Proper 10C; Deut. 30:9-14; Luke 10:25-37 St. Paul’s, Smithfield 7/10/2016

Jim Melnyk: “The Parable of the Merciful Enemy”

As twenty-first century Christians, we have lost – or perhaps never fully understood – the scandal of today’s parable from Luke’s gospel – the parable we know so well as “The Parable of the Good Samaritan.”  We misread the parable on so many settings – mostly because we are twenty-first century Christians rather than first century Jews.  But to hear the powerful meaning this story – this parable – was meant to evoke from those hearing it for the first time, we need to listen with first century ears – or rather with twenty-first century ears tuned to another time and place – and when this is done, we may find ourselves calling this wonderful parable by a new title.

To begin with, the lawyer in the story is less than sincere in his approach to Jesus.  He knows the answer before he asks the question, and rather than looking for a way of life that leads toward righteousness, his choice of verb tense implies a desire for an item that he can do once and get it over with – something he can check off his to do list.  “Tell me something I can do to be done with my obligations before God.”  His question, “And who is my neighbor?” is meant to limit his obligation further – to identify those with whom he does not need to interact in a righteous manner.  Jesus will give him an answer that stuns the lawyer so completely he all but loses his voice.

We know the lawyer understands the centrality of what we have come to call the Great Commandment: The command to love God with every fiber of our being, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  As someone conversant with Torah, he would also understand the fuller context of both parts of that commandment.  In Deuteronomy the command to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength cannot be separated from the understanding that nothing in our lives can stand above and beyond God, and that these words should be fixed on our hands and on our foreheads – we might say as Episcopalians, “grafted inwardly on our hearts” – and taught diligently to our children.  In Leviticus, the command to love our neighbor – that is those with whom we have immediate connections and friendships – cannot be separated from the command to love the alien in the land as if he or she were a citizen among us – for Israel knows full-well what it means to sojourn as an alien – as a stranger – in a foreign land. 

In a twenty-first century world that demands a religious-like allegiance to people, causes, and things – and in a world that embraces fear of the stranger – the alien – the sojourner – sometimes – sometimes, with good reason – we need to tune our ears differently to hear the scandalous messages of Scripture.  And all too often I’m afraid we’re unwilling or too anxious to take that risk.

Then there’s the parable itself: and in it the priest and the Levite both fail to stop for the dying man.  We often are told their failure to stop has something to do with a fear of becoming ritually impure if they were to touch what they think may be a dead body.  This is false on several levels.  First of all, they were both going down from Jerusalem, so their temple duties would have been finished and any need for ritual purification would not have hindered them in any way.  And neither Jesus nor Luke makes any excuse for the two based on a fear of “uncleanness” or “purity.”  “Nor would any excuse be acceptable,” writes Amy Jill Levine, who is both a New Testament Scholar and a faithful Jew.  The responsibility of the priest and the Levite is “to save a life; [and in this] they failed.”  Levine continues, “Saving a life is so important that Jewish Law mandates that it override every other concern, including keeping the Sabbath” (Short Stories by Jesus, 2014, p 94) – one of the very things Jesus teaches.

People hearing the parable would have expected the third person coming along the road to be an Israelite who will set right the surprising inaction by the priest and Levite.  But Jesus, as is his regular practice, throws his listeners a curve ball.  The person who stops is a Samaritan – an enemy of Israel – and it is the Samaritan who acts with the divine attribute of mercy – it’s the Samaritan who acts the way God is expected to act (ibid 105).

Perhaps the best explanation for everyone’s actions in the story was suggested in a sermon by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  He preached, “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me.  It’s possible these men were afraid…. And so the first question that the priest and the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’… But the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”  Levine reminds us that shortly after that sermon, King went to Memphis to stand alongside the striking sanitation workers, and was assassinated” (ibid 94).

Amy Jill Levine’s biting insights give us an almost perfect translation for today, updating the identity of the figures in a way that speaks to our experience.  “I am an Israeli Jew on my way… to Jericho,” she begins, “…I am attacked…and left half dead in a ditch.  Two people who should have stopped to help pass me by: the first, a Jewish military medic…; the second, a member of [The Episcopal Palestine Israel Network].  But the person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas, a political party whose charter…anticipates Israel’s destruction….” (ibid105-106)

In other words, we have met the enemy – and he has showed us mercy!  Those whom we believe should know better have left us hanging – and the one we fear and despise is the one who acts with the mercy of God.  The parable concludes with this incredibly shocking and scandalous twist – and we should hear it in a way that should catch us up just as short as it caught up and scandalized the original audience. 

And so perhaps a better title for this story – for this parable – for this teaching – is “The Parable of the Merciful Enemy,” and I am willing to bet it is a difficult rendering, at one level or another, for all of us to hear.  In the end, Jesus seems to say, “loving God and loving neighbor cannot exist in the abstract: they need to be enacted” (ibid105) – they need to be embodied.

This has been a terrible week for our nation, and many of us have found ourselves weeping over the violence and the loss of so many lives. Who is our neighbor in all of the confusion of today?  Our neighbor is the person shot under questionable circumstances during police stops in places like Falcon Heights, MN and Baton Rouge, Louisiana – stops which normally don’t require deadly force.  Our neighbor is also the fearful police officer pulling the trigger.  Who is our neighbor today?  Our neighbor is the innocent policeman helping to keep the peace in places like Dallas, Texas or Ballwin, Missouri, who is gunned down in an arbitrary act of vengeance.  Our neighbor is also the angry, misguided person senselessly pulling the trigger.  Our world is broken.  In some ways it is broken beyond our wildest imaginings.  The poet Warsan Shire writes:

“later that night

I held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.”

Who is our neighbor?  Everyone – everyone is our neighbor, and we, with all of our many varying and conflicting emotions are their neighbors as well.  And we need to find a place of healing in the midst of all this brokenness.  It begins with listening to one another; it begins with telling the truth; it begins with respecting one another as people created in the image and likeness of God.  And we find through this parable that Jesus wasn’t kidding when he tells us we need to love not just our neighbor, but our enemy as well.  And I, because I know my own self, I know that is scary!

It’s in this unexpected place that we find the Good News of the Gospel.  It may be likely that on more than one occasion in our lives there have been people whom we might not name as an “enemy,” but at least as an outsider, who have given us unexpected help or support.  We might find that someone whom we might never have expected to “be there for us” in a time of need, is actually alongside us.  Or perhaps even we have been the one least expected to help or support someone, and yet our hearts are moved to act.

In the midst of all the stories of great atrocities which grab the headlines these days, we miss the stories of Muslims guarding Churches in Syria during services, or Christians doing the same for their Islamic sisters and brothers.  We miss the stories of inner city neighbors hugging weeping police officers, and caring police officers watching over hurting citizens. This is grace in action.  This is Good News.  This is how we begin to heal a broken world.

Jesus teaches us over and over again that our common humanity is part and parcel of the Good News of God.  In parable after parable, or in act of mercy after act of mercy, Jesus invites us to enact – to embody – love of God and love of neighbor in our daily lives.  We might ask ourselves, using twenty-first century ears and hearts, in the days to come, “Like the wounded person alongside the road, how and where do we need God to stop and meet us?  And like the Samaritan, how is God calling each of us to stop and embody this kind of love with and for one another?”