July 11, 2010

A Manageable Task

A message delivered by Scott R. Cooper

St. Andrews Episcopal Church, Prineville, Oregon

July 11, 2010

This morning’s gospel is the parable of the Good Samaritan.

It is easily one of the most familiar passages in the Bible—the subject of sermons and Sunday school for sure but also the subject of great art, movies, poems and songs and lots of other secular attention.

Gary Cooper made a film called “Good Sam” in 1948 about a man who gave help to others at the expense of his own family. More recently, the popular TV show, NCSI titled an episode, “The Good Samaritan.”

Rembrandt and Van Gogh, among others, painted The Good Samaritan. Rembrandt’s picture is a rather dull composition of the poor Samaritan being lifted from a saddle horse at the inn. Van Gogh reversed the image and shows the Jewish trader lifting the Samaritan on to the horse in a brightly colored scene that looks a lot like something Meredith or Cecily might have painted.

Clearly, this is a story that resonates across the ages. So let’s take a moment before we delve into it and go back and review the basics of what it is all about.

Here’s the plot synopsis. Follow closely, because the story has an interesting twist, being as it is a story within a story.

For starters, a lawyer asks Jesus, what he must do to inherit eternal life.

This seemingly innocent question is yet another example of the learned and privileged class of elites in ancient Israel trying to cleverly trick Jesus into saying something heretical.

But once again, Jesus doesn’t take the bait. Instead he turns the tables on the lawyer and asks him, “What does the law say?” Now it is the lawyer who has to tread carefully?

But being a lawyer, he does that pretty well, and he responds with two commandments from the Torah that would have passed muster with any rabbi: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

Jesus affably agrees, and the lawyer, embarrassed at being outsmarted by the carpenter, tries for a recovery. “Who is my neighbor?” he asks.

That brings Jesus to his story of the Good Samaritan: It seems that a good Jewish man was descending the steep, dangerous and winding road that descends from Jerusalem to Jericho when, as often happened on that road, he was descended upon by robbers, stripped, beaten and left for dead. Moment later along comes a priest, who upon seeing what has happened crosses to the other side of the road to avoid involvement. A Levite—a member of the temple choir—comes behind the priest and also passes by. Various scholars excuse these men for their act or heartlessness, pointing out that in orthodox Judaism, contact with a dead body created ritual uncleanliness that could have affected the job performance and prospects of an up-and-coming man of the faith. That’s certainly one possible explanation but it’s equally possibly that the pair didn’t want to get involved or feared suffering a similar fate themselves. Or maybe they just thought the man was dead and there was nothing to be done. Any one of these explanations is possible, and there’s not any point in dwelling on the possibilities.

What we do know is that the next man to come along is a Samaritan. Now Samaritans were different from Jews only in one respect: Whereas Jews thought that God resided in the temple at Jerusalem and should be worshipped there, the Samaritans believed that God was resident at a mountaintop temple called Mt. Gerezim and accordingly they worshipped there. It’s a minor distinction to us, but to the ancient Israelites it was a HUGE difference and one worthy of demoting an entire subgroup of people to inferior status.

Now the amazing thing about this Samaritan—the guy who worships the false God—is that unlike the temple elites—the worshippers of the true god—he stops and does what all pious Jews would normally be expected to do: he cares for the wounded and sick man. He pours oil and wine into his wounds to sterilize them, he loads them onto his animal—probably a donkey or a horse—and he hauls him to the nearest inn where he pays for the man to recover and promises to return in a few days to see if everything has worked out. He does this for a man who probably despises him, he does this at possible risk to his own life in this dangerous mountainous pass and he does this even though he doesn’t know whether the guy he is helping was the victim of a knife fight between thugs, was a hopeless drug addict or was a lazy, unmotivated homeless person who, if he had bothered to look for work, wouldn’t have been on that road to get robbed in the first place!

Jesus says to the lawyer: Now who is the neighbor to the man who fell? The priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan? The lawyer says, “The one who showed him mercy—(note that he can’t bring himself to acknowledge the inferior Samaritan) and Jesus says, “Go and do likewise,” probably provoking applause and murmurs of the approval from the crowd that always seemed to surround Jesus when he was teaching.

I suspect most of you can fairly easily figure out the point that Jesus was making. It’s not exactly deep. In fact, it’s common sense. Don’t over think it, and you’ll be just fine. But what seems perfectly obvious to us here in the pews today apparently wasn’t quite so obvious to the early church. Amazingly, the early church fathers did exactly that: they over-thought the story and tried to turn it into something else entirely.

