July 14, 2013
A few years ago,
there was a man waiting in the subway in New York
and he had a seizure and fell onto train well
and onto one of the tracks right when a train was coming.
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| Wesley Autrey, "Subway Samaritan" |
Another man was coming home from work and
standing there with his two daughters when he saw it.
And he jumped onto the tracks,
right in front of the oncoming train.
He pushed the man with the seizure into the center and
covered him with his body and the train
went over the both of them.
It came so close, it left grease marks on the man’s knit cap.
The man who helped was named Wesley Autrey and
sometimes in the news they called him the Subway Superman
but mostly they referred to him as a Good Samaritan
Someone who goes out of their way to help out a stranger.
This parable has been called the Good Samaritan
And most often the lesson we hear from it is
Be like the one who didn’t worry about his own schedule, or safety.
Help a stranger in need.
And that is a great lesson to learn any day.
But, of course, it’s a parable of Jesus.
and as we will learn in our summer classes on the parables of Jesus,
there’s always more going on with Jesus parables.
The reason Jesus tells this parable
is that a lawyer asked him a question
”What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?”
Now lawyers then weren’t excatly like we know them today,
lawyers knew Jewish religious law.
So the lawyer asked Jesus a question he already knew
the answer to. It says he asked it in order to test Jesus.
So Jesus knows it, so he says,
“You know what the law says.
Love God and love your neighbor as your self.”
So the man asks a follow-up question –
It’s always the follow-up quesitons that are trickiest.
He asks “Who is my neighbor?”
If I’m supposed to love my neighbor, then who is my neighbor?
It says that he asked this question in order to justify himself.
That means he asked it in order to put himself in the right.
In order that he could say, “look, I’m doing everything I should be.”
I love God, naturally. And I’m loving my neighbor.
Because my nieghbor is whoever I already love, right?
Of course, Instead of any easy answer, Jesus tells a story.
But when you’re looking at a story of Jesus,
it’s always important to remember what question
was asked that elicited this story: “How do I gain eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbor?”
So the story:
A traveller is on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.
This was a notoriously dangerous road.
Someone was bound to get robbed and beaten up on this road.
And this guy does. He’s left on the side of the road half dead.
Then Jesus says that a Levite and a Priest go by.
Not just anybody, these are trusted people,
people everyone would have looked up to.
These would have been the expected “neighbors”
to the lawyer who asked the question.
But we’re told that they both cross to the other side.
As many people do.
Now everyone knows, since the beginning of time,
that all stories happen in threes.
So there would be one more.
And the next to come up that road would be the hero of the story.
But that third man was a Samaritan.
Jesus was Jewish, all of the people listening were Jewish,
The lawyer was Jewish and
Jewish people and Samaritans had a long history of
racial and religious hostility toward one another.
Remember in the Gospel reading just a couple of weeks ago,
Jesus and his disciples were going through Samaria.
And the Samaritan people rejected them?
And the disciples were quick to ask if Jesus wanted
them to call down fire from heaven and blow the Samaritans up.
That’s what most people around Jesus felt they deserved.
And yet in Jesus story, it’s the Samaritan who is moved with pity.
The Samaritan helps the man, takes care of him and saves his life.
And, guessing or knowing the lawyer’s dislike of Samaritans,
Jesus asks him an uncomfortable question: “So was a neigbor here?”
And the lawyer couldn’t even bear to say the word “Samaritan.”
He says, “The one who showed mercy”
Now, this is clever in itself
many of you have probably heard this explanation before
and it’s still pretty clever.
but Jesus has done something extra clever in this story
besides catching the lawyer in is own self-righteousness.
Think about it.
Jesus could have easily made the Samaritan the person that
was beaten up and left on the road for dead
and then ask the question, “who should we show love and mercy to?”
That is often the position that we put people who
are oppressed, hated or outcast if we’re trying to include them.
We make them people that we need to help because
they’re so helpless or hopeless and they’ll never get anywhere
without our good guidance like ours.
They just need to learn to be like us. Our way.
Poor, poor Samaritan.
No, Jesus takes the Samaritan, the hated one,
and puts him in the role of the one who helps
The one who is to be admired, emulated, imitated, learned from.
Jesus tells the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.”
Go and be like him. Find your eternal life in that whole arrangement.
Remember, the original quesiton was
“what must I do to gain eternal life?”
In other words, in order to gain your life,
don’t look to the priest and the Levite.
The priest and the Levite represent the temple sacrifice
the institutionalized, religious practice of the Jewish people
Subtly, Jesus is saying that if this man wants to find his salvation,
he shouldn’t be looking to the regular systems of religion.
Where should he be looking?
To the outsider, the one who is dispised, outcast,
pushed aside. Not just to look and to help and have pity on,
but to emulate, to learn from, partner with.
That’s the new system God has ordained.
In other words, for the people of God,
Salvation is found by looking outside the people of God.
All this with a simple story about a man who gets beat up.
Now we might say to ourselves as we read this.
“I don’t hate any race like the Samaritans.
I don’t have prejudices, not like that.
We don’t really have the same hang ups today as they had then.”
And thankfully, we have come a long way even in the last 50 years.
The people of God don’t have one periah
that Jesus can depend on using as an example for us in a parable..
Thankfully it’s not socially acceptable to hate any more
But, of course, we’re not completely different.
Today, our dislike and distrust isn’t universal.
We don’t look down collectively on one group or another.
But we do look down and despise others just the same.
Take the Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman case.
Where do you fall on that?
is it the Trayvon Martins you judge?
Is it the George Zimmermans?
Is the opportunistic community leaders who cry racism every time?
Is the gun right activists who cry self-defense whenver it suits them?
Who do you roll your eyes at?
Who do you not want to consider your neighbor?
Who do you not expect anything good out of?
That is our personal Samaritan.
We all have people or groups
that we struggle to consider a neighbor.
That we find it hard to see the good in, to see as a possible example.
Jesus asks us to reach across that barrier.
To go where we don’t want to go.
And not just with help and hand-outs, not just to teach them the right way– but with honor for them.
We are asked to go as far as to learn from those we struggle with.
To realize that the very presence of God, can come from anywhere.
Like the one from Jerusalem to Jericho.
Jesus road is a tough road.
There are a lot of dangers, a lot of places for us to fall.
There are a lot opportunities for us to cross to the other side
when we should be stopping to help.
A lot of divides we will never be able to cross.
And when we fall on that road,
we know it is only the grace of God --
the one who always shows us mercy --
that we depend on for our eternal life.
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