Who is your neighbor?

July 10, 2016   Pentecost 9                             Luke 10:25-37

I’m sure that almost all but the youngest of us remember the TV show Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.  It was a sweet place where adults gave undivided attention to children, they kindly and patiently explained things, and of course there was the Neighborhood of Make Believe that somehow the little red trolley connected between Mister Roger’s House and a world of puppets imagination.  Mister Roger’s Neighborhood took plenty of jabs and jibes for being too nice but I know many early childhood development experts who considered it to be the all-time best children’s program ever.  Count my attitude among theirs.

Of course as you age you discover that the world does not work at all the way Mister Roger’s Neighborhood worked.  Not everyone is kind and considerate.  There’s violence and destruction.  And perhaps most challenging of all, the world is complicated.  There’s serious competition for our time and our efforts.  We simply can’t be everything to everybody.

The parable of the Good Samaritan that we had in our gospel reading dives into this not-so-nice world of neighbors.  Remember the context of this parable.  Jesus is on his journey from the Gailean countryside to the city of Jerusalem.  This lawyer who stands up to test Jesus probably never met him before, although he probably heard of him.  As a legal expert he is going to put Jesus through his paces to see if holds muster. 

This whole scene is very compact and there’s not a word to waste.  The lawyer says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Notice the lawyer is using legal language – inherit.  While you don’t actually earn an inheritance from someone, if you’re in someone’s will you have a legal claim to some of the estate’s property.  This is the lawyers attitude towards eternal life.

Jesus’ responds to the lawyer’s question with a question of his own: “What is written in the law?  What do you read there?”  Now remember this is an illiterate society.  Only a few could read.  So Jesus’ question is directed to the lawyer’s status among the elite.  The lawyer cites verses from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, “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 neighbor as yourself.”

So far this has been straightforward, but now the lawyer makes it sticky.  “And who is my neighbor?”  Those same passages from Leviticus and Deuteronomy make it clear that everyone is your neighbor, including foreigners living among you.  But a lot had happened in the thousand years since they were written.  The Roman Empire was a vast melting pot.  Plus various conquests and invasions had blurred the lines of who was who.  So Jesus tells a parable.

The 17 mile road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notoriously dangerous.  It was rocky, narrow and descended 3200’ from Jerusalem’s elevation of about 2500’ above sea level to Jericho’s 800 feet below sea level.

Jesus says an unnamed man is making the journey.  Jesus gives this man no name and no nationality.  He’s just a man.  He is caught by robbers and is beaten, stripped and left half dead.  A priest goes by and passes by on the other side.  Likewise also a Levite.  Jesus is creating concentric circles going ever outward.  A priest was a Jewish official charged with helping to operate the temple in Jerusalem.  He was at the center of the religion, but he ignores the man.

A Levite was one circle outward.  All priests had to be from the tribe of Levi, but not all Levites were priests.  Just like all beagles are dogs but not all dogs are beagles.  One circle out and there is still no response to this hurt man.

Some have suggested that the priest and the Levite ignored the man out of religious obligation.  To touch a corpse or an unclean person would be to defile themselves or make themselves ritually unclean.  Some pastors like to preach this way because they can then set up Judaism as a religion of rigid rules and Christianity is not.  However this is not the case.  The Jewish rules were not so rigid and there were exceptions where if a person was in need anyone was expected to help, even a priest.

Jesus’ audience probably expected the next circle out to be an Israelite.  Then the common Israelite would indeed help the man.  Thus Jesus would have gone from priest to Levite to Israelite.  Since he’s talking to a lawyer the interpretation would be one against the religious elite.  But this is not the way Jesus goes.

Jesus says that a Samaritan travels by.  Jews hated Samaritans and Samaritans hated Jews.  Of all people this guy would ignore an injured Jew.  But he does not.  He cares for the man’s injuries.  He loads him on his animal and brings him to an inn.  There he spends the rest of the day and the night caring for the injured man.

Inns in those days were not nice places.  Don’t imagine something like the Holiday Inn Express.  Imagine something more along the lines of the innkeeper in Les Miserable.  He’s a scoundrel and a crook.  He is not to be trusted.  The next day the Samaritan pays this likely crook of an innkeeper two days wages and offers to pay even more when he returns.  The hated Samaritan has taken time, effort and money to help the original traveler.  And unlike Mister Roger’s Neighborhood where the streets are clean and people are trustworthy, how could this Samaritan know the whole situation was safe in the first place. What if the man was just a ploy to get kind hearted people to stop so the robbers could attack them too?  The Samaritan has also taken great risks to help.  Like many parables, the Good Samaritan plays on extremes.

Jesus then asks the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  I imagine the lawyer stumbling over his words….  The S….  The Sam…  The Samar…  And he just can’t bring himself to say it.  So he says, “The one who showed him mercy.”  And by not naming the Samaritan the lawyer makes the meaning of the parable all the more broad.  Everyone is a neighbor.  There are no distinctions.

If Jesus were to tell the parable to Americans today I don’t know what nationality he’d put in the role of the Samaritan.  Perhaps we would call it the parable of the Good Nazi, or the Good Communist, or the Good Islamic Extremist.  Whatever person or group offends and upsets you most gets the role of the Samaritan.

Perhaps you could walk away from this parable thinking that in order to inherit eternal life you have to live like the world is Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and you are to be kind and compassionate to everyone.

I suppose that would be a way to interpret it, but that would be missing the point.  No matter how hard we try there is always some group or nationality or ideology that we find abhorrent.  We’re kidding ourselves if we think we’re above that sort of thing.  We’re not.  We’re humans and no matter how hard we pummel our thoughts into thinking we’re all accepting and all-inclusive, we aren’t.  Thinking that you’re all accepting and all-inclusive is a delusion of the elite whose lives are insulated from the real struggles of the world.  Those who think they are all inclusive have deluded themselves into thinking they live in Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.

No, this parable hits at a deeper truth.  The lawyer knew he had been bested.  He could not live up to the parable’s demands.  And it bests us too.  We cannot live up to its demands.  We are convicted by it.

This parable hits at the deeper truth by making us realize that we are all sinners in need of God’s grace.  True neighborliness does not come from trying to be all-inclusive and being all-tolerant.  True neighborliness comes when you, and the people you love, and the people you feel apathetic about, and the people you abhor are all sinners in need of God’s grace.

We humans will never be united if we think we can get along by our own willpower.  We humans are united in our common brokenness, our inability to fix it, and therefore we are united in our need for God’s grace.  Only that way can there be community.  Only that way can there be true neighborliness.  Only by grace can any have eternal life.