July 15, 2007 

Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot

 

In the passage immediately before today’s text, Jesus rejoices in prayer that the ones who get it – the joy in God’s good news – are the simple and the child-like, while the wise and intelligent, the “know-it-alls,” are left blundering around in the darkness of their arrogance. To underscore his point, Jesus now tells the story of a very intelligent man, an expert in the law of Moses – will he get it? Commentator Fred Craddock notes from this story that knowing the right answers does not mean that one knows God. Let’s see where the story takes us….

 

Here’s the problem: everyone knows, and everyone loves this story. It is so shop-worn, its teeth so worn smooth, that it is likely not to rear up and bite us anywhere that it hurts. We’ve so domesticated it. We’ve got Good Samaritan hospitals, Good Samaritan laws, Good Sam Trailer Parks, Good Samaritan Boy Scouts helping little old people across the street. Good Samaritan neighbors whose children water our plants or walk our dogs while we’re away. All good stuff! But maybe we’re missing the twist in the tail.

 

Toward the end of my pastorate in Wisconsin, I got to be a Good Samaritan. I saw a car fire starting beginning on my way home after work. I made a quick compassion calculation: Had my cell phone, in no particular hurry, the fire station just minutes away, the man appeared uninjured – Yep, I can do this!!! I got the man away from his car, called 911, and waited with him while the fire department did their thing. After the initial emergency, I felt really good; helped the guy out with my quick action, maybe saved his car. I hung a round for a few minutes, waiting for the guy to thank me; kind of hoping other drivers would see my good works – not for my sake, of course! But for God’s sake. Hoping other drivers would say to themselves; “Look at this nice young white man, helping out the elderly black man in his beat-up fishing clothes. Hey! Just doing my part for racial reconciliation. Madison, Wisconsin – not just a hip, city of tolerance - it’s a city of brotherly love, and we can all feel good about that. I finally began to chuckle at myself for my mixed motivations, and moved on. As I drove away, it struck me like a sledge-hammer in the gut: My compassion was calculated. What I did, I did with virtually no cost to myself, and got back a ton of self-kudos. I guess, though, we’re all just a mixed-up bag of motivations.

 

If you agree with me that we’re essentially mixed in many of our motivations for helping others, I hope that you don’t mind that I point out something here. Our motivations are all mixed up with constant compassion calculation: What’s the cost-benefit ratio? If that is the case, that we’re a mess of motives, why is it that we are so quick to approach this story so uni-dimensionally, so unimaginatively? We cut to the chase: The Bible Scholar and the priest in the story are slimy hypocrites – for shame! We’d never be like that. We are drawn with warm fuzzies toward the Good Samaritan and are sure that we would do the same, or at least approximate his behavior. It is not that simple – and if it is to us, then Jesus has not yet set the hook in our heart or brain.

 

To get the story, we go back to the lawyer and his question that kicks the whole thing off. A good lawyer only asks questions to which he or she already knows the answer. He asks Jesus, “What’s the greatest law?” Jesus, the good teacher, says, “What do you think?”, and the lawyer smugly answers his own question – “Love God with everything you’ve got, and love your neighbor.” Jesus says, “Bingo.” And the lawyer, on a roll, now wants Jesus to corroborate conventional wisdom on the definition of a neighbor – which everyone knows: The ones we are to love as neighbors are those whom we accept or reject by our own rules, criteria, and benchmarks – the ones that we select for our largesse, and usually based on calculated compassion –cost-benefit ratio. We are the persons in the driver’s seat – we’ve got all the goodies, and we can pick and choose who gets them and why and when. And when we ask, “Just who is my neighbor?” which we all do, we, like the lawyer, are fishing for parameters, asking God to bless our calculated compassion. But Jesus won’t give us the answer we’re hoping for.

 

The lawyer thinks he knows the answer, but Jesus rocks his world and rips the rug out from under him – by telling him a little story. It starts out innocently and predictably enough: Busted up man in a ditch, religious person #1 scoots by on the others side - draws a knowing snicker from the lawyer. Religious person #2, same thing – and with a big yawn, the lawyer expects person #3 to be your average Joe, normal, good-hearted Jewish layperson who stops to help. But person #3 isn’t that – this person isn’t even a Jew. Horror of horrors, it’s a Samaritan – a despised, unclean, mongrelized, bastardized race: a Samaritan is the hero? Notice that Jesus doesn’t answer his original question, “Who is my neighbor?” Instead, with this story Jesus turns it around on him and us and asks: “Who, then, was the neighbor?” The ball is thrown back in his court, and the smug smile is wiped from the lawyer’s face.

 

The lawyer chokes on the “S” word – Samaritan. He can’t even bring himself to day the hated word, Samaritan. He grudgingly answers: “I suppose it’s the one who showed him mercy.” But how can grace and compassion come from that quarter? How do you feel when you look up from your distress and that the one person who reaches out to help you is just that person you have always despised and feared and avoided? God knows it’s hard enough to love your enemy – one commentator notes that it is monstrously upsetting to discover that against all odds the enemy has chosen to love you! Wouldn’t that just blow your tidy, quid pro quo world apart?

 

Hey! Who wants to open themselves up to that kind of humiliation? Who wants to accept the kindness of strangers, let alone from hated or feared strangers? Churches generally don’t: Why do you think churches look pretty much the same? Why do you think we unconsciously collect around us folk of pretty much near-equal station, pretty much the same manageable and respectable sins – so that if and when grace or mercy should leak out toward us from a sister or a brother, thank God it’s from one of us – a peer, and not an outsider. Otherwise, the shame and the inability to repay would flatten our egos, and all of a sudden we’d find other places to be on Sunday mornings.

 

Methodist preacher William Willimon says “Maybe that’s why we’ll find plenty of priests and lawyers and Levites, and maybe a Good Samaritan or two in a Christian church on any given Sunday morning. And we’ll find lots of folks putting on the brave and game face over the pain they’ve got inside – but we’ll have to look real hard to find in church, the obviously broken, needy, and bleeding person from the ditch.”

 

Philip Yancey, in his book, “The Jesus I Never Knew” tells a haunting and true story he heard from a friend who works with the down and out in Chicago: “A prostitute came to me in desperate straits; homeless, sick, destitute, unable to buy food or medicine for her six-year old daughter. Through sobs and tears, she told how she had been renting out her daughter – to men interested in deviant sex. She made more renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a night. She had to do it, she said, to pay for her drug habit. I could hardly bear to hear her sordid story. For one thing it made me legally liable – I’m required to report cases of child abuse. I had no idea what to say to this woman. At last I asked her if she had ever thought of going to a church for help. I will never forget the look of pure, naïve shock that crossed her face. “Church!” she cried. Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”

 

There’s really only one place to truly start being church – where neighbor and sinners of all shapes and sizes rub shoulders and are utterly and unabashedly welcome with one another here, or anywhere. Before we get even close to the Good Samaritan place in our lives, which is really a wonderful place to be – we must first truly realize, right on down to the soles of our feet, that we do not have all the answers, and the power to dispense, as we see fit. We must first be confronted with the raw truth that we are the broken man in desperate need in the ditch. We are the man who has been robbed, stripped of everything: he was left with nothing but desperate need. And this is exactly where we all begin with God – and where God finds us – naked, battered by sin, by life, by our choices, by other’s choices, stripped of everything, except for our raw and naked need for God.       

 

The first stranger who bends over and whose face we see is God. Are we really in a position to refuse God’s grace? Sure we can, but then we’ll never know what it means to be neighbored, loved by God – and we’ll never know what it means to truly neighbor others, and without calculated compassion – which is no compassion at all. We may choke on the fact, and try to deny with everything in us, but we are needy, we are the objects of divine charity and compassion, just like everyone else on this planet. If we don’t get this, we have virtually nothing to offer others.

 

Who, then, was the neighbor? Well, the Samaritan, for sure – but more deeply than this: God is the neighbor who first shows up; God’s face of grace is the first face we see when we look up from the ditch. God is the neighbor who first neighbors us and loves us back to life. When we’ve been picked up and bandaged by God, we are free from calculated compassion, free to love and to serve, free to be the neighbor.

 

Have you tasted this grace from God? Than you know what it means to love God with all of your heart, soul, strength and mind – and you also know what Jesus means when he says, “Go and do likewise.” Show mercy as you have been shown mercy. Thanks be to God!