Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 15, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Of course we all know the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We’ve heard it all our lives. It is one of the many great literary creations of the author of the Gospel of Luke. It’s about a kind man called a Samaritan—whatever that is—who helped an injured man when a priest and a Levite—whoever they are—ignored him and passed him by. The story means we should help people who need help, right? Well, yes. Of course that’s right—as far as it goes. That’s the obvious meaning of the story, but there’s one line in the story that has always puzzled me.

It comes not in the parable itself but in the verses that set up the parable. There someone identified as “a lawyer” asks Jesus what he must do to inherit “eternal life,” whatever that is. Now, when you hear the term “lawyer” you probably think of someone like me, or rather like you may suppose I used to be. Someone who knows the law—the secular law of course—and who represents clients, files frivolous lawsuits, goes to court, handles divorces, defends drunk drivers and murderers, writes wills and contracts, and gets rich charging way too much money for all of those things. Right? Well, whether that’s an accurate picture of lawyers today—and to some extent it is and to a considerable extent it isn’t—it’s not what lawyer means in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. There it means someone who was an expert in the religious law of Judaism, the law of Moses found in the Torah. The lawyer in this story is probably a scribe, that is, a Temple official like the priest and the Levite of the parable. He is probably a Pharisee, a zealous advocate of strict observance of the Mosaic law and especially of the purity code of the book of Leviticus. He certainly doesn’t ask his question because he is a spiritual seeker. He already has his answers. Luke says that he “stood up to test Jesus.” Luke 10:25 NRSV Presumably that means that he wants to see if Jesus would give an answer that was correct according to the Pharisees’ understanding of Torah law. As usual, Jesus isn’t so easily trapped. He turns the question around and asks the lawyer what Scripture says about his question. The lawyer then recites what we know as “the Great Commandment.” In Matthew and Mark, Jesus speaks these words. Here in Luke, the lawyer says them: “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 neighbor as yourself.” Luke 10:27 NRSV Jesus says, in effect: Right. There’s your answer, right out of the Torah about which you are so zealous. Do this, and you will have the life you seek.

Then comes the line that has always puzzled me. Luke writes: “But wanting to justify himself, he [the lawyer] asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” Luke 10:29 Luke is saying that the lawyer’s question “who is my neighbor” constitutes an attempt by the lawyer to “justify himself.” How could asking that question “justify” the lawyer? And what is it about the lawyer that needs justification? Those, I think, are very puzzling questions the answers to which are far from immediately apparent. To get at those answers we need to take a look at where the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself that makes up the second part of the Great Commandment comes from. The lawyer knew where it came from, and so did Jesus. So we need to discover where it came from as well if we want to understand what’s going on here.

The commandment that we love our neighbor as ourselves comes from the book of Leviticus, specifically from Leviticus 19:18. That verse reads in full: You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” NRSV (emphasis added) This verse when read in full, and indeed the whole bent of the Levitical purity code, says that the law applies only between Jews. Leviticus commands people to love fellow Jews as themselves, but it quite explicitly does not direct them to love non-Jews as themselves. That’s certainly how the lawyer in our story understood the command to love our neighbor. That’s certainly how he practiced it. He wanted to “justify” himself by getting Jesus to say that neighbor doesn’t really mean neighbor, whoever the neighbor is. He’s looking for Jesus to ratify his—and not only his—narrow reading of the command to love our neighbors. He is, in other words, looking for a loophole, or better, to have Jesus confirm for him the loophole he’d been using all his life. Neighbor doesn’t mean neighbor. It means those neighbors we approve of. It means those neighbors who are like us, who speak the same language we do and believe the same things we do. Who live and love the way we do. Certainly neighbor can’t mean everyone, can it? The lawyer didn’t think so. The law as he understood it didn’t say so, and wants to make sure this Jesus fellow doesn’t say so either.

