Text: Luke 10: 25-37
Slanted and Enchanted II: The Parable of the Good Samaritan
“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” is how Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems, a line that was shared with me after the sermon last Sunday. It’s a fitting way to begin another meditation on the parables of Jesus. Here’s Dickinson’s poem in full:
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
During the season of Lent, I’ve thought it helpful to concentrate less on what Jesus does throughout his ministry, and more on what he says. Those of us who are immersed in American Protestantism, of both the conservative and progressive varieties, often tend toward a pragmatic orientation toward faith. We’re interested in the actions of Jesus, the practices of Jesus – his interactions and his miracles, his healings and his sacrificial love. That orientation was made famous in an early 20th century book by Charles Sheldon, entitled In His Steps. The book was inspired by the social gospel movement, and it popularized the slogan “What would Jesus do,” a slogan that evangelicals discovered in the 1990’s, slapping it onto t-shirts and bracelets and ball caps. It’s a good question, one that I wish more people actually asked. But in the weeks leading toward the confrontation in Jerusalem, and Easter Sunday, it’s valuable to consider not only what Jesus did, but what he said. His form of speech, his method of communication, is central to everything about his ministry. In particular, the stories that he tells are central to everything about him. They distort the known world just a little bit, for his speech is subversive, slanted, and elusive. But that form of speech is also enchanting the world in new ways, offering a sideways entrance through a theological thicket, and into a clearing of grace.
Last week, we spent time with the parable of the sower. This week it’s the parable of the Good Samaritan that we need to examine, and hear again, as if for the first time. It’s so familiar that it’s likely few of us even hear its details any longer, let alone linger on its meaning. There’s the beaten man. There are those who pass him by. There’s the Samaritan. And there’s the exchange Jesus is having with a bystander, in which the story is embedded. As with all parables, the story refracts light in several different directions. One of those has to do with the questions of social obligation. The other has to do with questions surrounding the law.
First, social obligation. The entire story, really, seems to hinge on the question, “Who is my neighbor?” It’s a challenging question, as pressing today as it was in the ancient world. What defines a neighbor? How are we to relate to our neighbors? How are we to understand that term? In ordinary usage, the way you and I might use it, a neighbor is one defined by proximity or locale. And indeed, in the biblical text, that’s exactly what neighbor means. The Greek word is plesios, and it derives from the word meaning “near” or “close to.” So it would seem that a neighbor, at the most basic level, is a person to whom we are related not by blood, but by proximity. So, at first pass, one’s neighbor would be the person living next door, or across the street, or maybe around the corner. Proximity is indeed a good way to answer the question, “who is my neighbor,” and we would all do well to reflect on what it means to be in relationship with those who are in close proximity to us.
Of course, some of us have been fortunate with regard to our neighbors. Some of us have not. A few among us wind up forming lifelong friendships because of the happy accidents of proximity. Others of us have, let us say, more challenging relationships with our neighbors, and I have known more than a few people who actively hope their neighbors will someday move, or just die, because those relationships are so exasperating. Even so, there is among most people I know a desire to have at least cordial, and respectful, relationships with one’s neighbors. And though we don’t often find it, there lives within most of us a desire to be a part of a true neighborhood, where people not only know one another, but enjoy one another, and care for one another, where neighbors celebrate with one another and mourn with one another. It’s not impossible, but it’s certainly difficult to find enclaves like that in North America these days. That’s why we create communities like this one, here at the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme. We may not live next door to one another, but we sit together and pray together and eat together, and that proximity makes us, we hope, neighbors.
