Shape and Substance

“The Good Samaritan,” by Jacopo Bossano (1515-1592)

The View from the Ditch

The morning’s text was Luke 10:25-37, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (not, you will note, the RCL Gospel text for the first Sunday of Lent, which is traditionally the Lukan temptation narrative; the preacher had other aims in mind). It is a story those schooled in the life of the Church have heard hundreds of times. There is a lawyer (translate: Pharisee) who seeks to demonstrate his legal and perhaps rhetorical superiority to Jesus and who engages him in the familiar game of question and answer: What must I do to be saved?

Leaving aside for a moment my reservations about the terms “saved” and “salvation,” let us look at the exchange. In response to the lawyerly question, Jesus asks a question of his own: You know the law; what does it say? The lawyer responds with the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) and the commandment to love the neighbor as the self (Leviticus 19:18), two passages that elsewhere Jesus has himself identified as the core “on which depend all the Torah and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:40). Jesus does no less here, congratulating the lawyer on his knowledge of Torah. But the lawyer, “wishing to justify himself” (more later on that word “justify’), asks a follow-up: Who is my neighbor?

In response to which Jesus, in classic rabbinical fashion, tells a story about a badly beaten man, some robbers, a priest, a Levite, a Samaritan, and the dark and dangerous road that clings to the precipitous walls of the Wadi Qelt as it winds up from Jericho and Jerusalem. You know the tale of the priest and Levite who see but pass by, and the Samaritan—a reviled figure in early Jewish literature—who stops to help. Once he has told the story, Jesus turns back to the lawyer and asks, “who was neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer, either willingly or begrudgingly (the text doesn’t tell us), admits: The one who showed mercy. “Go and do likewise,” says Jesus.

And thus is launched a thousand guilt trips among modern motorists, seeing someone stranded on the roadside or seeking free food or money, and choosing to pass by out of concern for personal safety (modern robbers ambush travelers, too) or haste (we’re all going somewhere), or the conviction that money given to bedraggled street beggars is money most likely wasted.

Let me give credit to this wonderful preacher: she avoided all that, even as she acknowledged it. She focused on the lawyer’s attempt to limit the scope of his compassion, his implicit desire to draw the line between neighbor to whom he has an obligation and stranger to whom he does not. She noted that Jesus, by choosing to make the hated Samaritan the exemplar of compassion, effectively says that even those outside the community may offer kindness and healing to those to who should have no expectation of it. “There are no strangers,” she concluded. And she’s right. She went on to remind us that the calling of the church is to treat all as neighbor and none as stranger. In mild and balanced language she took a swipe or two at policies and attitudes, both personal and governmental, that would alienate and “other” those who would claim a place among us. It was a lovely job, and well done, the sort of preaching of which Presbyterians are capable when they put their minds to it.

But it seems to me that there is another layer to the story, one that gets beneath the admonition to hospitality and healing. Or, to be more precise, one that turns the tables on our sense of whose calling it is to offer hospitality and healing.

Let’s start with the lawyer’s desire to “justify” himself. Dikaiosune is the root word in Greek, a word that has a breathtaking breadth of meaning. The cloud of usage hovers around notions of righteousness and vindication, of uprightness and moral rectitude. It roughly translates the Hebrew tzedakah, righteousness. That in turn has a derivative form, tzadik, which refers to an upright and Torah-abiding person. The lawyer wants to be seen as a Tzadik; indeed, who wouldn’t? But he wants to know what the requirements are, how far he has to go to earn the degree and all the rights and benefits thereunto appertaining.

The English translation “justify” seems a bit off to me, suggesting that the lawyer feels the need to give some sort of explanatory accounting of his behavior. But as far as we know in this story, the lawyer hasn’t done anything requiring accounting, and what he has done Jesus finds laudatory. I find myself wondering if there is another sense of the word “justify” that’s more helpful here. “Justification” is also a printer’s term, used to indicate the relationship between the beginnings or ends of words in the lines of a column of print. Justifying a print column is bringing the words into correct spatial relationship with each other. Does the lawyer want to know what he has to do to bring himself and others into proper relationship? Funny you should ask.

The lawyer’s self-justifying question is “Who is my neighbor?” That’s the question that prompts Jesus’ tale. And when Jesus is done telling the tale, he asks his own question: “Who is neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” At the risk of presumptuousness, let me rephrase Jesus’ question, “Who is the beaten man’s neighbor?” Maybe what I’m getting at can be seen if I write the questions in parallel:

Who is      /       my        / neighbor?

Who is  / the beaten man’s   /         neighbor?

There’s an old trick of biblical hermeneutics: who are you in this story? If you pose that question to the lawyer, the answer’s pretty clear. The lawyer is not the Samaritan who gets the opportunity to demonstrate his socio-religious convention-busting compassion. The lawyer’s role in this story is as the nameless man, beaten and naked and left for dead, without help or hope of comfort. If you want to know who your neighbor is, Jesus seems to be suggesting, it’s not the one you find with his metaphorical ox in the metaphorical ditch whom you decide out of the magnanimity of your Christian heart to help. It’s the one who comes to offer you compassion, you who are half dead and fully alone, unable to do anything for yourself except await the approach of death. Your neighbor is the one who comes to you from utterly beyond you, having no obligation to you and no reason to stop to offer succor. That he does so anyway is nothing short of miraculous.

            Sounds a bit like grace, doesn’t it?

 So am I suggesting that the story of the Good Samaritan relieves us of the responsibility to reach beyond our definitions of neighbor (translation: those who look, act, speak, and think like us) and offer compassion to others? Not at all. That would be swimming upstream against two millennia of Lukan interpretation, and I’m not that strong. Besides, even if it’s not the point of the story, it’s a good thing to be compassionate—if you can tolerate the risk that compassion always implies.

But I am suggesting that the real point of this story is not the moral admonition to adopt the spiritual costume of highway hero. It is to understand that “salvation” (if that term has any meaning) is about the realization that there is nothing within our power that will “save” us, and thus we are dependent on forces and realities completely beyond our control if we are to be “saved.”

I suspect the lawyer walked away from Jesus on the lookout for someone—maybe even a Samaritan in need?—to whom he could choose to offer compassion and thereby burnish his salvific bona fides. He was, as he understood it, going and doing likewise. If so, I think he missed the point. And if we limit the intent of this parable to an imperative to help the bedraggled beside the road, so do we. That sort of thinking only encourages the idea that we have a choice about mercy. But that’s not what Jesus seems to me to be saying. Jesus’ point is that mercy in its most important sense is never what we choose to offer others. It’s what we receive from others, and ultimately from the infinitely loving One in whom all mercies meet.

In another context, Jesus once counseled his followers to take the log out of their own eyes before they tried to remove the mote in another’s. Good advice, that. Maybe with de-logged eyes, we can get a better perspective on our position. Here’s a hint: it’s not the view from horseback on the road. It’s the view from the ditch.