And Jesus will have none of it. He tells his famous parable, the obvious hero of which is a Samaritan and the villains of which are a righteous priest and a righteous Levite, Temple officials and professional guardians of the law, people just like the lawyer whose question prompts the parable. The Samaritan was precisely the kind of neighbor the lawyer did not love as himself. He didn’t love him at all. He despised him as a heretic and as ritually impure. The Samaritans you see, although they traced their ancestry back directly to the Patriarch Jacob, did not practice pure Judaism. They worshipped at Mt. Gerazim in Samaria not at the Temple in Jerusalem. They followed different purity laws. Jews and Samaritans avoided all contact with each other as much as possible. To the lawyer, the Samaritan of Jesus’ parable was an unclean heretic, someone to be despised, not someone to be loved. Yet the way Jesus tells the parable makes it so obvious that the Samaritan did what was right while the professional guardians of the law did not that even the lawyer must agree that the Samaritan was the one who acted like a neighbor to the beaten man even though the lawyer’s law excluded the Samaritan from being a neighbor. Jesus has deftly turned the tables on the lawyer. The lawyer sought self-justification. Jesus told a story that showed him the error of his ways. The lawyer wanted his loophole confirmed. Jesus sewed it shut.

Friends, there are no loopholes in the law of love. Love of neighbor means love of everyone. We of course don’t have to worry about Samaritans. There are a few of them left in Israel, but we never encounter them. Does that mean that Jesus’ great parable has nothing to say to us? Hardly. It leads us to ask the same question the lawyer asked Jesus. Who is our neighbor? Or we can ask: Who are the Samaritans among us, the ones we despise and try to exclude from the law of love? They’re not hard to identify. Who do we wish would go away? Who don’t we want to have to deal with? When I ask those questions several groups of people come readily to mind. The homeless, certainly. Our society wishes more than anything that they would just go away. If you don’t think so, consider this. Some of our own church members have been criticized by their friends because our church in involved in programs to feed hungry people, including of course homeless hungry people. We’re encouraging them, we’re told. We’re encouraging them to come and stay here, we’re told. We aren’t supposed to love them, we’re supposed to participate in society’s effort to make them invisible and to make them someone else’s problem. The City of Monroe has done just that by passing an ordinance with absurd and onerous requirements the intent and the effect of which is to make sure no homeless tent encampment like the one our sister church in Woodinville has twice hosted ever comes to Monroe. Or how about illegal immigrants? Don’t we wish they’d just go away? We don’t want to love them. We don’t want them to be eligible for benefits like Medicaid and food stamps, or even for public education for their children. We wish they’d just go away, go back where they came from, just like the lawyer surely wanted the Samaritans to go back to Samaria where he wouldn’t have to deal with them. Or what about racial minorities? The United States Supreme Court recently made a decision the lawyer would have loved, saying schools can’t use a desire to achieve racial balance as any factor in school assignments. We want to pretend we don’t have a racial problem in this country. We want minority races, Black people and Brown people especially, to go away. Or if they can’t go away at least to sit down, be quiet, and stop demanding that we redress the inequality centuries of racism have created among us. If they’d just act like white people and pretend that we have overcome racism in this country everything would be fine, we think, even if we don’t say it out loud. Or what about sexual minorities? Many Americans insist that to be treated as equal human beings they must cease being who they are and become someone they aren’t, just like the lawyer of Luke’s parable no doubt wanted those wretched Samaritans to admit the error of their ways and become proper Jews. Or what about Muslim Americans? We wish they’d go back where they came from too, even though most of them probably came from right here. They’re all fanatics who secretly applaud the acts of the terrorists here at home and around the world, or so we think. There’s no shortage of Samaritans among us. They’re everywhere, all around us.

And Jesus leaves us no loopholes. They are all our neighbors. God calls us to love them all. And notice one thing: Jesus didn’t require the Samaritan to become anything other than he was before holding him up as a model of the law of love. He didn’t include in his story a conversion of the Samaritan to Judaism. He doesn’t say the Samaritan suddenly began to obey the law the way the lawyer understood it. It’s the same with our Samaritans. Friends, love isn’t love if it isn’t love of the other as he is. Love that requires the other to change so that we can love her isn’t love. The Samaritan loved the beaten traveler just as he was. He didn’t ask after his religion. He didn’t ask after his immigration status or his sexual orientation (not that they had an understanding of different sexual orientations in that world). Only one thing mattered. The beaten man was a man. He was a human being, a child of God. And so the law of love applied to him. The same is true of the Samaritan. He was a human being, a child of God. And so the law of love applied to him. It really is that simple. Love. No loopholes. No exceptions. As Jesus said to the lawyer so I say to you and to myself: “Go and do likewise.” Amen.