5th Sunday after Pentecost
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” This question opens our gospel story this morning. A lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus asks him right back, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” The man knows the scriptures and quotes, “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.”
Jesus approves this answer, “You have given the right answer; do this and you will live.”
What must we do to inherit eternal life? We must love. It’s about love.
The lawyer wants more details. “And who is my neighbor?”, he asks. Whom exactly can I be expected to love? Who belongs in the category of ‘neighbor’? He is probably hoping that Jesus would draw the circle rather narrowly; the fewer people count as neighbors the easier it would be to treat them with the love God is calling for.
Jesus does not give him a straight answer. No definition is forthcoming. Instead, Jesus tells a story. He draws the lawyer and the people listening into a tale about a man accosted by robbers, beaten, stripped naked, and left for dead. A priest and a Levite walk past him but don’t do anything to help. Then comes a Samaritan man, someone belonging to a religious group Jews hate - and vice versa. This man stops, is moved by compassion, and treats the man’s wounds. He picks him up and loads him onto his animal and walks him to an inn, where he stays the night to tend to him. The next morning, he pays the innkeeper for further care and promises to come back and check on the man.
Jesus closes by asking the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer answers, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Jesus is such an ingenious storyteller. He does not answer the lawyer’s question. Rather, at the end of the parable, he has the lawyer answer the question himself. Who is a neighbor? Someone who shows mercy.
The lawyer wanted definitions and classifications, telling him where the boundaries are and what exactly would be expected of him. He wants to know whom he has to love. Jesus takes the issue out of the theoretical realm of legal codes and places it into the realm of mercy. We have no idea what kind of people God might be placing on our path, but we will know it when we see someone needing mercy.
The Samaritan needed no law to urge him to go over to the injured man. He saw him and was moved with pity, moved with compassion. This word describes the kind of gut reaction you have when someone’s plight pulls at your heartstrings. Jesus feels this compassion when he sees a mother having to bury her son. You know that feeling, right? Your gut reacts, your heart goes out, and you just have to do something to help.
This ties in beautifully with our reading from Deuteronomy this morning. Moses has reminded the people of Israel of the covenant law that shapes them as God’s holy people. This law isn’t far off and difficult to obtain, he says. No, the law is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. The will of God is in you. You have eternalized it. God’s vision for how people should live together informs your gut reaction.
The Samaritan’s gut reaction was pity, compassion, mercy. He sees the wounded man and immediately moves in, cleans and bandages the wounds, and brings him to a safe place where he can rest and heal.
On the night before he was shot to death, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Detroit, his famous mountaintop speech. In that speech, he talks about the parable of the Good Samaritan. He ponders why the priest and the Levite didn’t help, but the Samaritan did. King mentions a number of possible reasons as to why the first two didn’t do anything.
In the end, what it comes down to, says King, is this, and I quote from the speech: “And so the first question that 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?””
Dr. King gave this speech in support of striking sanitation workers who were fighting for better work conditions. He applies his reading of the parable to that situation: “That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week [..]?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.
This compassion is a costly compassion. It was costly for Dr. King, who was shot the next day, and for many of his coworkers in the fight for equality and justice, many of whom were harassed, beaten, jailed, or lynched.
This compassion was costly for the Samaritan. I had always known that the Samaritan risked that the robbers might still be around, and that he stopped his journey, and that he gave his own wine and oil and money. However, I never really grasped the true cost of what he was doing until one commentary I read this week pointed me to this painting by Aime Morot.
The Bible says the victim was stripped, but I never really pictured what that meant. The Bible says that the Samaritan lifted the man onto his animal, but I never truly realized what it would be like to support the limp body of a grown man. The effort it must have taken to get this man to the next inn! Astounding! This painting opened a whole new dimension to this parable for me.
The limp body of a wounded man held lovingly also called to mind all the art depicting Mary holding the dead Jesus in her lap. This connection made me wonder about Jesus. Jesus is telling this story. But Jesus is also in the story.
Jesus is the wounded man, rejected, beaten, publicly left for dead, all alone by the side of the road.
And Jesus is the one who comes to us when we are the wounded and abandoned ones; when we have been robbed or cheated; when we have been stripped of our dignity or our investments or our hope; when we have been ignored by those whose office charges them to care and help; when we thought we were going to die; when our pain was all-consuming.
Jesus comes to us with compassion. He tends to our wounds. He takes us to a place of safety, a place where we belong. He promises to return to pay all our debts. Jesus doesn’t just encourage us and point us in the right direction. Jesus takes care of us hands-on and brings us into a community where we are safe and loved.
How can I not mention our mission statement in this context? As followers of Jesus, we are called to be an inclusive and compassionate community, where everyone is connected in relationship with God and each other to foster wholeness of mind and soul. We are called to be the safe place where Jesus can bring the wounded so that we care for them and help them heal. The Samaritan uses oil and wine on the man’s wounds. Here is a community of faith where we anoint one another with the oil of blessing, where we rejoice in having been anointed with oil at our baptism, where we share the wine at God’s table, poured for us from the cup of salvation.
We are called to be compassionate. Compassionate like the Samaritan who was moved by pity and, at great cost, blessed a wounded man. Compassionate like Jesus who preached and enacted the grace of God and who, at great cost, died and rose to set us free from sin and death, free to a new life in Christ.
Compassion is costly. No doubt about it. Yet compassion is what Jesus modeles for us, and how Jesus blesses us, and what Jesus calls us to do. As followers of Jesus, the word of God is in our mouth and in our heart; the vision of God is internalized in our mind and soul; the Spirit of God makes compassion our gut reaction whenever we see people of God in pain.
What the Samaritan does reflects his core identity. He is not helping to inherit eternal life for himself; he is not out for a reward; he is not modeling self-sacrificial love. His actions show that he has internalized God’s vision of a world where we live in such a way that nobody experiences misery. He is modeling the world he himself wants to live in, a world where people watch out for one another and tend to each other’s wounds; where people’s gut reaction is compassion, even when it is costly, because life in such a world is better for everybody.
Jesus doesn’t tell the lawyer exactly who he is called to love, but he does tell him how to love: with compassion as his guide. Let compassion by your guide, as well. The world is in desperate need of compassion. Controversial supreme court decisions, repeated gun violence, hearings into the conduct of government officials, war, climate crisis, ongoing COVID concerns, crippling costs for gas and medical care and housing – it is all too much! And it creates too much hostility among people.
Let compassion be our guide as we vote, as we engage politically to bring healing to the wounded, as we invest time and resources in creating safe places for all.
Let compassion be our guide when we talk to those who differ from us. Jews and Samaritans hated each other, but compassion overcame those barriers.
Let compassion be our guide in modeling the world we want to live in, a world where all people experience the love and care of God through God’s people. Amen.