The View from the Ditch

When it became clear just now that this sermon would be based on the parable of the Good Samaritan, I wonder how many of you thought: “Here we go again. Love your neighbor the way the one guy helped the other guy. We know it already, but okay, one more time.” But being so certain that we already know it puts us in just the right spot, because Jesus told it to somebody who thought he already knew; and the story packs a big, surprise for all who think they know.

The know-it-all was a lawyer, an expert in all the laws and rule in Hebrew Scripture. He poses a question: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He’s not asking out of need, he’s playing theological ping-pong. He’s just fondling the questions as we sometimes do: engaging in God-talk to avoid staking our lives on a real answer.

Jesus won’t play. He says, “You answer it,” and sure enough, the man already knows: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “That’s right. So do it and live.”

The man prefers to keep talking. “But who is my neighbor?” His question may be insincere, but it’s not a bad one. Since love is action, and since our resources for action are limited, isn’t it fair to ask where the boundaries are? In Israel, “Love your neighbor” meant first: Love your fellow citizens, yet the Bible also said: “You must love the foreigners among you.” But that gets problematic when strangers have invaded and oppressed your people as an occupying empire, foreigners everywhere, heavy taxes, your culture in collapse. Under these conditions, isn’t it a reasonable question?  Who am I really obligated to love? “Who is my ‘neighbor?’”

Jesus, as he so often did, just told a story.

A man was traveling down the Jericho road, which is rocky and winding and steep, and where violent men could hide out and ambush the unlucky. This man was unlucky. Robbers attacked, took everything, then stripped him, then beat him and kicked him senseless and left him half dead in the ditch.

Look what Jesus has done to that lawyer. The question “Who is my neighbor?” had meant: Who am I obliged to help? But Jesus puts him with a broken man who can ask no such question; and from here on, the story has to be experienced through the eyes of an assaulted, dying person who desperately needs someone to act like a neighbor. Jesus puts the lawyer and you and me in that ditch.

And look, here comes somebody. Oh no, it’s a preacher, and he’s looking right at you with those preacher eyes! Will he stop and help? No, he crosses to the other side to avoid you, and goes on by. No surprise, no one expects much practical help from the clergy. So Jesus throws in another one. Here comes a Levite, another religious professional, and it’s the same. Gives you a look, crosses to the other side, and walks on.

And in a story like this, you know somebody else is coming, and that whoever it is will get it right, because that’s how such stories work. In folk tales, fairytales, parables, and jokes, where there are two characters acting pretty much the same, there’s always a third who is different. Three pigs: lazy pig, lazy pigs—industrious pig. Three sisters: ugly one, ugly one—Cinderella. The third is always the opposite of the first two. So here, we get clergy, clergy—and what’s opposite of clergy? Just a good and decent person, probably poor, uneducated, maybe not even religious. Any of those opposites of clergy is what we expect to come riding down the road toward the ditch we’re lying in.

So we can’t believe what we see coming down that road now, already staring at us, bearing down on our position. This isn’t the opposite of clergy, it’s the opposite of anyone we’re comfortable with! For the lawyer that would be a Samaritans, so Jesus says a Samaritan is coming at him. Jews and Samaritans hated and feared each other for reasons of ethnicity, religion, politics. They had a long history of bad blood between them with atrocities on both sides. So bad was it that one rabbi had decreed: anyone who accepts help from a Samaritan will delay the coming of the Messiah.

So who is it bearing down on you? For some white people in our country it’s a young Black man in a hoodie. Or, if you’re a young black man, maybe the one coming toward you is a police officer. For some it would be a transgender person, or a Muslim, or someone in a MAGA cap. Whoever it might be for you, it’s some kind of person you find scary and/or repugnant. Somebody you’d avoid if you could, resist if you could, but now you can’t because you’re bleeding and your bones are too broken to move.

And this terrifying stranger comes and leans over you, looks at you, and doesn’t say a word. They don’t ask: “Are you drunk? Were you at fault? Do you have a police record? Do you deserve help? Are you one of the good ones or the bad ones? Will you thank me?” There’s no checklist.

Then you see to your shock that there are tears in this person’s eyes. And now they touch you, wipe away your blood, put antiseptic on your wounds, bandage you, pick you up in their arms, carry you, drive you to a safe place, pay in cash enough for you to stay three and a half weeks, then sign to pay for any balance on your bill.

And without so much as pausing for breath, Jesus turns, glares into our faces and says, “Tell me—who the neighbor?”

What’s he getting at? That our neighbor could be the last person on earth we’d pick, and we’re in no position to pick. The question is changed from “Whom shall I love?” to “Who are you?”—the answer to which is: We are people who need help! The whole world is the Jericho road, and all are wounded travelers, all of us broken, and in need of help. We’re not up to deciding neighbor love, we are down to needing it.

What this suggests, at very least, is that more humility may well be in order. Given the conditions, it would be more than fitting to do less assuming, less judging, and less talking, and a lot more listening and learning—especially to people on the margins of our experience or others to whom we have not really been open. What if they are our Samaritans and we are broken and in need of their help? And what if we were to take seriously that deep down, all of us are wounded and in need of the same dignity and redemption? Then maybe we would repent of our incredibly selective mercy. And the lenses of our grievances and assumptions and defendedness could fall from our eyes, and we could see the truth of the kinship of us all.

A teacher in India was asked, “How should we treat others?” He replied, “There are no others.”

Who are you? You are someone with a wound, as am I. I need help. You need help. And if we’re alive at all to the truth of things, we see that all around us are wounded, though some more viciously and unfairly than others. If it’s true of all of us, we must never forget that the kind of Love we ourselves have needed—the unjudging kind, the uncalculating, most generous kind—is the kind that should be available and offered and given to everyone. We don’t have the false luxury of judging, blaming, or withholding. We’ve got wounds, as everywhere we look are the wounded, so we share the mercy all round.

We can do this because it has been done for us. This uncalculating compassion already arrived for us. We were joined in the ditches where we were dying by One we did not choose, One whom we are inclined to resist, but who came to where we were broken, and touched our wounds, and bore us out on his back, in costly compassion we could never repay, toward our healing. We live by the ongoing mercy of a Samaritan Christ.

Well, neighbors, I reckon this talk has gone on long enough. Part of his point, after all, was that religious talk won’t resolve much. We know to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. All we’re down to now are the words Jesus spoke just before he told the story: “Do this and live.”