A Dead Heart?
Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Psalm 25:3-9
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37
Tim
Christoffersen
St. Anselm’s
July 15, 2001
In
his opening words in a sermon several years ago, Bishop Desmond Tutu said,
"I hope you won’t feel like the little girl who asked her priest
father, "Daddy, why do you always pray before you preach a sermon? Daddy
replied, " I’m asking God to help me preach a good sermon."
And the little darling shot back, "And why doesn’t he?"
The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the most widely known stories both
within the Christian community and outside it.
The setting of the story in the gospel reading from Luke today is not as widely
known or understood. The occasion for Jesus to tell the story is in response
to a question put to him by a lawyer or an expert in the Law. When we hear
the word ‘lawyer’ we think of a civil or criminal attorney. We also
probably think of a person clever with words and capable of walking a fine
line with crafty or careful choice of words.
The lawyer in Jesus’ time was one knowledgeable in the Jewish Law of
the Old Testament. There was often ambiguity in the Law on how one was to
act in his or her daily life. The lawyer or expert in the Law was called upon
to interpret and provide the answer.
The social culture of Jesus’ time was also characterized by a system
of "honor and shame." An aspect of that culture would be what we
would call today a game of "one upsmanship." Who could be cleverer
than the next person? Your social behavior toward others was evaluated by
whether it brought honor or shame to your family and your clan. Association
with ‘acceptable’ people brought honor and association with ‘unacceptable’
people brought shame. Given his association with tax collectors, Samaritans,
lepers and women, Jesus was not a candidate for "either honorable or
acceptable man of the year."
The lawyer engaged Jesus in a game of one upsmanship. His first question was
"Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus turned
the question back upon the lawyer by asking him to draw on his expertise in
the Law and say what the Law required. Now almost every Jew in Jesus’
time knew the words from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19: "Hear, O
Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all
your heart and will all your soul and with all your strength" and "Do
not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your
neighbor as yourself."
The lawyer answered with these words and Jesus said to him, "You have
answered correctly. Do this and you shall live."
But the lawyer did not drop the one-upsmanship game at this point. He was
probably a little embarrassed at how Jesus turned the question back upon him
and his own expertise.
The passage says he wanted to justify himself so he asks "And who
is my neighbor?" When I hear the question I think he probably thought
the approved or acceptable people were his neighbors and others were not.
And he was trying to trick Jesus about exactly where the line was drawn between
who is and who is not my neighbor. The general meaning of "neighbor"
in Jesus time was "one who is near." The Pharisees tended to exclude
"ordinary people" from being a neighbor. The Qumran community (the
ascetics who lived in the Judean desert and were the source of the Dead Sea
Scrolls) excluded "sons of darkness." They were anyone who did not
believe as they did.
His attempt to ‘one up’ Jesus backfired a second time. Jesus turned
the question around on the lawyer, and in fact, does not even give him a straightforward
answer. He describes the now familiar responses of the priest, the Levite
and the Samaritan man to the wounded and beaten Jewish man lying by the side
of the road. The question became who was the neighbor to the beaten man. We
all know the story from this point.
The lawyer admits the neighbor was the one who showed compassion. He did not
‘pass by’ on the other side of the road. The Levites were priests
in Israel. The priest was a descendent of Aaron as well as a Levite. Both
were certainly "acceptable" people. The Samaritan was worse than
a pagan in the Israel of Jesus’ day. In our day the word "terrorist"
would come closer to the emotional impact of how a Jew viewed a Samaritan.
It is hard to miss the point. The neighbor is the one who acts. It is not
who you are in the social pecking order. It is what you do with your life
Bishop Desmond Tutu, in a homily to the Episcopal primates on this passage,
said in a time of transition and change, when the landmarks we knew are no
longer so clear, we tend to turn to the unambiguous, straightforward answers.
People do not tolerate those who are different from them in appearance or
values. And so we have an ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, genocide
in Rwanda, and "an impatience with anyone or anything that suggests there
might just be another perspective."
The story of the Good Samaritan becomes personal and emotionally unsettling
for me when I go to San Francisco. The children, the mentally ill, the Vietnam
vets who never recovered are all on the streets begging. I am usually disturbed
both by their situation and because I rarely give money to them. Intellectually,
I know giving a few dollars will not make much difference in their lives but
in my heart I am uneasy.
When I pray about my reaction and my feelings, I feel the Lord brings to my
conscious awareness the patterns in my life. Am I living my life and praying
to be open to God’s will, particularly as I understand it from Jesus’
teachings and his life? This is what Paul is saying to the Colossians in the
reading from today. "We pray for you…asking God to fill you with
the knowledge of his will…that you may live a life worthy of the Lord…bearing
fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God."
A seminary classmate of mine, William Greenlaw, has been an Episcopal priest
for 30 years and is the rector of Holy Apostles, a parish in New York City
that runs a major soup kitchen daily. In a recent sermon, Father Bill said,
"What we can do is incarnate a sense of both justice and mercy in all
that we do and are….We do it because people who are hungry come to us—every
day, a thousand of them. We do it because we have been called to such a ministry
none of us could have devised on our own. We do it as a signal of a different
set of values than ones that define so much of our society. When one hungry
person has been fed…then we have done something of heaven shattering
significance."
I believe we come back to the neighbor being the person who acts. The letter
of James says "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have
faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister
is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I
wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical
needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied
by action, is dead."
AMEN.
