Visions and Revisions

This sermon was delivered at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, July 15, 2007.

Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

The other night, Marie Jackson[1] told this story:

She, Austin and the kids were going from Mississippi to Oklahoma to visit family. It was the mid 1960’s and the boys were still quite young. Well, it was about noonish when they hit Little Rock and the kids were hungry. Austin and Marie didn’t want to pull off the highway in Little Rock, so Marie promised the boys that they would get some lunch as soon as they got past the city. Well, being the mid 60’s there wasn’t one or six fast food places at every exit, so they ended up traveling quite a way before finding a little diner. They got out of the car, and I bet the boys were cheering as they went to the door. By now, it’s a little after one in the afternoon, they go into the diner and Marie asks if they are still serving lunch. The black woman behind the counter says “Yes, take a seat.”

Today we read Luke’s account of “Jesus and the Lawyer.” This is also called “The Injured Traveler,” but usually it’s called “The Good Samaritan.” This story has been told so often by so many that the term “Good Samaritan” is known by people who have never seen a bible. People who hear this story are dared to imagine that in the light of a society that doesn’t care for the injured, the sick, and the poor; they are called to be caring and generous toward a stranger. But this misses the point of the story.

One of the common ways to understand the parables is to try to decipher the code, figuring out who God is and who we are in the story. But doing that with this story, we lose an important piece of it. The parable Jesus shares is important, but in Luke’s version, it is more important to focus on Jesus and the lawyer.

This reading has a strange format, it goes question—question/answer—answer. In Matthew’s gospel, this parable takes the usual question and answer format, but not in Luke’s. In Luke’s gospel, the lawyer asks “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus, like a teacher checking to see if a student has done the assigned reading asks, “Well, what is written in the law? What do you read there?” Jesus may be the teacher, but as an expert in the law, the lawyer ought to know the answer to this question too.

The lawyer answers this question in a perfect recitation from Leviticus and Deuteronomy[2] 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.” Jesus tells him that he has given the right answer. One thing trial lawyers learn is never to ask a witness a question that you don’t all ready know the answer. This guy must have been in class that day. Jesus affirms the lawyer’s answer saying, “Do this, and you will live.”

The question of inheriting eternal life was much discussed in the time before the writing of Luke’s gospel. The experts in the law commonly accepted that observance of the Torah was essential to inherit eternal life.[3] Using these commands from Leviticus and Deuteronomy to answer the question, the lawyer and the teacher agree that observing the Torah was the key to inherit eternal life. So when Jesus and the lawyer agree, they are sharing the truth of thousands of years of tradition.

But the lawyer’s questions are more than an academic or rabbinic exercise. He wants to justify himself. So he asks Jesus another question, “Who is my neighbor?” This is an important question, more important than we may suppose. What gets lost in the translation of Leviticus is that the original command to love the neighbor specifies “your kin” and “any of your people.”[4] The lawyer wants to be justified that by helping his family and his people he will inherit eternal life. So given the law of the Torah, his question is legitimate.

Then Jesus answers him with a question again. Jesus asks him, “So based on this little story, which of these three, the Priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan, do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

I know what you’re thinking: I left out the most famous part! Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the parable, but I dropped it out here to show this odd Lucan pattern again, question—question/answer—answer. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” and Jesus asks him back, “Who do you think was a neighbor?”

The lawyer answers, “The one who showed him mercy was a neighbor.” In saying this, the lawyer, the expert in the law tells the world that being a neighbor is about more than just being kin or members of the same nation. It has to do with mercy; it has to do with action. Being a neighbor now means more than it did in Leviticus. Jesus answers him, “Go, and do likewise.” Jesus shares with the man the vision of inheriting eternal life written in the Torah. Then he shows the lawyer that the Living Torah, the person and the work, and the word of Jesus Christ, revises the Torah given to Moses.

Vision and revision, we have a vision of what this parable means. We have a vision of what inheriting eternal life looks like. We have a vision of what justification and justice and security and peace look like, but in Jesus, all that is in our vision faces his revision.

Looking at the parable, we have a man, presumably a Jew since there’s no reason to tell the Lawyer a story about a foreigner. He is going from Jerusalem to Jericho and he is robbed and stripped; beaten and left half dead. Then a priest and a Levite pass by the man, they even cross the road before passing by him. It is easy to pass harsh judgment on these characters in Jesus’ tale. After all, they leave a half-dead man on the side of the road. But let’s not be so rash. It was illegal for the priest and the Levite to touch a dead man. They couldn’t even touch a dead parent without violating the law.

We cannot know for sure, but there is a fifty-fifty chance these men were going from Jericho to Jerusalem, possibly for some festival or observance at the temple. They had responsibilities. They had places to be and things to do. If they had touched a dead man, even to see if he had a pulse or a wisp of breath, they would have become unclean. If the victim were alive and bloody, as our traveler is, they still would have been ceremonially unclean and unable to participate in temple activities in Jerusalem.

