Look Again!
A ONE Church Devotional on the Good Samaritan
Hello, ONE Church Devo friends. I had the joy of preaching yesterday at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX — ad on this very same parable of the Good Samaritan. If you’d like to watch and hear the sermon, you may use THIS LINK and find the sermon’s beginning at 22:05. Enjoy!
Dinah Roe Kendall, “The Good Samaritan”
Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii [1 denarius = a day's wages) and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have." (Luke 10.30-35)
You and I live in a land and during an era of accomplished stereotypers. In my work in and outside of churches, I hear Lefties who are certain they know all Righties; I hear Righties who are similarly confident that they know all Lefties; and most no-Trumpers are just sure they know MAGA people from the inside. In fact, I sometimes hear the same thing across racial, national, cultural, generational, and socio-economic divides. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer often mused on our aesthetic sense. In a moment of insight he wrote about a surefire way to short-circuit our finely-tuned senses and observational skills: “Once I have called something ‘RED’,” he wrote, “I've stopped looking at it.” That's how we use our labels. We are just so sure we’re right about “them” that we stop looking.
We need help. So if we can imagine God diagnosing our illness and taking out a prescription pad, I believe the medicine the Almighty would order for our condition would be Jesus’s “Parable of the Good Samaritan”. (That would be a very cool pad to see, and the God who invented humor might even mimic a doctor's stereotypically terrible handwriting.)
Here's why I think God would choose Jesus’ very famous and familiar story as our antidote: despite the best efforts of preachers to supply ancient context for the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, twenty centuries later, you and I can't quite feel the sting that an ancient Jewish audience would have felt at the thought of a “Good Samaritan”. But Jesus’ first-century Jewish audience surely would have felt it. To Jews, the Samaritans were ethnically and religiously other – the hated rival. Rabbis of the Talmud (a collection of Jewish teachings from the 400s A.D.) ask the question, “Why are the Samaritans excluded?” Rabbis, who are mostly sure that this exclusion is proper, then answer variously.
Religious impurity: “because they were mixed up with priests of the high places” (fostering idolatry) and because they worshipped in the wrong place (Mt. Gerazim instead of Jerusalem).
Ethnic Impurity. Rabbis said Samaritans are not us “because they marry illegitimate women” which likely means “intermarriage with women of other races”.
These religious and racial dividers between Jews and their Samaritan had a history. Samaritans intermarried at home while Jewish families intra-married in the Babylonian exile; then Samaritans built a temple on Mount Gerazim soon after the Jews returning from exile built theirs in Jerusalem; in the early years of the 2nd century B.C., Samaritans welcomed Greek rule and the policies of Antiochus Epiphanes while the Jews stood against that ruler’s attempt to eliminate religious distinctions. Finally, in 110 B.C., the Hasmonean Jewish ruler John Hircanus led troops who destroyed the Samaritan temple on Gerazim. It’s no wonder these neighbors experienced an enmity that simmered...and made the prospect of a “Good Samaritan” hard for a Jew to fathom.
John’s Gospel captures the animosity and separation between the two in an understated nutshell: “Jews have nothing to do with Samaritans”. (4.9) This communicates in two ways: first, it tells of the social distance that lay between the two peoples; and second, it implies that Jews aren’t exactly going out of their way to find Samaritans to ask curious questions. They have “nothing to do with Samaritans”, and no apparent desire to check the accuracy of their stereotypes.
When Jesus praised a Samaritan in his parable (and when he had a long chat with a Samaritan woman by the well in John 4), he was crossing charged lines of time-honored Jewish religious and ethnic exclusion. And this bold, countercultural embrace of Samaritans didn't stop with Jesus. It made its mark on the early Christian movement we read about in Acts. There, after his resurrection Jesus commissions the disciples to be his witnesses “in Samaria” (Acts 1.8). And, though it took some time for this calling to gain traction, eventually Philip the evangelist launched a successful missionary campaign in an unnamed Samaritan town that produced “much joy in that city”. (Acts 8.4-8)
We know that this parable changed at least a few minds then. So how should this parable make its mark on us today? Like his ancient audience, I also have people I lazily think I know and can dismiss before I've really learned about them or listened to them. I'll bet you have some, too. If the Parable is going to have its way in our lives — if Jesus is going to have his way — we'll need to lay down our preconceptions and actually listen to the lives of people toward whom we’re tempted to nurse contempt.
Friends, there aren't many stings more gloriously healing than the sting we feel when God transforms our prejudice. When Jesus painted a GOOD Samaritan, it turned his listeners’ world upside down. In your better moments, don't you want your world blown away, too? Sometime today, ask a simple question: “Who can I absolutely not imagine being good?” God is in the business of breaking down the walls that stereotypes fortify. So today, go and find one of “them” — one of your Samaritans. Find ‘em beyond the news story or the social media post or the campaign rally. Find the people you can’t imagine being “good”, consider Jesus’s parable...and get curious.
Have a marvelous Monday!
Prayer -- God, we want to feel the pain and then the joy of minds you are renewing. Grant us, please, the courage and determination to be curious, in Jesus. Amen.