The fathers of Christian theology—Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Chrysostom, Ambrose and Augustine all believed this story was not a literal admonition of Jesus about how we ought to treat our fellow human beings. Instead, they turned the whole story into a complicated allegory that went something like this:  The man going down the Jerusalem-Jericho road was Adam. The attack on the man represents the fall of Adam. Jerusalem itself is a metaphor for paradise, while Jericho is a metaphor for The World. The robbers who set upon the man represent the hostile forces that tempt us into evil. The priest who passed by was the law. The Levite was the prophets. The Samaritan was Christ himself, because only Christ—not obedience to the law and not the advice of the prophets of Israel—can offer you eternal life. But wait, there’s more! The wounds inflicted on the man are disobedience to God. The wine and oil are the salvation of the man, just as the wine and the bread are the salvation of each of us. The animal upon which the Samaritan placed the wounded man is the Lord’s body who, through sacrifice upon the cross, was the carrier to our salvation. The inn represents the church, which accepts all who wish to enter, the bill for admission having been paid by the Christ-Samaritan figure. The manager of the inn is the head of the church, meaning the pope, to whom the care of the entire flock has been entrusted by the Christ figure, and the Samaritan’s promise to return is Jesus’ promise of his second coming.

This was the way the church taught the Good Samaritan story from at least the fourth century until the advent of the Reformation and the printing press about 1000 years later. If you want visual proof, you need only visit the great cathedrals in Chartes, Bourges and Sen in France, where you look at the great stained glass windows which feature, not coincidentally large panels showing Adam and Eve at the top and the parable of the Good Samaritan at the bottom.

And because the Bible was a forbidden book accessible only to the clergy and because only the clergy were presumed worthy to share the knowledge of the scriptures with the people, no one questioned this interpretation for 1000 years!

Imagine what would happened if they had? Would life in the Dark and Middle Ages still have been “Nasty, Short and Brutish” as someone once described it if common people had incorporated into their thinking the idea that they have a moral obligation to each other—even to their sworn enemies—instead of dismissing this wonderful teaching as an abstract allegory of theology? How many opportunities were missed over ten centuries to do the right thing because pastoral leaders covered up the truth—a truth so simple you and I can grasp it in just a few moments today?

Not surprisingly, this parable and its historical interpretation became Exhibit A for the Reformation preachers. John Calvin took square aim at it, noting “The allegory …is too absurd to deserve refutation.” George Bradford Caird, a 20^th Century Biblical scholar in the Church of England said, “This farrago bears no relationship to the real meaning of the parable.”

It is a fair question why the early church fathers didn’t just take the parable at face value and teach it for what it obviously said. I wasn’t able to find an answer to that question in my research for this sermon, but it is fair to observe that while the concept of the reading is simple, putting it into practice is a little more difficult. It is one thing to say that we ought to love everybody and overlook their social and physical condition and ignore all their hygienic defects, personal vices, dangerous habits and immoral choices; it is quite another thing to do that. Our instinct for self-preservation is as much a gift of God as is the gift of humanity.

So maybe the early church fathers realized that and they were just trying to give us an “out” from having to comply with an unrealistic and unattainable expectation layed out by Jesus. I’m not sure I really wanted to know any different, but the Reformers stripped away my convenient refuge, and now I’ve got to deal with the reality that Jesus probably meant what he said.

So how do I do that?

I think there is a main point worth remembering as we grapple with the idea of putting Good Samaritanship into practice.

Jesus calls us to try to rise above ourselves and to try to be better than ourselves. Jesus’s standard is not perfection. It is doing each day a little better than the day I did before. It is slow and steady progress, not a complete reconstruction of my character overnight. It is pausing to think about the homeless guy with the cardboard plaque and consider doing something instead of just looking the other way and walking on by. It is creating in your head room for doubt that the ex-convict is undeserving of your trust and any opportunity for employment ever again. It is not dismissing out of hand the claim of the formerly drug- or alcohol-addicted parent that they are willing to sober up and be the parent they should have been all along if only the state would return their children to them. It is, in short, being willing to give the second chance, to not assume the worst and to try and limit your judgments of people to what they have the potential to become rather than imprisoning them in our assumptions, our prejudices and our preferences.

Let’s keep in mind, as I bring this to a close, what Jesus said to the trouble-making lawyer who started all this about what it takes to gain eternal life. More precisely, let’s talk about what he did NOT tell him. He did NOT tell him, as he did the rich young man who wanted to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to give away all your worldly possessions. He did NOT tell him, as he did the adulterous woman, “Go and sin NO MORE.” All he said was that if you want eternal life, “Go and show mercy.”

Is that too much to ask? Is mercy all that hard? Considering the mercy God has shown to you, can you find a little more mercy in your heart today—and every day from this day forward—to show to the rest of God’s Creation?

It’s probably a manageable task.

Amen.