Who hasn’t passed a car on the side of the road without helping because there was someplace else to be? I have. Yeah, I’ve stopped a couple of times and helped, but considering the hundreds of times I haven’t stopped, the math is hardly in my favor. The priest and the Levite weren’t being evil, they weren’t even being callus. They were just two guys doing what people do. Frankly, these two aren’t role models for the good neighbor award, but they are hardly the villains they are so often made out to be.

Then the Samaritan comes upon the scene. Often this is where the parable looses its edge. So far in the past, it is hard for us to know the hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans. There was bitter tension between these two peoples.[5] The Samaritans were a mixed race of people, Jews from the half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh who were assimilated by Assyrian invaders over 700 years earlier.[6] They had opposed the rebuilding of the temple and Jerusalem.[7] They constructed their own place of worship on Mount Gerizim. In short, they were ceremonially unclean, socially outcast, and religiously heretical.[8] The Samaritans were the polar opposites of the priests and the Levites.

We have heard the story so many times that the true magnitude of the scandal is nowhere to be found. We boo the priest and the Levite, and we cheer the Samaritan like the audience of a puppet show. By the end of this story we all want to be the Samaritan. But time has taken the scandal from our reading of this story. The scandal is that no one hearing this story in its original time and place would have ever wanted to be the Samaritan, and suddenly the Samaritan is our neighbor.

We claim to live in an enlightened society, but being enslaved by sin and death and polluted by our own corruption,[9] we are unable to travel this lofty road. In Asia, the fate of the Samaritans has been the lot of Amer-Asian babies, especially those born since the 1950’s to American GI’s in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The fate of the Samaritan is shared by mixed race peoples in the United States, especially those of mixed African and European descent.

The fate of the Samaritan is found in North America and Australia in the way the aboriginal population was and is treated by the European immigrants. The Indian Caste system created a caste of “untouchables” who are treated much like the Samaritans were treated by the Jews.[10] Those who come to the US today seeking a better life using the immigration laws from the 1620’s face the indignity of the Samaritan in America today while often being used as a source of cheap labor.

We are an enlightened society, we live by rules and laws, we live by a vision of the dream of “one nation under God, indivisible,” but under God, we are faced with the truth that our vision is subject to the revision of Jesus Christ. And we live as slaves to sin, a sin that threatens to divide us all.

So the Jackson’s go into a diner outside of Little Rock and Marie asks if they are still serving lunch and the black woman behind the counter invites them to take a seat. As the afternoon goes on, one at a time, several people, all black, come into the diner. They walk up to the woman at the counter, whisper a question, and leave. After this happens two or three times, it occurs to Marie that they are in a café for blacks. Oh. “But you know,” Marie says, “nobody made us feel uncomfortable. We had a nice lunch and got back on the road.”

Hearing this story, and knowing the volatile racial climate in Little Rock in the 60’s, this story is amazing. Who is my neighbor? To the woman running this diner, her neighbors were a family from Mississippi traveling across Arkansas who needed lunch. Austin and Marie became her neighbors as soon as she helped them on the side of the road.

The lawyer in the story accepts Jesus’ revision of the Torah. He learns that the one who shows mercy like the Samaritan is the neighbor, not those who share family or heritage like the priest and the Levite. What might have started as a theological exercise between the lawyer and teacher becomes more when the law comes to life in Jesus Christ. The question isn’t so much “Who is my neighbor?” as it is “Am I a neighbor?”[11] When the law comes to life, we can no longer answer these questions like we’re taking a college entrance exam. We now have to answer the questions with our hands even more than we do with our heads. Jesus commands us to be good neighbors when he tells the lawyer, “Go, and do likewise.”

[1] This name has been changed.
[2] Leviticus 19:18, Deuteronomy 6:5
[3] “Adlet and Blink,” Commentary section, from Homiletics Online, http://homileticsonline.com/subscriber/printer_friendly_installment.asp?installment_id=930000347, accessed June 10, 2007.
[4] Cousar, Charles B., Gaventa, Beverly R., McCann, Jr., J. Clinton, Newsome, James D., Texts for Preaching, A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV, YEAR C. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994, page 427.
[5] Craddock, Fred B., Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching: Luke. Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY, 1990, page 150-151.
[6] Samaritans, Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. 21st Printing, 1992, Buttrick, George A., Editor. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962, electronic version 2002.
[7] Ezra 4:2-5, Nehemiah 2:19
[8] Craddock, Ibid, page 150.
[9] Calvin, John, The Institutes of Christian Religion, Volume 2. Battles, Ford Lewis, Translator. The Westminster Press, 1960, AGES Software Version 1.0, Albany, OR, 1998, page 111.
[10] The Caste system has largely become a thing of the past, especially in the cities, but this does not mean that vestiges of it do not continue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Caste_System, accessed July 14, 2007.
[11] Halverson, Richard C., Animating Illustrations section from Homiletics Online, ibid.