Careless Grace

Text: Luke 10:25-37

We bring a lot of baggage to this reading in Luke. That is how it is with scripture. Reading scripture is a conversation between you and the text. The text stays the same. You change a lot. You come with your history, your worries and hopes that depend on current circumstances, the events of the day both global and local. It is no doubt a good thing that this is so. Otherwise, what is the point?

But when we read a familiar story like this one, the conversation can be a little stilted. This story in Luke is certainly one of the best-known stories in the New Testament, and many of us have heard it since we were children. So when we come upon it, we hardly even need to listen to it. It is like your grandfather telling the same joke over and over. Still funny, but we know the punchline. So it does not have the impact it once did. Maybe it is kind of boring, even.

This story is usually known as the Good Samaritan. That is a little misleading, as the word “good” never appears in it. It is not really about his goodness. Some people call it the Merciful Samaritan. That is better, because he is merciful—the text does say that. But there is a lot going on in the story, so we could call it “The Man Who Was Left to Die,” or “The Way to Eternal Life,” or “A Lawyer Learns a Lesson.”

The story is often portrayed as a triumph of grace over law. The lawyer who occasions the story, and the men who pass by the wounded man, are all official students of the law. And the Samaritan is an outsider who acts from kindness.

But compassion for others is a part of the law. That is why we read Leviticus today. We heard a few of a long list of laws. These are the laws given via Moses to the Israelites. There are a lot of them. In Leviticus: 247. Plus many more in Deuteronomy. They all come from God. “I am the Lord your God,” they all end. And one of them is “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The point is that loving your neighbor as yourself is just as much law as the other statutes.

The laws are a part of God’s grace. They provide guidance and comfort in a world of suffering and fear. They are one embodiment of grace. The lawyer is not trying to get out of obeying the law. He is trying to escape the graceful part of it, the part which I’m sure he finds annoying. What he wants is an interpretation that lets him off the hook.

He wants to justify himself, it says. Justify means judge. He wants someone to judge him based on his adherence to some very specific actions. He wants, perhaps, for Jesus to say: it is OK if you do these particular things with these particular people and it is OK if you don’t do these things with these other people. It is OK. You are a good person. God will think you are good person.

The lawyer might, as it seems, be trying to escape some obligation. But he might just want to know what to do. How can he do the right thing if he does not know exactly what the right thing is?

But really. We all do know what to do, don’t we? It is built into us. Loving our neighbor as we love ourselves does not strike us as radical. That is because it makes a lot of sense to human beings. That does not mean it is easy.

Why do we admire the Samaritan in the story Jesus tells (which is a kind of parable) and disdain the two others who walked on by without stopping? Mostly it is because he helps someone who needs help. It makes the story much more dramatic that he does so at his own risk. The Samaritans and the Jews were enemies, at each other as only feuding cousins can be. The Samaritan is in the wrong neighborhood, which makes it dangerous for him. And then he stops to help a Jew. So he would be hated by the Jews for what he is and hated by his fellow Samaritans for what he does.

Yet his compassion—built in compassion, I’d say—compels him to care for a person who lies suffering by the road. We are amazed at the priest and the Levite because they did not.

The Samaritan is merciful, it says, but a more modern way of saying it is that the Samaritan is kind. That kindness is sometimes called Common Grace, meaning grace that is given to all people. People in common, or common people, meaning you do not have to be special to get it. The sun rises on the evil and on the good, and God sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous, it says in Matthew. This unconditional favor is gospel. The Samaritan is filled with Common Grace.

The thing is, we all are. When we focus, as the lawyer seems to, on the exact boundaries of grace, we make things more complicated than they need to be. We can applaud in general the rule of law and ponder who by rights gets what and debate what makes things fair or just. But if we ourselves were in the ditch by the side of the road, beaten and near dying, we would not do that. We would see in an instant and would all agree that the interpretation by the passersby—that their interpretation of the law of God somehow and amazingly does not compel them to love us as themselves.

One way to think about this is to ask: who owns us? If it is primarily the rules, then it is important most of all to be precise. That is what lawyers and scribes—who were the lawyers in Jesus time—are supposed to do. The law—not just the law from Moses but any law—the law makes distinctions. Is this thing or action the thing or action described by such and such a law? If so, one thing happens. If not, another. The law justifies our actions. We are judged by the law. Since we live in a complicated, fluid, and only-human world, making these distinctions is never ending and a lot of work. Plus, the stakes are high—life and death sometimes—so it is even harder. It is important to get it right. The lawyer in the story, living according to this scheme, is right to ask Jesus to be more specific. He wishes to survive. He wishes to reach God.

But if it is primarily gospel, then it is important most of all to be kind. Suffering compels our compassion. In the moment the rest simply does not matter. No rule, no matter how precise—or even no matter how otherwise good—no rule trumps kindness.

The lawyer wishes to be free. He sees better definitions and more exact measurements as the way to get there. “But who is my neighbor?” he asks. For whom can I defer the kindness within me for one reason or another? We make countless good arguments for hesitating, or refusing, to offer help to people in need. What reasons are good enough?

But Jesus will not tell him. Instead, Jesus tells a story. The lawyer like everyone else can see who in the story is doing what should be done. By every thing that can be measured, the Samaritan is the wrong person doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. A foreign law breaker. But even the lawyer admits that it is not time for those measurements. Who is neighborly? Jesus asks. There is only one answer.

It is hard to know who we are in this story. Sometimes we might be the passersby, sometimes the man suffering in the ditch, sometimes the innkeeper, watching, amazed. It is a parable, not an allegory. But for the lawyer the interpretation is precise: if you want the kind of life you seek, be the one who showed kindness.