Luke 10: 25-37
Preached by Rev. Dr.
Jason Haddox
George Zimmerman was
found innocent of the death of Trayvon Martin yesterday in Florida. He was not found guilty on a lesser
charge. He was judged altogether
innocent of wrongdoing by the jury. And
yet he pulled the trigger that took the life of another human being. No matter what the motivation was, no matter
what he imagined he was doing in that moment, no matter what the judge and jury
and media have said, nothing in heaven or on earth can undo that act. And it was an act motivated by racial
division. Whatever fear and anxiety was
at work that day in that neighborhood to bring those events to pass, the
divisions and fears of race and class were present. For that is who we are, as a people. It is in the air we breathe. It is part of our life together, part of the
culture in which we live. “Us and Them,”
however we draw the lines. Have mercy,
Lord, for we are sinners in your sight.
This morning Jesus is
asked by an expert teacher of the Hebrew scriptures and traditions, “How may I
inherit zohn aionion (Greek). The phrase is translated “eternal life”, but
it might also be translated “the life of eternity.” The question has to do with the present: how does a person participate in that way of
life NOW, never mind sometime later after death. This question is about the Kingdom of God,
which Jesus has been proclaiming and enacting all along—how does one enter into
that living reality? In other words, how
does one live “in the world, but not of the world” as we know it? And is that even possible?
Jesus answers not by
listing “Do this, that and the other thing” but by asking another
question: “What do you read, O thou
expert in the scriptures and the traditions?
You know the book as well as I do.”
This scholar of the scriptures and traditions replies with words taken
from two separate locations in the Hebrew Bible: Love God with everything you are (Deut.
6:4-5); love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18).” Very good, Jesus replies. You get 100% on the quiz!
But then our resident
know-it-all asks another question: “Who is my neighbor?” The implied question-behind-the-question is
“Who is NOT my neighbor? Who can I
ignore--who am I allowed to cut from the guest list?” Jesus does not answer the question; instead
he tells a story.
The idea of a Good (or
better, Merciful or Neighborly) Samaritan is, for Jesus’
audience that day, an absolute contradiction in terms. The enmity between Samaritans and the people
of Jerusalem and Judea went back for centuries—they had as little to do with
one another as possible. They were
distantly related, many generations in the past, but now they had no use for
one another and often went out of their way to avoid interacting with each
other.
Jesus tells a story of a
man traveling in dangerous territory, who was attacked, mugged, beaten, and
left for dead. Those community leaders,
both religious and secular, who saw this man and should have stopped to help
one of their own, kept on walking. The
person who by all societal norms would have been expected to walk on by,
perhaps even with a gesture of disdain, sees what has happened, stops, and goes
to great lengths to help the man, naked and half-dead, who had fallen into the
hands of robbers. This is scandalous,
even disgusting! It’s not supposed to
work that way! Both Jesus and his
hearers know that—and that is exactly the point.
In telling the story of
a Samaritan who does the deeds of a neighbor, Jesus turns his hearers’
treasured stereotype on its head. The
Samaritan, the hated enemy of all who heard that parable, embodies what it
means to be a person of “zohn aionion”;
he is the one who demonstrates what it means to be neighbor; he is the one who
does the deeds, and lives in the way, the domain, the eternal life of God’s
kingdom, even on an isolated desert road, vulnerable, surrounded by danger and
uncertainty. He is not merely being kind
to another person (as good a thing as that may be); he embodies God’s kingdom
come, on earth as it is in heaven.
Christ, the Word of God Incarnate, points to one assumed to be utterly
incapable of even knowing the truth of God as the only one who understands it
at all.
And take note: Jesus himself will shortly be given into the
hands of those who will beat him, strip him, and leave him for dead along a
public roadside. In a sense Jesus is
telling this story on himself. He will
be the one, there on the side of the road, beaten and bloodied. Who is it then that will show pity to Jesus
in his sufferings? Where does one
discover Jesus in his sorrows?
We find Jesus in every
place of suffering and sorrow. In all
those situations, in all those lives, that are broken and hurting and
half-dead. The big obvious ones on the
nightly news; the little tiny ones we ignore and hurry past on the street or
the sidewalk. Jesus is there, in all of
that mess. And that is where
Jesus—hiding, disguised as one of the least, the lost, the insignificant and
the dead—looks for us to meet him.
Jesus is there even in
our own brokenness and pain and death—all the little deaths, on the way to the
big final one. And when we ourselves are
hurting and broken and half-dead or worse, Jesus comes and finds us, in ways
and in the appearance of neighbors, perhaps even Merciful Enemies, who may be
surprising, or even distressful or unwelcome to us.
Because we don’t like
letting go of control. We want to know
who’s in and who’s out. We want to know
with certainty where the lines between “Our People” and “Them People” lie. We live our lives trying to manage our own
lists of acceptable and unacceptable, worthy and unworthy. “Who is my neighbor?” we ask, along with the
expert in the law and traditions this morning.
Jesus gives him—and us—no answer, but a story.
I want to tell you a
story. A confession, in fact.
In the spring of 2010 I
was living in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a comfortable suburban area just a short
train ride from New York City. One
afternoon I walked downtown to do some errands, and was returning home when I
realized someone was walking behind me.
I glanced back and saw a young man, in his late teens or early twenties,
walking maybe eight or ten feet behind me at about the same speed as I. We were on a sidewalk beside a busy major
street in broad daylight. I had no
reason to be anxious or nervous, but I suddenly realized that I was both of
those things. I wondered as I walked:
“Why do I feel uneasy in this situation?”
And it hit me like a slap in the face: because of the color of this
young man’s skin. I was white; he was
black. And that was all it took to cause
me to wonder…and I was horrified.
Horrified that I had thought such thoughts and felt such feelings, even
subconsciously; horrified that there was THAT in me that would create such an
imagined scenario. Without a single
justifiable reason, I had glanced once over my shoulder at this young man and
judged him. I had assumed him to be a
potential threat.
I went home that
afternoon and cried. For myself, and for
him, and for all of us. Because we’ve
been trained, you and I, and all of us.
“You’ve got to be carefully taught,” as the words of Oscar Hammerstein
II in the musical South Pacific
remind us—to fear those who are different, who are strange, who are “not our
kind of people.” This fear and suspicion of one another is not natural; it is
taught and learned and reinforced. And
it can be otherwise. It can be
different. We can learn to live another
way, according to a different set of priorities. Jesus tells the story of an enemy who is a
neighbor, to shock his hearers into seeing that the lines we draw around
ourselves, to protect ourselves and hold one another at arms’ length are not
God’s lines. And then he goes to the
cross, where he opens his arms, to show us how generous, how deep and broad and
high the wide-embracing circle of God’s love really is.
What is your story? Of a time, a person, a situation, that
shattered some belief you had held about “them people”? That caught you up by the scruff of the neck
and demanded something—that what you’d always thought, or been told by those
around you, could not be thought, could not be held as true, any more? That drew the circle wider than you’d ever
imagined it could be?
This is metanoia. This is the place of the turning, where the
armor of supposed knowledge we build for ourselves breaks, and the zohn aionion, the life in eternity, the
Kingdom of God, can break in and take us over.
My sisters and brothers,
may it be so for us. May it be so among
us.
No comments:
Post a Comment