That’s all well and good, but Jesus challenges that notion of proximity in his parable. He does it by making a Samaritan the protagonist of the story. A man is beaten and robbed and left to die on the side of the road, Jesus says, but those who exist in close proximity, at least in cultural terms, cross to the other side of the road, establishing distance, and refuse to help, while the Samaritan notices the beaten man, draws close, and shows him mercy. Samaria was a territory wedged between the northern and southern portions of ancient Palestine. Picture a sandwich, with the territory around Jerusalem being the bottom piece of bread, while the territory around Galilee was the top piece. Between them, the portion that got squeezed, was Samaria. It was comprised of a people who were not considered to be Jewish. But they were not considered Gentile either. They were, to the wider Hebrew culture, simply “other.” That meant that they were treated with suspicion, and were often misunderstood. So the Samaritan in the story shatters any notion of neighborliness understood as proximity. He lived in a segregated zone. He did not live near or close to the man lying on the road. But the Samaritan was not culturally proximate either, for he was defined by practices that would have felt alien to most Hebrew listeners. Neighbors, then, cannot be limited to those who are geographically or culturally proximate. The Samaritan does draw close to the beaten man, but he does so because his heart is close. The proximity of the neighbor, in Jesus’s rendition, has to do with a proximity of heart, not houses.
Whenever I hear the thought that perhaps our church should concentrate on more local concerns, rather than spending time getting to know far off places, I like to point out just how much we do that is local. But it’s the story of the Good Samaritan, in large part, that won’t allow followers of Jesus to rest easy in that understanding of the neighbor as local or proximate. The story calls for a proximity of heart, and not only houses.
It’s also worth noticing the reversal of power that takes place within the story. It’s the one from the dominant, majoritarian culture who exists in a state of need. And it’s the person from the minoritarian, misunderstood culture who sees that need, and who exhibits the generosity and compassion needed in that moment. Is Jesus saying that those in a position of privilege are sometimes the ones in greatest need of help? Is he flipping the script so that good religious folk, good church folk, understand themselves not in the role of hero or helper, as we so often like to imagine, but actually the ones most in need of assistance? In other words, is Jesus actually casting his questioner in the role of the beaten man who desperately needs a helping hand, who needs to learn what it is to receive mercy? Is it the man’s autonomy, his self-sufficiency, that prevents him from recognizing his proximity to another through a shared sense of humanity? Might that be the subversive, slanted element of this parable?
Perhaps. But there’s another feature of the story that we need to notice, which has to do with the law. As important as the question “who is my neighbor” is for this parable, there’s a deeper underlying concern, which has to do with how you and I relate to the law. That nuance comes out when we consider the exchange in which the story is embedded. It is a lawyer that Jesus is speaking with, one well versed in the law, one charged with upholding and preserving the law within that ancient society. When the priest and the Levite pass the beaten man, they do so not because they don’t wish to be inconvenienced. It’s not about hygiene, really, or a sense of personal danger. They do so because they are upholding the law. There were injunctions in the Torah having to do with coming into contact with half dead bodies, and the priest and the Levite are simply obeying the law as best they can.
It’s easy to dismiss the priest and the Levite. It’s easy to point out their rigidity, their hardness of heart, the way their orthodoxy got in the way of their humanity. But I think we need to reconsider them. What if they were good people, simply trying their best to uphold the values and principles that they found in the books of Moses? What if they were sensed the importance of laws, the ways in which we all depend upon laws in order to live in a well ordered civilization? For all the ways that the books of Leviticus or Numbers invite ridicule from modern readers for all their arcane legal prescriptions, those were early attempts to give form to human society, to provide a framework that ordinary people could depend upon for the organization of their lives. And for all the ways that it’s tempting to dismiss the law, or scoff at those who are concerned to uphold the law, imagine a culture without formal laws, where a legal code doesn’t extend into the countryside, for example. Those aren’t, by and large, places that are comfortable to dwell in, precisely because justice doesn’t reach certain portions of the region. We need a legal framework if we are to thrive as human beings, and the books of Moses, the Torah, were attempts, good attempts, to provide just that. That’s why a theologian like John Calvin, who was first trained as a lawyer, could write about the beauty that he sensed in the law. It’s why to this day, as I was recently reminded by one among us, orthodox Jews exhibit a sense of excitement and wonder when they gather to recite the law. There is a deep necessity to the law, and a great beauty as well, and I wonder if the priest and the Levite merely sensed how important it all was for their sense of well being.
