Hard News

Text: Luke 10:25-37

Purity rules, like taboos, exist for two reasons: for identity and for safety. People who obey the same cultural rules and agree on what is nice and what is disgusting are my people. My people are the ones who obey the law. The law they obey is the one that they established. Other people obey other laws. Those people are not my people. Their rules seem foolish or evil, sometimes.

We, my people, all obey the same rules because they separate the world into two kinds of things: Things that I know are safe and things that are maybe not safe. Things that we do or avoid because the law demands it are safe. Other things might or might not be safe. The point is: I don’t know. I don’t know if they are. Therefore I avoid them, for good reason.

The same thing applies to people as to things. People who are not my people might not be safe. They might be, but I don’t know. I do know, or suspect, they don’t follow the same, safety-proven, rules. People who are my people I call neighbors. People who are not my people I call aliens. Or foreigners. People who have foreign—different—rules. They are not exotic and desirable. They are potentially unsafe and scary.

Purity rules—sometimes called holiness codes—are therefore less an issue for a dominant, powerful, ruling culture. Such a culture is less fearful. An oppressed, weak, occupied culture is, rightly, more fearful. When something bad happens to a powerful culture—9/11, financial weakness, inability to control nature and nations—that culture too begins to wonder: who is the alien and who is my neighbor.

The man who approaches Jesus, who is described as a lawyer in our Bible, might be called a rule expert. The Bible makes him sound a little like a jerk. But if on the one hand we give him the benefit of the doubt, he has a legitimate concern. He wants to know who is safe, in the way I’ve been talking about. He knows that the rules say that everyone should love their neighbor (it is in Leviticus, chapter 18). Loving a neighbor is safe. But it sounds safer if there are fewer neighbors. And besides, it is less of a nuisance. So, Jesus, what does God have to say about this?

If on the other hand we don’t give the benefit of the doubt to the lawyer, then we might say he is trying to get Jesus to tell him how far he might go. He does not want to know so much whom he should love. He wants to know whom he does not need to love. Whom can he exploit, or ignore, or be excused from being kind to? In that way he is like a child who wants to know the exact letter of the law so that he can find a way to do what he wants without violating it. What he can get away with. Who exactly is it that I don’t have to love?

Jesus, being kind of a lawyer himself, and wily in the ways of argument, instead of answering tells a story.

There is a man by the side of the road, beaten and left for dead. Two guys walk by, see the man, and do nothing. The third man does something. That is the first point of the story. What God asks seems, in light of the story, to have nothing to do with what you think or believe or profess. It has to do with what you do. This story is about doing. What shall I do, asks the lawyer at the beginning. Do this, says Jesus. Go and do likewise. The two men who pass by don’t do anything bad. Their fault is that they don’t do anything at all. The man who does help sees the injured man, is moved with compassion, and goes to him.

If that were the whole story, it would be a moral tale, but kind of boring. Being nice is better than not. What makes it interesting is that the two men who do nothing are neighbors of the injured man. At least by the definition we are using. He is their people and they are his. But the other guy, the one who helps, is a Samaritan.

What is important to know here is that the Samaritans and the Jews—that’s who the others were—Samaritans and the Jews were really enemies. They hated and feared each other. They burned each other’s buildings. It was not safe for a Samaritan to walk in Judea or the other way around. This was not like Minnesotans and North Dakotans. Not a friendly rivalry. If you asked either one who was their neighbor, you’d get an answer like: Anybody but him. So the story that Jesus tells is very shocking. It is hard to imagine what the other Samaritans would have thought of the Good Samaritan, who was by their lights not good at all, if they had known.

For he cared for an enemy. And really cared for, spending about $400 equivalent on a hotel room, with promises of more. Aiding and abetting.

Who is your neighbor? I mean, actually. That person who lives next door or down the street. In our world, and especially in the city, neighbors are people who are close geographically. They live near each other. Saying that someone is your next-door neighbor conveys real information. People can imagine it. Your neighborhood is a special place. But neighbors also tend to be alike in ways that a random assortment of people might not be. They might be alike in income, or lack of it, or education, or whether they have children, or how much they can spend on housing. Brattle Street is not the same neighborhood as East Cambridge. So in some sense every neighborhood is an exclusive one. When people come into the neighborhood from outside the neighborhood, people can tell and are suspicious. Even modern neighborhoods in a diverse city have a sense of identity and safety.

Neighborliness can trump culture. There was a story in the paper last week about a neighborhood that was originally made up of Italian immigrants. But gradually people from Mexico moved in. This particular neighborhood was in New York; the same thing is happening in East Boston. But living side by side did not overcome people’s fear. The Italians and the Mexican were not each other’s people. They did not feel safe with one another. But during the World Cup four years ago, the Mexican team was defeated in an early round. When the Italian team won, the Mexican neighbors ran down the streets waving Italian flags, shouting “We won! We won!”

This is a happy story. But the point of Jesus’ story is that neighborliness is not sufficient. Shared values, even ones acquired by proximity, interest, and affection over time as with the Italians and Mexicans, are not the answer to the lawyer’s question. Who is your neighbor goes beyond the neighborhood.

Who was the neighbor, Jesus asks the lawyer. The one who showed mercy, the lawyer says. Scholars complain that the lawyer hates the Samaritans so much that he can’t even say the name. That may be so, but it seems to me that lawyer has found the general conclusion in the particular story. Neighbors are people who show kindness to each other, and who accept kindness from each other. If the lawyer wants to know whom he can pass by, this is bad news. Because if he is to follow this great commandment, the answer is that he can pass by no one. And that he must be kind to everyone. This is the second point of Jesus’ story.

This is not easy. It is much easier to know right from wrong, which in itself is not so easy. But knowing what is right and wrong has a lot to do with the codes and laws that we talked about.

Being kind does not. Doing kindness does not. For the men who passed by the man who was robbed and beaten, somehow their definition of what was good did not compel them to love another person as they loved themselves.

Do not do what those men did, says Jesus to the lawyer. You cannot pass by. Be kind to all people, even those who are not your people. Go, do as the story says.

This is not easy. The world is not safe. If we want safe, that’s OK, but that’s not a value that we’ll find in the Gospel, not something that we’ll find in the words of Jesus. Not a Christian value.

Perhaps the man should have asked: Who is my God? We are commanded by God to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we are taught by Jesus that that means everybody. If our God is the God of the Bible, and if we believe both our God and believe Jesus, we are in trouble. There is no one to whom we can deny kindness.

And if everybody is our neighbor, who can be our enemy? And if everybody is our neighbor, who will be the alien? And if everybody is our neighbor, who is the foreigner?