July 15, 2007 - Who is your neighbor?

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
15 July 2007
Luke 10.25-37
Who is your neighbor?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007


It was our fourth of many wonderful days in Poland, but we were having a less than wonderful moment. Marcia and I were in the main train station of a central industrial city, where even in summer there wasn’t much reason for pandering to American tourists with cheap tricks like providing information in English. Polish, unlike French or German, has nothing recognizable in it to English speakers, so the printed word might as well be Chinese. We were standing at a ticket window trying to figure out where to go next and how to get there.

The attitude of the ticket clerk was helpful enough, but everything about the situation made our attempts to communicate pointless and his attempts futile. Also, the Soviet style poured concrete rail terminal itself cast a grey, dehumanizing light on everything. In Poland you can really see that everything Karl Marx must have cared about for the masses was drained of its humanity by a Soviet government that used the name of communism to mask the totalitarian ambitions of the likes of Josef Stalin. We would stand in that train station and all places like it and feel sinking into us what happens to people when rulers arrogate power to themselves by taken rights away from citizens. Totalitarian rulers trade on intimidation and fear, leaving the citizen with the cold, hard reality that he is on his own to make a fulfilling life. Marcia and I were beginning to see that our cold, hard reality was that we were not going to figure out how to get out of that place on a train that night Nor did we have any idea of somewhere to sleep, except against a urine stained wall of poured concrete with all the other people who had no place to go after dark.

A man appeared beside me at the ticket window. He asked if he could help. He didn’t smile. I felt unsure, but I explained what we were after. He talked to the ticket clerk. He asked me more questions and then explained that our plan to travel east for a cultural excursion, before heading back west to Krakow, would add at three extra days on trains and layovers, and did we want that? I was non-committal. The two Poles talked some more, and then the man confirmed his first sense that we were better off to skip the trip east. He also said we should stay the night where we were, in the cold industrial city. We adjusted our expectations and purchased the tickets that would take us to Krakow the next morning.

The man assumed we’d be staying at the hotel adjacent to the train station. How much? No, we can’t afford that. Is there a hostel? Yes, but you will take a cab; out at the curb. We went out to the curb and headed toward a cab. The man appeared again and hailed a different cab for us. In Poland, you don’t take the wrong kind of cab. The man gave instructions to the driver of the right kind of cab. I thanked the man exuberantly and shook his hand. He never did smile. Once in the cab, I suddenly wondered where the driver was really going to take us. In just minutes we were at the door of a reasonable, safe and comfortable hostel.

It’s not as if Marcia and I had been overtaken by highwaymen, stripped, beaten, and left for dead without our belongings, so we do not feature ourselves like the victim in Jesus’ story. But in our vulnerability, we did meet a person who behaved like the Samaritan. We also were, like the Samaritan and the victim he helped, subject to historical and political influences that made everything harder than it might have been. The difference between our unsmiling helper and the Samaritan was simply a matter of everything being so extreme.

The Samaritans Jesus knew about traced their spiritual and cultural lineage from the early Hebrews, but because of geographical separation, internal divisions, and external factors like war and exile, it’s hard to say what happened to whom and when. And the ideological differences between Samaritans and Jews were huge. When the Jews insisted, for instance, that God said the temple belongs at Jerusalem, the Samaritans insisted that God put it on Mt. Gerizim. The Samaritans and the Jews remembered everything about God differently, and because of their differences, they came to distrust and eventually despise each other. When peoples tell divergent stories about themselves, they often write their rivals into the stories as enemies.

We know what that’s like. Here in Newark, we should have been close neighbors to the center of Mormon religious life in Palmyra, the birthplace of what came to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but our divergent stories made us enemies. Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith wrote down all sorts of historical information about how the Mormons descended from the holy people of God that Christians would never accept, and people distrusted Mormons. They harassed and drove them off. Christians often hated and sometimes killed Mormons, though Christians and Mormons were culturally like each other. Samaritans were hated like that. So Samaritans had all this working against them on the day Jesus told his story to the lawyer who was curious about what it means to be a neighbor.

