FINDINGS II
Proper
10 - C - July 11, 2010
Luke 10: 25-37
 By Harry T. Cook
7/05/10
RUBRIC
Among the best known passages of religious literature are
the verses of Luke that constitute what is known as "the parable of the Good
Samaritan." It is of the best known because it is a compelling story to the
plot of which people of all sorts and conditions can relate and do relate. Like
the classic parable, it means one thing at one time and one thing at another.
It means one thing now, but it will mean something different next time around.
One thing it doesn't mean is that the priest and his acolyte, the Levite, were
bad people. They were just trying to get to where they had to go to do what it
was they were obligated to do, and if it was what we think, i.e. some kind of
ritual task, they could not have done it had they dealt with bloody casualty or
death.
The parable hangs there in spatial and temporal suspension,
just as a dissonant chord awaits resolution that does not come. The hearer is
invited to resolve it if and as he can -- or not.
WORKSHOP
Talk about midrash. Talk about the living word. With this
passage of eight concise verses, we come to Luke at the gospel's finest moment
as it shows how near the "rule of God" can be when and where it is least
expected. The so-called Parable of the Good Samaritan (a title given to the
passage by 18th Century English bible editors and publishers) is Luke's
imaginative extension of a colloquy between Jesus and a lawyer reported in some
form by all three synoptic gospels.
In the Matthean version, it is a Pharisee and in Mark a
scribe. At issue in the exchange is in Matthew which of the 613 commandments of
Torah is the greatest, in Mark which commandment is the first and in Luke what
must be accomplished to inherit eternal life - that term meaning not life
without end but life in its fullest possibilities here and now, a matter of
breadth and depth rather than mere length. The answer in each case is the
commandment to love God first and foremost and the admonition to love neighbor
as self (Leviticus 19:18) At Luke 10:27 Deuteronomy 6:5 is cited.
Luke handles the inquiry differently than Mark and Matthew
in having Jesus turn the question back upon the lawyer: v. 26, "What is written
in the law? How do you read it?" It may remind one of a Supreme Court justice
questioning a lawyer before the bar. But the lawyer is not about to allow his
questioner (in this case Luke's Jesus) to make a point at his expense and so poses
another question wanting to justify his initial inquiry, which was not a stupid
question, given the sometimes bitter divisions between and among different
strains of folk in the Levant. In the end, the lawyer was not dumb. He knew the
answer to Jesus' post-parable counter question: "Which of these three, do you
think, was the neighbor to him who fell among thieves?"
The lawyer, presumably associated in some way with the
scribes and Pharisees, could probably not bring himself to speak the word
"Samaritan." And that is one unmistakable point of the parable. "Samaritan =
neighbor? Impossible."
Under "the rule of God," that is to say a world in which the
Hillel Doctrine of not doing to another what one hates, neighbors are not made
by distinctions or discrimination among class, clan, kith and kin. Neighbors
are made at the intersection of need and resource. The late George Arthur
Buttrick wrote of this parable, "People may live divided only by a narrow wall,
and yet not be neighbors. People may live with no intervening wall, and yet not
be neighbors."*
What results when need is served by available resource
unstintingly provided is what the gospels call "the rule of God," as if the
commandments mellowed into the humanist ethic credited by the same gospels to
Jesus of Nazareth. When the lawyer asked what he needed to do to inherit
eternal life (as if it were already his by will and testament), he was asking
what was necessary to realize "the rule of God." The answer was breaking down
such barriers as exist between, say, Samaritans and Judeans.
What was true of that barrier during the first century C.E.
was that Judeans thought of themselves as pure Jews as opposed to the
Samaritans to the north whose ancestors had intermarried with Assyrians in
earlier centuries. To the Judean, therefore, the Samaritan was tref -- unclean.
But the Samaritan of the parable was unconcerned with such barriers and fell to
the task at hand with the man who was left half dead.
As has been observed above, the story is not a polemic
against priests and their assistants over matters of ritual propriety. To avoid
rendering himself unfit for priestly activity, a priest could only bury members
of his immediate family. The Levite, a member of a kind of "associate priest"
class, would have been under similar restrictions. Is Luke saying that such
restrictions are invalidated by emergent need? Or is it a more general
head-shaking, inviting the inference that no job is so vital that a person on
the way to doing it should not stop to lend a hand?
The parable does not reveal anything about the Samaritan's
identity than that he was of and from Samaria with all the perceived faults
attendant upon his origin.
Either way, the Samaritan might have had nothing to lose in
any formal, cultic sense by coming to the unfortunate robbery victim's aid.
Though thinking of that road from Jerusalem down to Jericho with its drop of
almost 1800 feet over a mere dozen miles through crag and rocky paths, why
wouldn't the robbers of Luke's imagination be lurking for another victim upon
whom to pounce? So risk of self well-being was an issue.
What in Luke's imagination would have been the motivation
for the Samaritan to turn aside to administer First Aid? And then to convey the
victim to a hostel and then to leave the equivalent of two days' wages to
support him with a promise to return with more if needed?
By indirection, Luke answered his own question thus: Those
with little to lose or who wear what they have lightly enough that to risk
losing some or even all of it are the kind of people who can turn a crime scene
into a neighborhood. "Go and do likewise," is what Jesus is made to say to the
lawyer, who surely must have been sorry he ever asked his question in the first
place.
* The Parables of Jesus,
Harpers, 1928, p. 152
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
If it is accurate to say that this parable hangs, as suggested
above, in spatial and temporal suspension like a dissonant chord awaiting
resolution, how shall it be resolved? Or can it be?
In 2010 the possibilities for resolution are as numerous and
they are nearly impossible to imagine.
How does the abyss separating the aspirations of the Israeli
from those of the Palestinian get bridged? How can the conflicting views of
life held on the one hand by the Arab or Pakistani jihadi obtain concurrent
with those of the typical middle-class American Christian? How can the
political analysis of the socialist-leaning Democrat be reconciled with those
of staunch political and economic conservatives?
The barrier between Samaritan and Judean (if that is the
division Luke was thinking of) was crossed and removed in a simple act of
kindness and mercy by what have been risky in more ways than one. For a Judean
to be so tenderly cared for by a Samaritan would have involved touching. For
the Samaritan thus to stop and occupy himself as he is depicted as having done
was to expose himself to the same lot as the one he was trying to save. To part
with two days' worth of wages was then and would be today no small investment
in the life of a stranger who would under ordinary circumstances consider the
agent of his deliverance a dirty dog.
I go out on the proverbial limb here to say how I choose to resolve
the dissonance at least as I compose this essay in the late Spring of 2010. At
this writing I will say that in Luke's imagination, the Good Samaritan must
have been the avatar of all the human potential for good and loveliness Luke
believed was realizable. And if it could be manifest on a lonely and perilous
mountain pass infested with robbers who cared not whence their loot, it could
be manifest anywhere -- meaning that emergent need trumps ideology and racial,
cultural, social and economic identity.
It sounds good, but I cannot resolve the chord. It remains
suspended in judgment of the unable and unwilling.
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