Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 11, 2010

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.

We all love the Parable of the Good Samaritan, right? It was one of the first Bible stories I remember hearing as a child, I suppose because we so love to teach it to our children. We tell them that it means you should care for others and not pass them by on the other side of the road. And of course it does mean that. It also means that God wants us to put caring for those in need ahead of our own spiritual concerns, especially our concern for our own religious purity. That’s the significance of the people who pass the beaten man by on the other side of the road being not ordinary Jewish people but a priest and a Levite, officials of the temple in Jerusalem and guardians of the Purity Code that is part of the Mosaic Law in the Hebrew Bible. These are powerful and true lessons. Jesus makes his points here, as he always did, not with a lengthy discourse on moral theory but in a short, pithy story, in a parable.. This parable begins with Luke’s version of the Great Commandment, when the lawyer who sets up the parable quotes Jewish scripture as saying “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,” and Jesus approves of his doing so. The parable then gives a powerful illustration of what love of neighbor means. It’s a great story, one of my favorites, and perhaps one of yours too.

Yet as I studied the Parable of the Good Samaritan again this week when it came up in the lectionary readings for today I wasn’t much struck by what a great story it is. I was more struck by the story’s limitations. You see, every parable has its limitations. Every metaphor, every allegory, every parable has its limitations. They have to have their limitations, because they are precisely short, concise statements that are dealing with great big issues, something they can do only in part, and they’re doing it indirectly at that.

What got me thinking about the limitations of the Parable of the Good Samaritan was a line from the Deuteronomy passage that we heard. In that passage Moses is giving the Law to the people, as he is throughout Deuteronomy. Moses tells the people that they will prosper in the land if they faithfully observe God’s commandments and decrees as they are stated in Deuteronomy. Moses must have been getting some complaints about how hard it is to obey all of the law because he says “Surely this commandment that I am commanding you,” namely, the commandment to observe all of the law, “is not too hard for you.” Now, Deuteronomy’s Moses is referring to all of the 613 laws of the Law of Moses, laws dealing not only with moral issues but also with proper sacrificial worship and with ritual purity among other matters. All of that is the law that Moses is saying isn’t too hard for the people to observe. Well, St. Paul and I beg to differ. Paul knew that it simply wasn’t possible for anyone to observe all of that law. Indeed, the thought that the law’s function was precisely to “convict us sin” by showing us that we can’t obey all of the law.

Be that as it may, when we Christians think of a law that we are supposed to obey we think—or at least I hope we think—not of all those Mosaic laws but of the Great Commandment of Jesus, the commandment that we love the Lord our God with all our being and that we love our neighbor as ourselves. And I got to thinking: Is that law too hard for us? The Parable of the Good Samaritan is the example that Luke’s Jesus gives of the Great Commandment at work in real life; and it struck me that applying the Great Commandment in the situation Jesus sets up in the parable really isn’t hard at all. We see a man beaten by robbers and left on the side of the road to die. Of course the law of love that the Great Commandment gives us requires us to help this poor man. That’s clear, obvious even. In that case it is clear what the law of love requires of us.

But this week it struck me that this example of how to apply the law of love is not only simple, it’s simplistic; and it struck me that real life is very, very rarely that simple. That’s the limitation of the parable. It’s too simple. For example, any of us who have ever studied professional ethics, as I have done in both law and ministry, know that you study professional ethics not by looking at the easy cases but by looking at the hard ones. Not the ones where the ethical answer is obvious, as it is in the case of the Good Samaritan, but the ones where the ethical answer is far from obvious, the ones in which there may be no clear-cut answer to what course of action is the ethical one. It’s not just professional ethics that are like that. Life is like that. Consider a few examples.

A poor man begging on the street corner asks for money. Jesus said give to all who ask of you, but if I give this man money won’t he just spend it on drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, things that not only he doesn’t need but that do him more harm than good? Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe he’ll spend it on a meal and a room for the night or some other necessity. Should I give him money or not? What does love require here? My adult child loses his job and moves back in with me. I provide for him; but, having free room and board from me, he never does anything toward getting another job. Should I let him stay? Or should I throw him out, forcing him to take steps toward becoming independent and self-sustaining, things I want for him and wish he wanted for himself? What does love require here? I have a high paying job that provides a comfortable living for my family, but that job is spiritually unfulfilling, soul deadening even. I want to quit and go to work for a nonprofit that provides free medical care to uninsured poor people, but doing that would mean taking a huge pay cut; and I still have my family to provide for. Do I change jobs or not? What does love require here? I want to give more money to charitable organizations, but I really love the finer things in life, fine cars, fine homes, fine clothes, fine wine, fine vacations. And I’ve worked really hard for a really long time to get to the point where I can afford some of those things. And I do give to charity. Really I do. Do I really have to give those fine things up? The Great Commandment doesn’t say don’t love and care for yourself, it says love your neighbor as yourself. What does love require here?

These are just a few examples that occurred to me of the everyday moral decisions we all face. I’m sure you can think of others. They are real, and they are not simple. The moral choice in them is not clear. We hear Jesus saying love God with your whole being and your neighbor as yourself, and we wonder: Just what does that mean in these and so many other specific situations?

Well, I’m afraid that I have no easy answer to what we are to do in difficult moral situations. There is no easy answer to what we are to do in difficult moral situations. That’s why they are difficult moral situations. Some moral choices are easy. The Ten Commandments with which those 613 Mosaic laws begin deal with pretty simple moral situations—don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, and so on, although even some of those can be difficult at times. But life is rarely simple. So what then are to say?

We say, or at any rate I say: Jesus told simple parables, but he knew that life isn’t that simple. He didn’t lay down a law that was impossible for us to follow. Rather, he calls us into life’s difficult situations and calls us to be guided by the law of love in them. Guided, not directed. Led, not dictated to. Jesus calls not to a life of easy, clear cut, formulaic decisions but to a life of constant discernment, a life of constant struggle, a life of doing the best we can in difficult situations with no obvious answers.

And that may not sound like very good news. We all would like simple answers to difficult questions. Some churches give people simple answers to difficult questions, and a lot of those churches are a lot bigger than this one. This one doesn’t give people simple answers to difficult questions. It doesn’t because Jesus didn’t. It doesn’t because life just isn’t that simple.

So where’s the good news in all of this? The good news is that as Jesus calls us into life’s difficult decisions he doesn’t expect us to go alone. He comes with us. He comes with us every step of the way to offer guidance, to offer encouragement. Not to dictate answers. Jesus—and God—never dictate answers. But Jesus is with us in those difficult decisions helping us to make them. And just as importantly, or even more importantly, he is there extending to us God’s forgiveness and God’s grace when we fail to make the most moral decision, even when we make immoral ones.

So we can face those moral decisions that are so much more difficult than the one the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan faced on the Jericho road in Jesus’ parable. We can face them with courage and with confidence. Not confidence that we will always make the most morally correct decision. We won’t. Confidence rather that God is with us and that God loves and forgives us even when we pass by on the other side of the road. Amen.