The point is, there is a whole wide political context and also a deep historical conditioning that makes up the mind and heart of the Samaritan who comes upon the beaten and stranded Jewish stranger in the road. The Jewish stranger is broken and robbed and good as dead, and everything in that context and in his conditioning should make the Samaritan feel hatred, or short of hatred, should make him fearful. I cannot imagine that the Samaritan smiled at the Jew. He found the whole situation, no doubt, serious as a heart attack. But there was something the Samaritan could not not do, and that was to save the life of a stranger in distress. There was something deep inside the Samaritan at work, something deeper than the social loyalties he had been taught, deeper than the emotional clash of ethnic difference, deeper than traditional values that tilted against cultural enemies, something more true than even the truth of his religion that made an unpredictable decision in him.

But can anything be more true than your religion?

Jesus seems to think so.

Jesus plucks this traveling Samaritan merchant off the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and stands him up in front of the expert lawyer of Jesus’ own religion. He tells the lawyer that the Samaritan understands, better than the lawyer does, the ancient law of Moses about love of neighbor. In fact, the Samaritan understands the law of Moses better than a Jewish priest and better than a Levite. If you want to see what it means to obey God’s single most important commandment for living in this world, Jesus says to the lawyer, watch this Samaritan.

What happens to the Samaritan that leads him to such admirable obedience?

When the Samaritan lets go of historical animosities, when he never minds that his rivals the Jews think they have the only God there is in their own temple, when he sets aside his bitterness about the invectives that have been traded and all the blood that has been shed between his own kith and kin and the people of this very man lying bleeding in the road, when the Samaritan ignores the very reasonable thought that the man in another circumstance would happily spit in his eye or strike with the fist or even slash him with a dagger—when the Samaritan lets rise into his moral consciousness something deeper than everything he has been conditioned to think or feel or expect, he follows a deep law of love that surpasses anything the priest and the Levite and, more to the point, the lawyer have been able to understand from within their own religion.

Love in that fashion, Jesus says, even if everything in you militates against an act of love. The Jewish lawyer cannot imagine a Samaritan capable of such love, but Jesus says that, on any given day, anyone, including a Samaritan, is not only capable of but will be inwardly compelled to act with such love. And that’s why we know that Jesus wants us to remember that there are some things that will be more true than anything we ever think we’ve known, even the truth of our own religion.

It is because Jesus chose the Samaritan for his parable that our personal spiritual acts must mean something for God and for the neighbor. Our persona spiritual acts are never just for our own sake, and they do not take place in a vacuum. The most profound acts of love, we now know—because the Samaritan is our model—are personal, historical and political acts. And since that is true, then what? If our spiritual lives are personal, historical and political, how does that truth change our lives?

If we are going to learn what Jesus wants us to understand from the Samaritan, we will have to face the fact that such personal and political matters as our health care system challenge us to look at people as if they were lying in front of us in the road suffering for lack of health care. And it is not enough to act like the Samaritan every now and then by supporting a free clinic or persuading doctor or dentist to treat an indigent for free. We’re fond of the bumper sticker that suggests random acts of kindness, but Jesus does not say that good person is only randomly good. Jesus says that true obedience to the second of the two great commandments for your whole life is to understand that every person anywhere, including your sworn enemies, deserves your deep, personal, practical love…

…and your political love. It’s the notion of political love that trips us up, but what else would you call it? It’s the love that the man in the train station in Poland showed us for probably close to an hour without ever smiling. He had seen too much to feel the giddiness of a kindness randomly acted. That isn’t the love Jesus is talking about. That’s just a sop to a self indulgent conscience. Or if it’s love, it is not agape love, which is love that comes from the dispassionate goodness we rediscover in ourselves when all the love that feels good has been too little and so unreliable. The motive for the love grounded in the second great commandment can never been warmhearted resolve or the satisfaction of having cared. The motive for the love of the second great commandment is that God wants it. Wherever in this world the love of God for the sufferer goes unfulfilled, the second great commandment is crumbling for lack of human faith, and that is a political and a spiritual reality for those who would be faithful.

