WOULD YOU RESCUE YOUR ENEMY?

A Sunday school teacher was telling her class the story of the Good Samaritan, in which a man was beaten, robbed and left for dead. She described the situation in vivid detail so her students would catch the drama. Then, she asked the class,

"If you saw a person lying on the roadside, all wounded and bleeding, what would you do?"

A thoughtful little girl broke the hushed silence, "I think I'd throw up."

This is a story of conversion, of how a simple story revolutionized the meaning of a word and of how God, through that story, calls us to a conversion of life.

The story of the Good Samaritan has had such an impact that it has completely changed how the word Samaritan is used and perceived. For us a Samaritan is someone who serves others in a selfless way. So the word has been used as the title of that wonderful organization which provides a listening service for those who are distressed and suicidal…The Samaritans. We describe someone who comes to our rescue as a Good Samaritan. A trawl through the internet reveals a whole range of organisations which use Samaritan in their title, from hospitals to relief agencies to social projects. So for us the title Samaritan is wholly good.

Contrast our perception with that of those listening to this debate between Jesus and the lawyer. To them a Samaritan was a hated and despised person. The quarrel between Jews and Samaritans is a family one which perhaps explains its vitriol. The twentieth century gives us plenty of examples of how vicious such quarrels between related peoples can become, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Kosovo all remind us that it is those who we live closest to who we can hate the most. This was the case with Jews and Samaritans. From a Jewish perspective Samaritans were a perverse people. Samaritans claimed to worship the same God, but would not do so in Jerusalem and were totally opposed to the rebuilding of the Temple. They collaborated with the Romans, they married outside the tribe, they didn’t keep the purity laws. Samaritans were hated much more than the Roman occupiers who knew no better than their pagan customs, Samaritans should have known better but chose to go their own dreadful ways.

So when we’re reading this story we have to work quite hard to get back into that context. The very familiarity of the story makes the discernment of what it’s saying to us much harder.

So let’s look at the details. The action centres on a man travelling from Jericho to Jerusalem, a road that was notoriously dangerous. He’s set upon by bandits, robbed, beaten and left for dead. Three individuals come across him and have to decide what to do. Now we rather tend to despise the priest and the Levite, but let’s look at the context in more detail. First, this is a dangerous road, you don’t linger on it. In particular it wasn’t unknown for bandits to set up traps for the unwary and this beaten stranger could have been a trap. Then there is the reason for the priest and Levite to be on the road in the first place. They were heading to Jerusalem to take their part in the worship at the temple. Judaism was a tribal religion and the right and duty to take a liturgical role in temple worship was passed down through the family. For these two men, their turn to help lead worship had come. But, they had to remain ritually pure to be able to take part. Getting involved with a bleeding man, or even worse a dead man would have meant that they’d have been ritually impure for a week. Their turn would have come and gone, they would have missed the opportunity to fulfil the duties given to them by right of birth. It was a huge ethical dilemma …did they serve God in the temple or did they take care of the man at the side of the road. Both chose to pass by, possibly through fear but certainly because they believed that their duty was to go and fulfil their proper role in the worship of God.

Now, I’m sure that we can all understand their fear of falling victim to bandits themselves. But we have more difficulty understanding why the Jewish purity laws weighed so heavily with them. But let’s just think about those things that we set up as important, our families, our jobs, our service at church, our homes, our hobbies. These are all good things in themselves, but how often do these get in the way of the call to be a loving neighbour, a good Samaritan.

So we come to that third traveller. He would have had the same fear of bandits but the religious question was rather different for him. As a Samaritan he had no qualms about breaking Jewish purity laws, they’d have been as meaningless to him as they are to us. However he had a different barrier to cross. Here was a Jewish man on the road one of the tribe that hated and despised Samaritans. He had to decide whether he would give a helping hand to someone who was effectively his enemy. He did so with great generosity, tending the wounds, taking him to an inn and paying for his care. To do so he had to see the beaten man as another human being not as a representative of his race.

Let’s go back a bit to the context in which this story is told. Luke recounts that the lawyer is out to test Jesus. He is a man who knows his scripture. He knows the foundation of true religion, he knows what God asks of people “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 neighbour as yourself.” I read those words and think “my goodness”. with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind, with all my strength. A tall order if ever there was one, thank goodness we have the Holy Spirit to help or we’d be really stumped. And to love your neighbour as yourself.

Note, it says as yourself, not instead of yourself. Our ability to love others stems from our ability to love ourselves. There’s no room for self-hatred. The actions of the Samaritan provide a good example of how this might work in practice. He provides first aid, takes the victim to a place of safety, arranges care and then goes on his way promising to call back when he can. He doesn’t do the nursing, he continues on his way, very possibly he’s on a business journey. He provides the help that he can but gets others involved too. Sacrifice but not martyrdom.

To return to our lawyer. He asks a very interesting question ”who is my neighbour”? As a good Jew he would have included all Jews in his definition of neighbour, not just his own family, not just his own friends or those who lived in his locality. He would have included all of Israel and probably considered himself very generous to do so. But Jesus wants him to think outside the narrow confines of the chosen people, and that’s why his hero is a Samaritan. Notice how the lawyer at the end of the story can’t bring himself to say “Samaritan” he refers to him as “the one who showed him mercy”. Jesus’ story turns his whole world view upside down. God is breaking into God’s world and proclaiming that God loves the whole of humanity, not just the chosen people and that if God loves everyone then we are called to love everyone also. The Christian Church has at times got this horribly wrong. Think of the sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland, of the apartheid regime in South Africa, of the slave trade and of the persecution of religious minorities. We need to beware that we don’t justify our own bigotry or parochialism behind some sort of holiness code.

There’s one more twist to this tale. It is not a story about a good man befriending the outcast. This is about the outcast showing the good man what it really means to serve God. It is the outcast who models truly holy behaviour in stark contrast to those who believe themselves to be God’s chosen ones, the elect, the in-crowd.

I end with a story told by Donald Nicholl, a distinguished theologian who, at the time of this story, was Rector of the Ecumenical Institute for Theological research at Tantur, near Bethlehem. He writes:

For me the crucial example of spontaneous goodness was given once and for all by a poor Muslim workman whose name I do not even know.

It was very early one Sunday morning, not far from Bethlehem. At dawn I had put on my tracksuit and gone for a run through the hills around Beit Jala.

On my way back I found myself running along a stony road which was flanked on my left by a high wall that hid me from anyone on the hillside below me.

When I came to the end of the high wall I turned sharply at right angles, in order to descend the steep path to the track along which local people say Mary and Joseph and the donkey travelled on the way to Bethlehem.

As I turned I encountered four Muslim workmen trudging up the steep path on their way to the quarry above.

They were in single file, and so close to me that I almost ran into them. I had no time to shout a greeting to them.

But, to my amazement, by the time I had reached the last of the workmen, which can have been no more than four or five seconds after I appeared on his horizon, he had plunged his hand into his lunch bag, taken out a big handful of raisins and pushed them into my hands with the words, ‘You are sweating’.

I was moving so quickly that I could not stop and had to content myself with shouting ‘Thank you!’

But the word that came unbidden into my mind as I felt the soft skins of the raisins on my sweating palms was ‘Eucharist’ – I felt instantly that the workman and I had shared a moment of Eucharist.

(From ‘Holiness’ (DLT,2004)

So, as we come to join in the Eucharist, may the Good Samaritan enlarge our vision as to who is our neighbour and who God is asking us to love. Amen

Amen.

Penny Sayer
St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea