Luke 10:25–37
As with last week,
today we heard an ancient story in our season of winter as a congregation. The
familiarity of the story of the good Samaritan, like the story of Namaan, is problematic.
It is a story which has been acted out and interpreted from our days at Sunday
school. Did anyone ever act this one out? Because of our familiarity with the
story we might sit back and reflect on the ethics of the tale of the Samaritan
thinking we have this one all nailed down.
We might think to ourselves, “this parable is an ethical story with a moral injunction that we should help our neighbours who are in need.”
So well-known is this story that many Chirstian countries, states and provinces have Good Samaritan Laws. In Queensland we have the Civil Liability (Good Samaritan) Amendment Bill 2007. This Bill is intended to protect people “who offer aid or assistance in emergency circumstances, and that any act done or omitted is done so in good faith and without reckless disregard.”
This moral injunction to help others is matched by many of Jesus’s teachings in Luke: “love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (6:35); “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:23); “sell your possessions, and give alms” (12:33); and “when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (14:13), and there are others.
Of course, hearing and believing this moral injunction to love our neighbour is quite different thing to living it out. We should hear the challenge to each one of us in the interaction between Jesus and the lawyer who, seeking to justify himself, asks “who is my neighbour?” The lawyer is assuming that he already loves his neighbour.
But what if this story has more layers to it that we miss out on because we want to stay on the well-worn path of our Sunday School interpretation. What if rather than thinking that we are interpreting the story we think again about how the story is interpreting us.
I want to pose 4 questions from the story some of which come from ancient interpretations that might cause us to pause and consider how the story might be interpreting us.
What if the story is
about changing who we see as our neighbour?
What if the story is
about shifting the lawyer in his relationship with Jesus?
What if the story is
about changing the views of Samaritans about Israelites and vice versa?
What if the story is about challenging the church with a task of caring for the broken and bleeding?
What if the story is about changing who we see as our neighbour?
Part of the well-worn pathway of interpreting this parable is the potential shock value that the lawyer feels but also we should feel who seek to justify ourselves.
The story unfolds and creates an expectation for Jewish listeners.
If you were in ancient Israel and your were an Israelite your expectation of where the story was heading would have been that the third person coming was an Israelite. A bit like the old jokes we hear ‘an English man, Scots man and an Irish man’ walked into a bar. Based on this idea the story should go a Priest, a Levite and an Israelite were coming down the road.
The Priests were
all descended, it was claimed, from Aaron, the brother of Moses.
The Levites were
“set apart … to carry the ark of the covenant of the Lord” (Deut 10:18)
The Israelites were all the others, descended from the other sons of Jacob.
But no there is a plot twist. Coming to help is a Samaritan. As Christians many of will have been taught from a very young age that there was a difficult relationship between Samaritans and Israelites. We may not know or understand what that difficulty was, but we do know the person coming towards the injured man is potentially his enemy.
John Squires “The Samaritans were regarded as being the descendants of the people who committed idolatry after the Assyrians had conquered the northern kingdom (2 Kings 17:5–6) and resettled the northern region with people from other locations in their empire (2 Kings 17:24), from “every nation [who] still made gods of its own and put them in the shrines of the high places that the people of Samaria had made, every nation in the cities in which they lived” (2 Kings 17:29).”
If the scripture is now interpreting us and who we are and asking us to reconsider who we think our neighbour is, we need to recontextualize the scene to our contemporary setting. The person that we see coming down the road to help is no longer a Samaritan but is the person that we see as an enemy.
At which point I'm going to suggest to you that whoever it is that you might be thinking about at the moment that you are saying to yourself I should be thinking about these people or that person or that kind of person because I know that I should really be thinking of this person or these kinds of people as my enemy. That's exactly who is coming down the hill to help. This is the plot twist not simply for the lawyer but for each one of us who want to listen to this story with fresh ears. Jesus is challenging all of us as to whom we consider to be our neighbour.
So, what if this story is about saying to you that you need to rethink who you think your neighbour is?
