Good Neighbours

 

 

I said, “Indeed, you are right.  There is a story in The Bible about a man who was beaten up and helped. It was the story of The Good Samaritan.”

 

“That’s the one” he said, “That is the one I heard many years ago.  Seems to me that is very real, don’t you think?”

 

After that my mind was stirring. 

 

Questions are powerful things.  Sometimes questions can be used for trickery.  Questions can be used in such a way that you catch somebody out, test them and trip them up.  I was watching just recently the re-run of the movie Frost and Nixon.  Frost had incredible charm and was able to get Nixon to say things through the most subtle questions that revealed so much.  It was brilliant!  No wonder so many politicians are trained to say in response to questions that they don’t want to answer, “But the real question is this.....” and then they re-phrase it in order that they can give the answer that they want to give.  Questions can be tricky!  Questions can also reveal truth.  If you read Plato’s great work The Republic there is a question at the beginning of it all:  Is it better to be just or unjust?  The dialogue between Plato and Socrates as it runs through The Republic, with other characters as well, is really a question and answer method of trying to get to the heart of a truth.  In this case, is it better to be just or unjust?  It is brilliant because it is predicated on the asking of questions.

 

In today’s passage from a very well-known story, we have four questions.  All four of these questions are in and of themselves challenging enough to warrant pages and pages of explanation.  The simplicity of the questions and the power of the answer to the questions is what I think makes the story of The Good Samaritan so gripping and vital.  We read that a lawyer, a student of the law – and by that we mean The Torah and the Old Testament – asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Now, Luke tells us by virtue of an editorial comment that this was a question designed to trick and test Jesus.  He wanted to see if Jesus was going to stick with the traditional answer.  Jesus, brilliantly, throws back the question. He says, “Ah, what does the law say about this?”

 

The lawyer knows the answer.  So Jesus gets the lawyer to say what needs to be said: “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength and with all thy mind, and love thy neighbour as thyself.”

 

Jesus said, “You see, you have answered correctly.  This is absolutely right!  This is what the law teaches.”

 

The lawyer hasn’t given up yet.  He has another question in his pocket:  “Who is my neighbour?”

 

Jesus does not then get into a long discussion about who the neighbour is.  There is nothing philosophical here, no platonic argument like in The Republic.  Rather, what Jesus does is tell the story of a man who goes from Jericho to Jerusalem, Jerusalem to Jericho; he finds himself in this rocky area; there are bandits around; he gets robbed; he gets stripped; he gets beaten; he is forced to lie on the side of the road.  Then, two characters come along, one is a priest and the other one is a Levite, they walk past him and just leave him there.  But a Samaritan was coming by and the Samaritan stopped and looks after him; he places him on his animal, provides shelter; and in that shelter he pays for the man to be cared for.  Now, the real challenge of The Good Samaritan begins, because who then really is the neighbour?  That is the question!

 

The answer is clearly that the one suffering is our neighbour.  I think one can assume that in this particular story the man who had been on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho would have been a Jew, although in the story Jesus doesn’t suggest that overtly.  Why? Because the person who comes and cares for him is “the other” the Samaritan.  Now, what you might not realize is that the Samaritans had been around a long time.  They were actually placed in their position in northern Israel by the Assyrians in the seventh century before Christ to be a buffer between the Syrian world and the Jews.  The Assyrians believed that if they had this group of people in the middle, it would be a political buffer for them, so if there were any wars or insurrections, the Samaritans would be like a demilitarized zone.

 

The Samaritans were different because they also developed their own religious traditions, and followed some of the teachings of Israel, and some of the teachings of The Old Testament, but their main difference of opinion was about where the Messiah would show up.  They believed that the Messiah would show up at Mount Gerizim.  I say all of this because essentially the Samaritans were a political reality.  They had been placed there by the Assyrians, but they were a spiritual reality. They had a different view than those who lived in Israel and because of this, they were despised.  So, Jesus is saying that the one who comes along and cares for the one who is needy is the neighbour.  But, you might say, “Well, isn’t it reasonable to do the right thing?  If you see someone on the side of the road, surely reason suggests that you can take make sure that they are all right, and that is all that really matters. 

 

Reasonableness alone does not take us to where the Samaritan went.  The Samaritan went much further than just reasonableness.  It was John Locke, the great philosopher, who said, “If you want to simply be reasonable, then you become a Christian.”  That was his argument.  Others have suggested that if you wanted to become reasonable you take care of yourself.  Others say if you want to be reasonable, then you do everything according to equity.  But the Samaritan went beyond what is reasonable.  Bill Powell, who used to be the head of World Vision and saw the world in all its need, a man I respect immensely, once wrote this about The Good Samaritan:

 

Most people would probably agree that we should all get along.  So why don’t we?  This is because neighbourliness is not just a rational matter.  Becoming the merciful neighbour Jesus commanded requires a conversion, a transformation so radical that it will leave old habits and ideologies behind.  All tribal allegiances would have to be severely readjusted. Politics and alliances would need revitalization as Jesus became Lord and Saviour.  It is critical in the midst of our fallen humanity that the Church continues to affirm its call to a radical discipleship and a compassionate and loving outreach.

