Go and do

The parable is a favorite teaching vehicle of Jesus. He is a storyteller, and uses parables in order to embody his message to his followers. And, as I imagine many of us remember, at least generally, these parables—the sower, the mustard seed, the prodigal son, the lost sheep—his method works, at least partially, as the narratives stick with us.

And—as Jewish scholar, Amy Jill Levine reminds us when she writes religion is meant to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted—Jesus is doing something more than telling us a story with the parables. He is, in his way, attempting to cause affliction, to cause enough discomfort that we might consider transformation. In this vein of thinking, Levine also writes “If we hear a parable and think, 'I really like that' or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough."

This is particularly true with the parable we receive today, the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan has embedded itself into our secular culture in such a way that we have churches, hospitals, aid programs, laws named after the perceived spirit of this story. Political leaders use the narrative to project an image of care and safety. We ourselves likely have memories or experiences of learning about this story with a somewhat sweet view of the narrative.

And I want to name that none of that is inherently bad. But as Levine mentions, if we aren’t being challenged by this story, we are missing something. We aren’t listening fully to the story that Jesus is teaching.

Luke narrative starts with a lawyer bringing forward a seemingly softball question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus, likely recognizing that he’s up against a bit of a know-it-all, asks him a two-fold question—what is written in scripture about this, and how do you particularly understand it. The lawyer gives the kind of answer he might expect an A+ for: “You shall 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 neighbor as yourself” And Jesus says yup, you’re right, now go DO it.

But this lawyer…he’s got more to —somewhat facetiously— clarify. He asks, “But who is my neighbor…” And, in a way that honestly feels a little like when my toddler sneaks his way around a question, what the lawyer seems to really be asking is: who is NOT my neighbor?…who do I NOT have to love?

And thus Jesus offers him this parable. A man—unidentified in anyway, so it could be anyone, no clear identify to tell us what side he’s on, what his background is, who he follows, he is a human being—is walking the treacherous road down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and is set upon by robbers. He is brutally beaten, stripped of his clothing, and left to die.

Passing by on the road, we hear of a Levite and a priest, both individuals we expect to stop and care for the man. But they don’t. We aren’t given reason—which is also important as historically people have attempted to make a lot of reasons why they don’t stop, which wind up becoming thouroughly anti-Jewish in nature. They simply don’t stop when we expect they will. They pass by.

Then comes a Samaritan. Now briefly, I want to just open up what this might have meant to the first audience of Luke’s Gospel. The audience was likely Jewish, and in much Jewish literature, scripture, writing of the time, a priest and a Levite in a story was expected to be followed by an Israelite. It’s an example of an expected rule of three: Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear; the first two set up the third. A Priest, a Levite, and an Israelite. This was the expected continuation of the story. The Israelite would likely come in to have the expected, appropriate response to a half dead person in the ditch.

But Jesus inserts here a Samaritan. As we have mentioned before, the Samaritans and the Israelites are long-rooted enemies. “The two groups disagreed about everything that mattered: how to honor God, how to interpret the Scriptures, and how and where to worship.  They practiced their faith in separate temples, read different versions of the Torah, and avoided social contact with each other whenever possible.  Truth be told, they hated each other’s guts” To make a Samaritan, the enemy of the Israelite audience, the character who would respond rightly in this situation is, or should be, the element that makes this parable a challenge.

If we look back through Scripture, through history, through the stories that shape us— we begin to see a painful pattern. Again and again, when fear creeps in, when power feels uncertain, when people begin to feel threatened by those who are different, the human response has too often been to draw lines. To create categories. To strip away the dignity of others in order to justify harm. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Pharaoh looks at the Hebrew people and does not see neighbors or workers or fellow image-bearers of God—he sees a threat, an infestation, a problem to be controlled. And so he enslaves them. In the Gospels, we may remember from a few weeks ago the demon-possessed man cast out from society, chained and left among the tombs—treated as less than human, someone to be feared, avoided, forgotten. Today we receive this parable. Where Jesus attempts to dismantle the hatred for the outsider within the people of his own community, by upending the narrative of his parable. He pushes back against his followers committing the act of dehumanization by telling a story where the people they would expect to do the right thing—to speak up in the face of trauma and harm and abuse, to take care of the down trodden— ignore the problem and pain while those they would call their enemy show and live out what it is to live as Jesus calls them to. To pay attention and act in the face of pain and abuse of power. To love their neighbor. 

I said earlier that reading this story for the simple message is not inherently bad. But Jesus hopes and expects for more from us. Because this seemingly ancient pattern of dehumanization is still with us. We have seen it repeated across history: in Nazi Germany, where Jewish people were mocked and othered in propaganda, long before they were rounded up and murdered. In our own country, where Japanese Americans—many of them citizens—were labeled as threats and locked in internment camps. And I fear we are seeing it again, now. Migrants are called “animals.” Trans people are targeted by cruel policies and crueler words. Political opponents are not just disagreed with—they are dehumanized, on all sides of the political divide. We fail to see the harmful roots of christian nationalism, and simply demonize them instead. And entire communities—Black and brown, Jewish and Palestinian, disabled and poor—are being reduced to caricatures or threats. This kind of language is not harmless. It tills the soil for violence. It numbs our compassion. It prepares us to stop seeing others as beloved, as image-bearers of God, as neighbors on the side of the road, or neighbors who would partake in our healing in times of trauma or need.

In the last sermon before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. preached on this parable, and famously offered that perhaps those who passed by without helping were scared, and asked the question “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and then followed it up with the preferred question “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

There is another question that pastors and theologians and people of faith have come with in response to the parable, and MLK’s take on it. That question is “If I do not stop to help this man—or depending on where you have placed yourself in this story, allow my enemy to help me, or accept the story of a person I expect to hate showing me a way of love—what will happen to me, to my soul.”

Like it or not, we are all guilty of participation in large or small acts of dehumanization. It is something we confess to weekly—evil we have done, or done on our behalf—and each time we return to those acts, or allow those who act on our behalf to commit large scale acts of dehumanization and say nothing about it, we continue to wound one another and ourselves. If we can’t get out of our own way, and love our neighbor, treat everyone as our neighbor, as God asks us to, calls us to, commands us to, we are causing damage to our own soul, our own relationship with God and with one another.

But Jesus hopes and expects for more from us. Which is why his response to the lawyer, after he has perhaps sheepishly named that the Samaritan is indeed behaving as a neighbor to the injured man is simple and clear: go and do likewise. Do not let your faith just be talk, or recitation. God and do. Love your neighbor beyond boundaries, walls, differences in ideology. See past the hatred the world has caused you to hold for others. Go and do. Push back against those who would hold hatred and dehumanization for others as a means of gaining power. Do your best to recognize the humanity in one another. Combat the tragedy of dehumanization with the authenticity of real, human relationships. Love your neighbor. Go and do likewise. Amen.