And yet. And yet. For all the necessity and goodness of the law, we must never forget that laws, like Scriptures, are composed of words, and depend upon interpretations. We must never forget that, like Scripture, like any complex text, we can never arrive at a single definition or understanding of the law. We must never forget that, like Scripture, the law can be cruelly misused and mishandled, causing damage to human lives, rather than their flourishing. And we must never forget that the law, like Scripture, must never become calcified, lest the framework it actually does provide winds up degenerating into a rigid and unyielding prison. Those questions about the law are at the center of Jesus’s entire ministry, and they’re precisely why he ended up nailed to two pieces of wood. As Jesus puts it earlier in Luke’s Gospel, was the law made for human beings, or were humans made for the law? That’s the question hovering around the entire parable of the Good Samaritan. Yes, the parable is about the limits of love, and extending our understanding of the neighbor. It’s about transgressing social boundaries. But as much as anything, the parable seems to be an argument about the purpose of the law. It’s purpose, Jesus suggests, is found in mercy more than rigidity, in the proximity of the heart more than obedience to a code. The law finds its apex in mercy.
For those who most deeply sense the urgency of the law, that can be a difficult learning. For those tasked with upholding the law, that sense of leniency and mercy can be maddening. We might recall that famous defender of the law in literature and pop culture, Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. He finds comfort in an unchanging order within the universe. He seeks to understand and uphold that order, within himself, but also in the world around him. The genius of Hugo’s writing is that Javert is a good man, a decent man, even as that very goodness drives him toward an unyielding rigidity, as he chases the escaped convict Jean Valjean. For Javert, to enact mercy toward that one individual would destabilize the order of the world – and he’s not fundamentally wrong about that. But his focus on the law, on the unchanging order represented by the stars, prevents him from drawing near to the humanity of Valjean. Ultimately, it prevents him from drawing near to his own humanity as well, for rather than accepting an act of mercy, he chooses his own death, privileging his unyielding sense of order above his own life.
Might the words of Jesus have saved the good inspector’s life, had he meditated less on the law than the mercy the law is designed to protect and enhance? And might the words of Jesus, in the form of the parable of the Good Samaritan, be precisely what we require in our community just now, and maybe in our country as well? Don’t the words of Jesus speak into our world in startling ways as well?
When we made the decision to become a sanctuary congregation, and when we received Mariano Cardoso into sanctuary, I heard from a number of individuals who were concerned about upholding the law, and who thought that we were flouting the rule of law by accepting immigrants into our care. I’m sympathetic to those concerns, because like Calvin, like the ancient Hebrews, I sense the goodness and beauty of the law. Not only that, I’m keen to point out that offering sanctuary isn’t breaking the law at all, but rather extending the law, allowing the law time to do its work. Even so, in each of those conversations, it’s the parable of the Good Samaritan that I come back to, a slanted and enchanted tale that asks us to consider the limits of the law, that instructs us to find the ultimate fulfillment of the law in acts of mercy. Given the choice, given the impasse between the law and mercy, wouldn’t Jesus have us choose mercy?
One final thought: might it be that within each of us there’s an Inspector Javert, or a priest, or a Levite, that requires a kind of order to the world? Might it be that we can each of us become trapped in a firm rigidity that prevents us from attending to our neighbors, and ourselves? And might it be that within each of us there’s a Jean Valjean, a Samaritan, a Jesus, ready to transgress the law for the sake of mercy? I sense those twin poles within me. I wonder if you sense them within you. What would it mean to treat the battered and broken and vulnerable parts of yourself with mercy, rather than judgment? Would the stars cease to turn in the sky? Would the order of the world collapse? Or would it free you to identify with those burdened by the weight of the law, and to offer them a little mercy as well. I can’t and won’t say for you. But isn’t Jesus on to something when he tells the truth, but tells it slant? Couldn’t the world use some mercy from time to time? Couldn’t you use a little mercy?
