I don’t know about you, but gospel readings like the one we heard today immediately put me at ease.  Episcopalians aren’t particularly known for memorizing scripture, but we do know stories.  And the Good Samaritan is definitely one of the stories we know.  We know these stories so well that we sometimes tune out, maybe imagining, like I did, the time when we were kids and the Sunday School teacher had us dress up and act out the story.  And we are not the only ones.  There are whole churches, charitable organizations, nursing homes, and hospitals named after the Good Samaritan.  We love this simple story about how to be like the Good Samaritan and not like the lawyer, priest, or Levite.

The problem with these familiar stories is that our familiarity dilutes the power of the stories – and perhaps our ability to situate ourselves in the characters of the parable.  Some scholars even try to rename this parable to something like, “Jesus and the Lawyer.”[i]  The lawyer is the first person we miss in this narrative.  We know he is trying to trick Jesus, so he must be bad.  We admit he knows the law, or Torah – to love God and love neighbor.  His second question is where the trouble comes.  The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?”  The question seems simple enough, but the trouble comes from what he doesn’t ask, “Who is not my neighbor?  How much love are we talking here, Jesus?  Can you be specific?  Where can I draw the line?  Outside my front door?  At the edges of my neighborhood?  Along the cultural and racial boundaries I was raised with?  I mean, there are lines.  Aren’t there?”[ii]  And before we get too high on our “I know loving neighbors means loving everyone” horse, think about the last time you got angry about politics and what “those people” are doing or saying. 

Our next issue is pointing the finger at the priest and Levite.  I have heard and read all kinds of explanations about why these two men might have walked on the other side of the road from the dying fellow in need of help.  I have heard people explain that priests and Levites must be careful about ritual purity.  I have heard that as religious professionals they were being upper-class snobs.  I have heard they were late to temple, in a rush to do their jobs.  Unfortunately, according to scholars, none of those justifications work.  The purity laws would not have prohibited these guys from helping – from touching, maybe, but not from helping.  And despite being known leaders in communities, the roles of priest and Levite were mostly inherited, and not a vocation like we know now.  And the text tells us the men are walking away from Jerusalem.  They’re definitely not late for work.  The real problem is simple:  the two men simply do “what is all too ordinary:  [they] fail to act when [they] should.”  In fact, both men were required to attend to the fellow in the ditch, dead or alive.[iii]

Martin Luther King, Jr. on the night before his assassination preached about this parable.  He said, “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid….And so the first question that the priest [and] the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’…But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”  King went on, “If I do not help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”[iv]  The real issue with these two men is they only thought about themselves and failed their neighbor.

Now, the final challenge in the parable is the Samaritan.  We all know him as the “Good Samaritan,” but even that nomenclature is problematic.  You see, Samaritans and Jews experienced a great deal of tension.  They have had a long rivalry about where the proper temple is and who has authority.  Just a chapter before in Luke we read about how the Samaritans do not welcome Jesus and the disciples are ready to rain down fire upon the Samaritans.  This does not necessarily mean Samaritans are less influential or wealthy.  This is a tribal feud – an “us versus them” conflict.  And as much as we might identify with the Good Samaritan as the example we always follow, the truth is the Samaritan is not us.  He is the last person you would think of as the “good guy” in Jesus’ day.  We have to hold on to that reality because anyone hearing Jesus’ parable in his day would have been shocked by the introduction of the Samaritan – especially one who behaves much better than “us.”[v]  Scholar Amy-Jill Levine reminds us of the storytelling “rule of three.”  For anyone hearing Jesus’ story, when he talks about a priest, then a Levite, the hearer would have anticipated an Israelite being the third character in the story.  Levine says, “Instead of the anticipated Israelite, the person who stops to help is a Samaritan.  In modern terms, this would be like going from Larry and Moe to Osama bin Laden.”[vi]

So, to help us hear this familiar parable in a fresh way, I want to turn back to scholar Amy-Jill Levine.  Doctor Levine is a Jewish New Testament scholar – and yes, you heard that right – a devout Jew whose career has been in the study of Jesus.  She retells the parable like this:  “I am an Israeli Jew on my way from Jerusalem to Jericho, and I am attacked by thieves, beaten, stripped, robbed, and left half dead in a ditch.  Two people who should have stopped to help pass me by:  the first, a Jewish medic from the Isreal Defense Forces; the second, a member of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.  But the person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas, a political party whose charter not only anticipates Israel’s destruction, but also depicts Jews as subhuman demons responsible for the world’s problems.”[vii]

Before we can be Good Samaritans or Good Hamas Members or Good Jews, Jesus is inviting us to get real clear on who our neighbor is.  As scholar Debie Thomas suggests, “Your neighbor is the one who scandalizes you with compassion…Your neighbor is the one who upends all of your entrenched categories and shocks you with a fresh face of God.  Your neighbor is the one who mercifully steps over the ancient, bloodied line separating ‘us’ from ‘them’ and teaches you the real meaning of ‘Good.’”  What shall I do to inherit eternal life?  Do this.  Do this and you will live.”[viii]

I do not know who you are so deeply in conflict with that you have written them off as unacceptable neighbors.  I do not know whose hand you would recoil from if they extended their hand in help.  I do know who you have deemed unredeemable or unforgivable.  But Jesus’ parable is not a safe, cute parable about how to be a good person.  Today’s parable is an invitation to recognize how deeply difficult loving your neighbor is because the definition of neighbor is uncomfortably expansive with Jesus.  And once you concede this parable of the Good Whomever Makes You the Most Uncomfortable, Jesus invites you to love them anyway.  In the same very way that Jesus loves you – unconditionally, bountifully, and full of mercy and grace.  Amen.

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[i] Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville:  John Knox Press, 1990), 149.

[ii] Debie Thomas, Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories:  Reflections of the Life of Christ (Eugene, OR:  Cascade Books, 2022) 126.

[iii] Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus:  The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York:  Harper One, 2014), 98-101

[iv] Levine, 102.

[v] Thomas, 127

[vi] Levine, 103.

[vii] Levine, 114-115.

[viii] Thomas, 128.