Go and Do Likewise

'The Good Samaritan' (1994) by Dinah Roe Kendall

This past Sunday the Gospel reading was Luke 10: 25-37, which is the parable of the Good Samaritan.  I'm not including the full text here because I think it's safe to say that this is one of, if not the most, well-known of Jesus' stories. Found only in Luke's gospel, it is such a part of our Christian narrative that I suspect sometimes we forget that it's a parable and not an actual biblical event. We know the story so well:  a man is traveling the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho and is robbed; then two people come upon him--a priest and a Levite--but walk past; finally, a Samaritan comes upon the man, takes him to an inn, cleans up his wounds, and makes sure he has a place to stay.  Who is it, then, that we wish to emulate?  Well, it's obviously the Samaritan, right?  Of course. So engrained is this story in our minds that we name hospitals after the Good Samaritan, and we consider anyone who performs some act of kindness to be a Good Samaritan.  Yet do we ever really stop to think just how radical this text is. If so, we might be less inclined to want to identify ourselves with the Samaritan, and we might not be so eager to agree with Jesus.

To understand the fullness of this story's power we have to understand who the Samaritans were. The Samaritans were not Jews; in fact, they were as different from Jews as you could be and yet still consider yourselves followers of the One True God. They, like Jews, were descendants of Abraham, but while Jews had been scattered during the Babylonian exile, Samaritans stayed put, resulting in a different version of Torah and other sacred texts being written. They believed the holy site not to be Jerusalem but atop Mount Gerazim, which was the mountain that Moses and the Israelites worshipped upon when they first laid eyes on the Holy Land. Samaritans were considered foreigners in the land, even though they actually weren't, and they were so cutoff from their Jewish cousins that Jews considered them to be of an even worse stock than Gentiles. Simply put:  the Samaritans were the very embodiment of the Other, of the absolute worst kind of people. And the Jews despised them.

So the lawyer who compelled Jesus to tell this story of a man being cared for by such an extreme form of the Other would have likely expected the Samaritan to end up being the one who kicked the man into the ditch in the first place.  Instead, the no-good foreigner turns out to be the good guy, the one who acted with mercy. When the lawyer asked Jesus, 'Who is my neighbor?' he would've expected the response to include any Jewish male. Even though Leviticus 19: 18 says, "make no vengeance and love your neighbor as yourself," that language was vague enough that religious authorities were able to put their own spin on it. Yes, they said, you should love your neighbor, but women, foreigners, Gentiles, and sinners were not your neighbor. Your neighbor was one of us, not one of them, and you should absolutely take care of someone who is one of us.  Let God worry about the rest.

Yet in Jesus the notion of neighbor is redefined, and in this story the one who embodies what it means to love your neighbor is the very one that the lawyer would've dismissed. The Samaritan, the Other, shows mercy toward the man in the story, cleaning his wounds and giving the innkeeper enough money to take care of him for several days--two denarii would've afforded the man roughly two months stay at the inn. "Go and do likewise," Jesus tells the lawyer. Go and show mercy. Go and be neighborly, be loving to the Samaritans in your midst, to the Gentile, the foreigner, the sinner. Don't be like the priest and the Levite who were only concerned with themselves. Make this Samaritan your model because he is your neighbor. Forget about us and them. Those are outdated concepts. Jesus presents a new concept:  there is only us.

There is only us:  beloved and beautiful children of God. When we really think about what Jesus is saying it's pretty jarring. It flies in the face of the systems in which we have operated for centuries. Everything we know about who does and does not deserve our respect and mercy are thrown out the window. The ancient Israelites saw little to no value in people who were not of their tribes, and they passed that mindset down through the ages until Jesus finally comes along and tears down that social structure.  

We hear this story, then, and we are all on-board with Jesus.  Yeah, Jesus, you're right!  Samaritans are ok and deserve mercy!  Still, what if Jesus tearing down our own modern social structures, rather than those of 2000 years ago?  What if the parable were told in a slightly different way? Like this:

An Episcopal bishop was walking down a dangerous street and saw a young white girl, who had been beaten and robbed lying in a ditch.  The bishop felt bad, but he had an importance service to get to, so he walked on. In the same way a Methodist pastor walked by, and though she drew close and even prayed over the girl, she passed along because she had her own issues that she needed to deal with. A few moments later, a dark skinned Muslim man walked by. He saw the girl in trauma and took her to the hospital, got her cleaned up, and gave her money for a place to stay. Which one was a neighbor to the girl?

This is the power of this parable.  The Good Samaritan is any Other.  He is the one that you despise, the one that you cannot possibly imagine showing any act of kindness.  As such, we can substitute any type of Other for the Samaritan:

A gay man came upon a straight person lying in the ditch. A black teenager in a hoodie came across a fallen police officer.  An illegal immigrant came upon a hard-working farmer. A conservative Republican came across a liberal Democrat, his opponent in the next election.  You get the idea. 

This parable is meant to show us what the kingdom of God can and should look like here on earth:  a kingdom without labels, where people reach down into the ditch and pick up our brother or sister and say, 'Come on!  Let me take care of you.  Because God loves you!'  That's a radical dream, but it is Jesus' dream, and it can be achieved by showing the mercy of the Good Samaritan, by loving our neighbor.

Love your neighbor. Love your Episcopal neighbor. Your Methodist neighbor (and we got a lot of those in our section of North Carolina!). Your gun-owning neighbor. Your pacific neighbor. Your black neighbor. Your gay neighbor. Your Muslim neighbor. Your atheist neighbor. Your poor, begging neighbor. Your rich, affluent neighbor.  Love these and all those in-between, for all, ALL are your neighbor. 

So how will we respond the next time we meet someone in trouble?  Will we move to the other side of the road, thinking only of ourselves?  Or will we remember how Jesus' assurance that that person is our brother, our sister, and will we hear his voice calling us to action?  So may we go, brothers and sisters, and trek the troublesome roads of our communities, of our world. And when we see our neighbors--ANY of our neighbors--may we have the grace to act as the Samaritan in the story.  May we go and do likewise!