 

 

The neighbour is also the one who acts with mercy.  This is an incredible passage in so many ways, because it is all about mercy.  Mercy is not about clemency in a legal sense.  It is not about forgiveness in a legal sense.  It is about the Hebrew word hesed, which means loving and compassionate, about going beyond even what the law requires.  After he has told the story, Jesus then asks the fourth question:  “So then, who is the neighbour?”  

 

The lawyer replied, “The one who showed mercy.”

 

So, the man on the side of the street and also the man who showed compassion were the neighbours in this story.  And mercy is what our world desperately needs!

 

What the sales person was getting at was so true.  He talked to me about this tension we have these days between the private and the public.  He said, “You know, there used to be a point in life where you would do something in private, but now, because of social media it becomes so public.”  What happens massively in the public world becomes intimate and private as it enters into our lives.  An oil tanker burns in Pakistan this morning, and we hear of 140 tragic deaths.  A public event has become a source of private anxiety and concern for us.  A building in London burns down and kills a hundred people, and it privately affects us.  Or we do something personal and it becomes part of social media and everyone seems to know then what years ago would have been an intimate thing.  The world that we are living in is torn by this private and public nexus and interface, and what happens is it builds up stress and sometimes anger within us.  We hear about what a particular group of people have done to another particular group of people, and rather than thinking in terms of mercy, we think in terms of righteous indignation and anger. If you were to let cumulatively all the injustices and evil in the world come upon you, you would have a dark and a turbid view of the world.  That sales person was feeling the pain of that, so after we talked about The Good Samaritan, he asked, “What do we do?  What would Jesus, who told this story, want us to do?”

  

This week, I am going to Ottawa for a few days.  The purpose of my visit to Ottawa is to spend time with millennials, who have been appointed by Faith in Canada 150.  For two days there is a conference amongst young people about how to live with this private/public tension, and how to live our faith in the public square.  These are young people from nearly every religious tradition in this country.  This is not a monolithic group.  In fact, because of all the influences and the people who were part of the Cabinet that brought these people together and the multi-multi religious levels that are represented there, they represent the diversity of that.  I am eager not so much to speak this time, but to listen– I know you find that hard to believe!  I am going to be a facilitator of a morning session on faith in the Public Square.  I want to hear how they are dealing with it and how they are looking at it, because it all boils down to, in my opinion, what Jesus was trying to say to the lawyer in The Good Samaritan.  Who is our neighbour, how do we treat our neighbour, and we show respect to our neighbour, and transform the world as we address our neighbour?  This is going to be uncomfortable, I am sure.  I am sure there are things that will be said that are going to be deeply troubling as well as inspiring.  Sometimes, just like the priests and the Levites, and the lawyer, Jesus will give us something to think about and challenge us, and maybe a question to get us to think about how we see the other.

  

There is also a profound sense that there are still those who are on the side of the road and who have been beaten up.  I don’t mean they have been beaten up physically, I mean that they are in need.  It may be a bandit that has caused it or maybe it is societal problems that have caused it. There are a myriad of reasons why, but there are people who sit on the side of the road and they are our neighbour crying out to us like the man who was on the side of the road and had a Samaritan come and take care of him. 

 

This week, I was privileged to hear Roberta Jamieson, a well-known First Nations and Indigenous lawyer speak to the Rotary Club.  In this incredibly deep speech, she talked about her hopes for the future of indigenous people in our nation.  I appreciated the positive tone that she took.  But she was not reluctant to say or to describe the needs that are there.  The fact that 4 out of 10 indigenous children graduate from High School and in the rest of Canada it is 9 out of 10.  Or that 1 in 4 children across the country who come from indigenous and First Nations homes live under the poverty line, and in some parts of Canada, three-quarters of them live below the poverty line.  She talked passionately about this, and about how we change.  She had a number of very good suggestions.  All of those suggestions revolved around seeing the people who are metaphorically on the side of the road as people, and as people who need compassion and justice and care. These people who need to be lifted up and encouraged, and despite all the problems of the past, to move on to a positive view of what they can become.

 

That is what is striking about The Good Samaritan, the man who showed mercy.  He did not just throw the man on his horse or his donkey or whatever it might have been.  He actually took him somewhere, and made sure that the landlord had sufficient funds so that the person could get better.  In other words, the “neighbourliness” of the Samaritan went way beyond just the ordinary of making sure that the guy was okay, but to make sure that he continued to be okay.  In this world, where there is intolerance and injustice and where there is fear and anger and uncertainty, that kind of mercy is desperately needed.  I am not surprised that the sales person in the store would want to know who the neighbour is, by reminding me of the story from Christ, which should be for us all.  Powerful words!  Even nature agrees! Amen.