and gave the man his immediate attention, tended to his wounds and proceeded to take him on his donkey to a nearby inn. He handed over two silver coins, the equivalent of two weeks wages, to the innkeeper for the man's lodging and promised reimbursement for any futher expenses.
What an exceptional level of assistance this was, especially since the victim was a total stranger and one who may well have been a social enemy. The Samaritan's act was truly one born out of compassion for a fellow man -- a negbour he did not even know.
Jesus concluded his deceptively simple little story by asking the lawyer "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" The lawyer's answer was a convinced "The one who had mercy on him." (pause) The lawyer got the message, but do we truly grasp the significance of it today? Do we fully understand that we, as humans, cannot meet the perfect requirements of the law? Even those who fully dedicate themselves to it, fall short.
All these centuries later, we still write people off because of the color of their skin, or because of where they live, or what they do, or even how they relate to us. We are living in a society that has become dehumanized, where life in some quarters is not worth much.
We only have to look at the current murder rate in "Toronto the Good" for evidence of that. Look too at the troubling rise of bullying cases in our schools and on cyber space
...Look at abhorant physical and mental abuse inflicted on many of our senior citizens confined to nursing homes
...Look at our sad history of mistreatment of native children in regional residential schools run by our churhes, prompting the need for "Truth and Reconcilliation" today
...Racial discrimination continues to rear its ugly head
...Likewise biases against people of differing sexual orientation.
We have no reason to be smug. The list goes on and on, to the shame of all of us.
I took part in a lay ministry course earlier this year, in conjunction with the Elders Institute in Vancouver. There were 12 of us in the course, from six provinces across the country, and we often shared personal stories and experiences. One woman, a clerk of session for her church, touched me with a story about someone who "stopped". but not in a Good Samaritan way...so indicative of the society in which we live today.
This is her story. in her words: "My daughter is handicapped, and occasionally has siezures. She had one last fall just after she left a busy mall, landed on the grass next to the sidewalk, and no one came to help. She had wet herself, and people spoke about the tragedy of people who spend their money on liquor. They treated her as just another drunk, and walked away. When she recovered, she discovered that her cell phone (which she had in her hand before the siezure) was missing, so obviously someone stopped, but not to help." How often do we hear stories of that nature?
Now, I readily acknowledge this morning that I am talking to the converted...Absolutely every one of you are Good Smaritans in your own right. You are caring and loving people and Knox Tiverton has a lengthy record of mission and outreach to show for it -- outstanding support of Presbyterians Sharing and World Service and Development initiatives, not to mention special contributions to local ministry and the commendable Crop Share program that you support.
When I use the term "we", I am using it in a collective sense as in "society" in general. We can identify with the words of Mother Teresa: "The biggest disease today is not leprosy or cancer. It is the feeling of being uncared for or unwanted, of being deserted and alone. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity and an indifference toward one's neighbor who may be the victim of poverty or disease or exploited and at the end of life, left at a roadside."
In all of this, we should not overlook the really good news that is hidden away in the parable of the Good Samaratin. I like to look at it this way...
The robbers in Jesus' story correspond to sin and the forces of evil.
The man who was beaten, on the other hand, is representative of all humanity -- helpless, hopeless and left to die.
The priest and the Levite represent the sacrifices of the old covenant which are ineffective.
The Good Samaritan in the person of Jesus, is the only one who can help.
The wine and oil used to cleanse the man's wounds correspond to the blood Jesus shed for us, and the Holy Spirit which dwells in us.
The inn may well represent the church where God puts his people to be spiritually nurtured until He returns for them.
Jesus used the lawyer's question to show how inadequate for salvation even the best human effort can be, and how wonderful and sure is His work of redemption for all humanity. The "good news" for us is that only Jesus can rescue us from the "Way of Blood"...and he did it by way of his own blood, nailed to a cross.
In our own personal lives of faith, it is important for us to recognize that Christ the "Good Samaritan" stops for us. Each of us have had our own moments when we have been "lying by the roadside"; moments of anxiety and confusion; times when we were in need of Christ's forgiveness; experiences of facing illness and dealing with the loss of loved ones.
Usually through other people (our "neighbors") Christ has stopped for us to be a source of healing in our lives. It is through our awareness of His being the Good Samaritan for us, that you and I are empowered to stop for others ("neighbors", again) as we find them by the roadside.
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