Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Deuteronomy 30:9-14; Psalm 25; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

It’s often said that familiarity breeds contempt. That may be so for relationships, but when it comes to famous stories, familiarity mostly breeds apathy. Upon hearing the opening words, we race through the basic events of the story that we know so well.  As soon as we hear “Once upon a time” we know that what follows isn’t real, but just a fairy tale.  “The fairest of them all” conjures images of Snow White and poisoned apples.  And “a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell into the hands of robbers” leads us to envision the Good Samaritan, who did the right thing after the priest and that other holy guy, whatever he was called, didn’t.  And from that we have legal principles called "Good Samaritan Laws" and hospitals named "Good Sam's".

We probably don’t listen that closely to the words anymore.  We just summarize the basics of the story and cut to the moral of it.  Two holy guys don’t stop to help the guy beaten up on the side of the road; a Samaritan, who didn’t get along with the Jews, does help the guy, going way beyond the call of duty; and we’re supposed to be like him, not like the other two.  Tough message, challenging, but clear. 

Actually, it’s not clear at all, and in the next, oh, twelve minutes or so, you’ll hear an entirely different interpretation of this famous parable.  An interpretation that recreates the shocking, startling, turn-the-world-on-its-ear flavor of the story that Jesus originally told.  An interpretation littered with offensive ideas and ending with more questions than answers, for this parable is like no other.  This is no time for apathy, because what follows is totally unfamiliar.  End of suspenseful build-up; here we go.
 

If you think about it, almost all of Jesus’s parables are general, universal.  A man with two sons.  The owner of a vineyard.  A poor widow. We’re not told what these people do for a living, where they’re from, or where they live.  We’re given a vague outline of a story, so that we can apply its moral lessons to our own lives.

Not so with this story, which is full of specifics. A lawyer asks Jesus who his neighbor is, and Jesus responds with the story of a man who’s going from Jerusalem, elevation 2500 feet above sea level, to Jericho, elevation 800 feet below it.  He’s attacked by robbers, who beat him and strip him, and leave him, in the Greek word, hemi-thanos, literally, “half-dead.”  A little while later a priest happens by, which wasn’t unusual, given that many of the temple priests lived in Jericho, and he’s probably on his way home from work in Jerusalem.

He sees the man lying by the side of the road, but instead of going to help him, the priest crosses over to the other side to avoid him, because according to the law anyone who touched a dead body was unclean for the next seven days.  To become clean again was a complicated process which required, among other things, the burning of a red heifer.  And the priest was an important person – the people were counting on him – what would they do if there was no priest for a whole week?  Perhaps he believed that it would be selfish to defile himself by helping the wounded man.

A few minutes later a Levite is walking down the road, sees the half-dead man, and literally follows in the priest’s footsteps.  On treacherous roads, it was common practice to pay attention to where the people ahead of you had walked, and so the Levite would have known that the priest had passed on the other side of the wounded man.  Perhaps the Levite reasoned that if it was OK for the priest not to help him, it was OK for him, too.  After all, the Levite’s responsibility was to accept tithes from the people, and the same rules of cleanliness applied to him.  If either the priest or the Levite had stopped to help the man lying in the gutter, the church services back in Jerusalem would have been seriously disrupted.

But then a Samaritan happens by.  Now the Samaritans and Jews of two thousand years ago were like the Palestinians and Israelis of today, or the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – they hated each other.  The Jews believed that, on a recent Passover, the Samaritans had secretly entered Jerusalem and defiled the temple by strewing human bones throughout it. To the Jews, the Samaritans were the lowest of the low – people who said they worshipped the same God, but didn’t follow all the rules, and even blatantly violated a few of them. 

But this Samaritan was “moved with pity” for the injured man, and he bandaged the man’s wounds and poured oil and wine over them. He put the man on his own animal and walked them to an inn, where he paid the innkeeper to care for him until he recovered, never asking for anything in return.

At the end of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer “who” was a neighbor to the wounded man, and the lawyer, through clenched teeth, responds, “The one who showed him mercy.”  He’s forced to admit the truth, but he can’t even bear to say the word “Samaritan.”  He might as well have said, “The third guy was right, whoever he was.”
 

The easy, and traditional, way to read this story is as an appeal for social action.  For going beyond the call of duty.  For helping the poorest of the poor. 