So it is time to stop dithering, for one, about national health care. The fact of tens of millions of Americans going untreated because of an economic and medical system that puts treatment out of reach is a threat to our spiritual health, no matter what religion you profess.

And there is a yet deeper issue—and a wider intercultural issue—that Jesus opens up when he makes the Samaritan the neighbor of the Jew. For just a moment, forget the lawyer’s question—who is my neighbor?—and ask the real question underlying Jesus’ parable: Who is your Samaritan? Obviously, you and I have no problematic history with Samaritans, though they still exist out there with their heritage and traditions. So everyone has to figure out who the Samaritan is.

So who is your Samaritan? The question has been made easy for us over the last six years. The Samaritan, to us, is the sort of Muslim who is critical toward, fearful of and angry at us Americans. So it is that the Samaritan to us is the Arab Muslim who might find us along the road and carry us on his donkey to a safe place and provide for our care. This would be in stark contrast to who we might be if we had not already violated what Jesus has instructed us—if we had not already picked up Muslims along the road and taken them not to an inn for food and care, but to a prison for detainment and interrogation, and sometimes worse. Jesus teaches us to expect to find in these possible enemies the same deep law of love buried somewhere underneath all their reasons for rage, perceived and historic, as he taught the lawyer to expect in the Samaritan.

We may find such love impossible, but it is Jesus’ teaching. Just as hatred’s purveyors have known that there is a deep resentment in such people, be they rich or poor, that they can cultivate into passionate hatred, Jesus expects us to know that there is something yet deeper in everyone that we can cultivate into dispassionate love. It is not easy, and it is far from sure that we will always or even often succeed, but this is the vision of humanity that Jesus teaches us is our truest obedience. Jesus is not unrealistic about such love, as his cross has fiercely demonstrated, but he sees no faithful way around the faith that obedience to the law of loving God is connected at the hip with the law of loving neighbor. Jesus also seems to believe that obedient love of neighbor is our best hope.

And here’s what I believe. I believe that when we finally learn how to orient our soul rightly toward our enemies, according to Jesus, we will better orient our soul rightly toward our loved ones and friends. For remaining callous to our neighbors without access to health care is training ourselves for callousness to the people near us we care for. You already know that some people who profess to love you have been more than rarely callous toward you. They had to learn this callousness, and you have in the same way learned a certain amount of callousness yourself. Learning the Samaritan’s love of neighbor will change you and cast out callousness from your soul.

What’s more is that some people you love at home and in the world, even in the church, are people to whom you sometimes attribute malevolent thoughts to you and others. Attributing malevolence to the heart of Muslims, even militant extremists, is to practice attributing malevolence to members of your family and community, even to members of your church. When you base your own attitudes on the malevolence of others, you trap yourself in a cycle of passions that leads to destruction. The destruction spreads outward to the world and inward through your own soul. Jesus wants to spare you and your loved ones and all the world of this. His death on the cross is his witness to the conviction that no life, however true and spotless and gracious, is worth preserving at the expense of obedience to the deep and ancient law of love written into the core of every human being. Hatred is learned, it is temporary, and it is corrosive to the soul. But love is the life-giving force of every human being, and it is the only hope for the kind of destiny Jesus describes as the kingdom of God.

Maybe Jesus could have thought of a way to keep his teachings about truth and faithfulness, which are necessarily personal and practical, from also turning political, but he didn’t. For Jesus, God’s truth and faithfulness bear on everything that happens in human life and society. I suspect that this is because he sees that when we subtract God from culture and politics, it is such an easy step to subtract God also from a friendship and even from family. Jesus believes that the love of God belongs everywhere to everyone, and he expects us to live accordingly. Amen.