Watch this
homily! (begins at 36:31)
What’s
required to inherit eternal life? That’s the question posed to Jesus by
a scholar of the law in today's Gospel. Luke tells us that the question
was asked in order to test Jesus. Jesus does what good teachers often
do, he answers the question by asking a further question.
He
asks the scholar, what do you think? How do you read the law. The answer
is right on. The scholar quotes Deuteronomy about how we are to love God
with every part of our being, and he quotes Leviticus on how we are to
love our neighbor as ourself.
Jesus affirms him and says, “…do
this and you will live.” But remember, this is a test. So the scholar
presses Jesus. In order to “justify himself,” Luke tells us, he asks,
“And who is my neighbor?”
At the end of the story I wonder if
the scholar had wished he would have just let it be. But, he couldn’t.
He was testing Jesus, and so he pressed him with this further question.
And thank goodness he did.
What follows is a parable that would
have challenged the scholar, and Jesus’ listeners. It should challenge
us too. If it doesn’t then we haven’t really understood it. Jesus uses
the Parable of the Good Samaritan to answer the question, “Who is my
neighbor?”
Long before Jesus, in the formative days of the
Jewish people, Moses had said that the command of the Lord was not
remote or difficult to understand. The command, which would assure their
intimate relationship with God and assure their own flourishing as a
people, was written on their very hearts. All they had to do was carry
it out.
Hundreds of years later, the scholar of the law asks
another religious leader how to do that, how to carry out this law that
is written on our hearts. And so, he presses Jesus – who is my neighbor?
As a legal expert, this man would have interpreted the word
“neighbor” as applying to his fellow Jews, and everyone else as “other.”
But the parable Jesus tells demanded a much more universal and inclusive
understanding of who one’s neighbor is.
There was deep and long
lasting resentment between Jews and Samaritans. Jesus chose a shocking
person to illustrate his point about being a neighbor. For historical
reasons, Jews saw Samaritans as heretics, and would go out of their way
to avoid them.
Given the animosity that existed between them,
we can imagine that a parable which portrayed a Samaritan as a hero and
their own religious officials as less than heroic would have been hard
for many of Jesus’ listeners to swallow.
But Jesus did not back
off. He made it clear that those who claimed to love and believe in God
would have to live out that love by similarly loving their neighbor.
This love would apply to anyone in need of compassion and care.
For this parable to carry the same weight and have the same impact some
twenty centuries after its original telling, we have to be willing to
apply it in a modern setting that challenges us. If we don’t, then we
dilute the challenge that Jesus intends.
So who is it, what
category of people do we feel comfortable excluding as a neighbor who we
must love as we love ourselves? Perhaps it is the person on the street
who is incoherent because of drugs, the person who identifies with the
“other” political party, the one who identifies as transgender, or, the
most common “other” today, the immigrant who is here without papers, or…
and you can fill in the blank.
For this parable to carry the
weight that was originally intended by Jesus, we have to ask ourselves
what would it be like if this “other” were the hero of the story?
Notice that at the end of this parable Jesus changes the question. The
scholar had asked, “Who is my neighbor?” At the end of the parable Jesus
asks, “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the
robber’s victim?”
The scholar replies, “The one who treated him
with mercy.” He can’t even bring himself to name the Samaritan. But
Jesus makes clear this despised one is the model to follow. “Go and do
likewise,” he says.
The twentieth century Lutheran theologian
and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, once wrote, “Neighborliness is not a
quality in other people; it is simply their claim on us. We have
literally no time to sit and ask ourselves whether so-and-so is our
neighbor or not. We must get into action and obey: we must behave like a
neighbor to them” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament to Freedom, Harper
Collins, San Francisco: 1995).
In Bonhoeffer’s day, he was
critiquing “cheap grace,” and calling for a costly and and active faith
that demands obedience and sacrifice. He would eventually give his life
in opposing a mindset that demonized a certain group of people, Jewish
people, and treated them, not as neighbor, but as other. He called upon
good people, faith-filled people, to not sit back, but to behave like a
neighbor to those who were suffering.
Today, we are called to
do the same. We are called to be neighbor to those who are suffering. We
are called to serve them, to bind up their wounds - wounds that are a
result of them being treated as “other.” This is a personal challenge
for each one of us as we strive to grow in our love of God and neighbor.
And it is a challenge for us as a community of faith. The
Parable of the Good Samaritan invites us to advocate for those who are
treated as “other” by our society, and even sometimes by our Church.
Direct service to those who are wounded, and advocacy to change systems
that inflict wounds and create “otherness,” was the challenge in Jesus’
day, in Bonhoeffer’s day, and it is the challenge in our day.
Thank goodness that scholar of the law pressed the issue with Jesus, and
asked, “Who is my neighbor?”
My friends, the Lord has written
the answer to that question in our hearts. And the answer is clear. It
is not remote or mysterious. Deep down we know it. My neighbor is anyone
who is in need, and we are called to treat them with mercy, and to love
them as we love ourselves. That’s what God commands.
If we want
to truly live, all we have to do is carry it out.
Father Gary F. Lazzeroni, Pastor
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