But while that’s a noble aspiration, it doesn’t take into account the core message of this parable.  The reason why Jesus goes into so much detail – about Jericho and Jerusalem, about priests and Levites and Samaritans – is because this is more than a story of two guys who didn’t do the right thing and one who did. This is a story of a desecrator, a blasphemer, a profaner – all rolled into one, who was Christlike when the religious folks skulked by on the other side of the road.

Our first response might be, “Well, not all Samaritans were bad.  This is probably one of the good ones.  So the message of the parable is that we should avoid guilt by association.”  But there’s no reason to suppose that this Samaritan was any different than all the others, when it comes to the things that the “Samaritans” were known for.  For all we know, he might have been there last Passover when his buddies desecrated the temple, the holiest place of all.

Which raises the question:  Who are our Samaritans? Not “good” Samaritans – we’re not there yet.  Who are the people who violate the rules of God that we hold so dear, who cause a righteous rage to burn within us?  If Jesus told this parable today, the third guy wouldn’t be a “Samaritan” – he’d be a racist, a sexist, or an intolerant zealot who saw everyone else’s sin, but not his own.
 

Walking down the street, minding his own business, he sees a person of color lying in the gutter, and his initial sarcastic thought is something like, “Well, no big loss.”  Or maybe woman is lying there who’s just been assaulted, and he thinks to himself, “Look what she’s wearing – she had it coming.”  Or maybe he recognizes the person in the ditch, and he sees the bruises as God’s rightful punishment, because the person lying there had different ideas about the war inIraq, or who should be able to marry whom.   But somehow the Samaritan is "moved with pity" – a glimpse of God in the midst of sin – and he helps the wounded person in the ditch.

The sadness and fury that you probably felt at the Samaritan’s hateful thoughts and words: Jesus’s listeners felt the same way when he turned out to be the hero of the story.  But we’ve diluted, or ignored, the meaning of “Samaritan”, turning it into a pleasant word, a word that makes sense to describe as “good.”  Just think of it this way – if Jesus were to re-tell this parable today, eventually we’d have hospitals named “Good Neo-Nazi,” or legal principles called “Good Bigot Laws.”  That’s about as much sense as the term “Good Samaritan” makes.

So how do we feel about this story now? Maybe a little indignant, at the thought of someone who stands for everything that we detest being in the right, when we religious folks are in the wrong. 

And what’s the moral of the story?  There are a bunch – nobody’s perfect.  Even a person who holds some despicable views can do the right thing.  Sometimes we get so caught up in being “good Christians" – worshipping the right way and all that – that we forget to do what Christ told us to do in the first place.  And what matter’s most in the end is what we do when somebody needs us. 

But there’s an even deeper, more revolutionary meaning of this parable.  We have to ask who’s the Christ figure in this story?  Our first inclination is to say, “The Samaritan,” because he’s the hero, the one who did the right thing.  But what about the man in the ditch?  What if he’s the Christ figure?

The man in the ditch is going down from Jerusalem toJericho, much as Jesus is on the fateful downhill journey toward His passion and death.  The man is stripped, beaten, and half-dead – exactly as Jesus soon will be.  And Luke immediately follows this parable with the story of Martha serving Jesus, but Jesus saying that Mary, who simply sat with him, had chosen the better way.  If the moral of the parable is that we should do good works, it’s awfully strange that the very next story says exactly the opposite.

If the man in the ditch is the Christ figure, then everything changes.  First of all, the name of the parable.  We’ve already seen how bizarre the name “Good Samaritan” is, so maybe we should call it the Parable of the Man-Who-Fell-Into-the-Hands-of-Robbers. Second, the basic moral of the story changes, because, ultimately, the Parable of the Man-Who-Fell-Into-the-Hands-of-Robbers is not about social action; it’s about pride.  We hope we’re not like the priest and the Levite. We hope we’re like the “Good Samaritan”, and we edit out the unattractive features of that title.  But those are our only options – priest, Levite, or Samaritan – all healthy, powerful, bequeathers of aid.  We want to help the bruised, beaten, half-dead person, but we don’t want to be him.  And we certainly don’t want to accept any help from people we judge as harshly as they condemn others.

Jesus is in the ditch.  He calls us to follow Him, to take up our Cross, to walk the way of sorrows.  To admit that we need help, and the only people who might be able to give it to us are “our” Samaritans, when they temporarily lay down their terrible words in order to perform an act of grace. 

Those people who hate others for the color of their skin or their gender or who they love – we are not above them.  Sometimes we’re not even level with them. Sometimes we need them, as we lie half-dead by the side of the road, and they’re our only hope, just as the Samaritan was Christ’s.

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