This brings me to a second question which in some ways has a high level of complexity to it. What if the story is about shifting the lawyer in his relationship with Jesus? There are ancient interpretations of this parable that carry through right into the 20th century that teach that Jesus is the Samaritan.
From key ancient scholars of the early church including Clement and Origen, who were both bishops of Alexandria, down to more contemporary theologians including the great Reformed theologian Karl Barth there is an interpretation that suggests Jesus himself is the Samaritan.
When we place Jesus into the role of being Samaritan, I think it is also important for us to consider then where the lawyer is placed in the story. Remember that the lawyer has asked Jesus’s question, ‘who is my neighbour?’ Now within the context of the debate between Jesus and the lawyer they could be seen as adversaries or enemies. So, the lawyer then is placed by Jesus into the position of being the man who is broken and bleeding by the road.
The lawyer, who is seeking to justify himself through his behaviour and through who he treats as his neighbour finds himself as one who is powerless and in need of God's grace.
What if this story is about saying to us that any of us who seek to justify ourselves or think that we have been good enough for God, or think that we have been the Samaritan ourselves and helped the right people, are actually the ones who are in need of Jesus help. What if this story is a story which reminds us that God comes to us in Jesus in the time that we are feeling battered and broken by life and that we feel that we have been left by the roadside of our existence, but the good news is that Jesus whom we would treat as our enemy comes to us with grace and mercy.
One of my colleagues John Squires offered a new insight through his blog on this story about the location in which the story may have been told. His insights led me to ask the question, “What if the story is about changing the views of Samaritans about Israelites and vice versa?”
John explores Jesus’s movement through the Gospel of Luke and postulates the possibility that between Luke 9 and 19 Jesus may in fact be travelling in Samaria. If this is the case it is also possible that a large part of Jesus’s audience, possibly even the majority are Samaritans.
Squires’ notes that, “In this story, no Jew exhibits the behaviour that the Torah mandates, of loving your neighbour; it is a Samaritan who lives this way. The power of the story is intensified by where it is being told.” In this case not only is Jesus issuing a corrective to the behaviour of the Israelites he is affirming his Samaritan listeners who had become traditional enemies of the Jews.
Jesus’s story serves as a challenge to the geopolitical, religious, and ethnic divisions that had developed. If this is the case, then we might also ask how is Jesus interpreting how we understand who our friend or enemy is now when it comes to thinking about nations and peoples. And who is it that Jesus might affirm in their behaviour to correct us in our thinking.
This leads me to my 4th and final what if question. What if the story is about challenging the church with a task of caring for the broken and bleeding?
When I was speaking before about ancient understandings of this story and the idea that Jesus was the Samaritan, alongside this idea of Jesus being the Samaritan is the idea that the inn and the innkeeper represent the church.
The coins are the gifts that God provides us with Jesus own presence and giving of the Holy Spirit to help the church fulfil the task of being a place that cares for the broken and the bleeding in the world. The church is not a place filled with people who are righteous and who know their neighbour and who help their neighbour. No! The church is a place that is filled with people who have been battered and bruised by life who have struggled to find their way safely through the pathways of their existence but have found within the church a place in which they can wait for the returning Christ who comes to meet us in the process of our healing.
Far too often the church has presented itself as a place full of good and righteous people, people like the lawyer, rather than a place that welcomes Saint and Sinner alike. What if this story challenges us as a congregation as we look around and see who is within this church and who was missing from this congregation and we ask ourselves are we willing to be those who care for the broken and the bleeding in culture and society around us? Are we available and do we have the tools to support those who have real need without judging them for their predicament.
So, what if the parable
of the Good Samaritan is far more than a challenge for you to help someone whom
you see in need? You see most cultures and societies would teach us that
anyway? What if it is about question again who we discriminate against and who
we should really be treating as our neighbour? What if it is about us thinking
we are just as self-righteous like the lawyer accepting that maybe we need
Jesus' help and that we are broken and bleeding? What if it is about us
rethinking who the audience is that is listening to Jesus’s stories? And what
if it is a challenge for us to look around their own community and wonder are
we really willing to take in the broken and bleeding and look after them until
Christ comes again?
