“The Stupid Samaritan”
Luke 10:25-37
July 15, 2007

Did you ever notice how Jesus spent all his time with losers? He used losers in his stories as if they were heroes. He asked losers to be his followers and to carry on his work. And his work was with losers. Even Jesus died as a loser in a humiliating way. Yet somehow, Jesus turned losing into the requirement for winning. If you want to win, first you have to lose. Confusing? You bet. Our world doesn’t work that way.

Take the story of what has been misnamed “The Good Samaritan.” It’s a story about a bunch of losers. A guy gets beat up and robbed by a bunch of crooks. A couple of religious types pass by without helping. And then this man from Samaria comes by, risks getting mugged or killed himself, and spends a fortune on somebody who would probably hate him if he were conscious enough to know what’s going on. Wouldn’t you agree that he was the Stupid Samaritan?

To help us understand this story a little better, I’ve slightly revised it - as if Jesus were telling it here today. It might go like this:

Luke 10:25-37
 
Just then a Sunday School teacher stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” she said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26He said to her, “What is written in the Bible? What do you read there?” 27 She answered, “You shall 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.” 28And he said to her, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” 29

But wanting to prove that she was worthy, she asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30Jesus replied, “A Westcliffe man was going downtown, and fell into the hands of some crazy kids high on drugs who beat him, stripped him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance Rev. Miller from Community United Methodist Church was going downtown; and when he saw him, he slowed down, and said to himself, “There’s nothing I can do for him. I’ll be late to the funeral. I promise to call 911 on my cell phone.” And he passed by. So likewise a devoted member of the Staff-Parish Relations Committee, when she came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side, afraid that she, too, might come to some harm in this neighborhood. But a man recently out on bail because of a meth house investigation in Texsas Creek, came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured the last of his booze on them. Then he put him on his own motorcycle, brought him to a motel in Silver Cliff, and took care of him. 35The next day he took out five hundred dollars, gave them to the motel clerk, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37She said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to her, “Go and do likewise.”

There is much we can learn from this story. I want to concentrate on two questions that I think are at the core of this parable: (1) Who is right with God? And (2) How are we made right with God?

(1) Who is right with God? The one who is like the Stupid Samaritan, in three ways.

a. You can’t always tell the good guys by the color of their hats.

C. S. Lewis - “When we get to heaven, there will be three surprises: First, we will be surprised by the people that we find there, many of whom we surely had not expected to see. The second surprise is that we will be surprised by the people who are absent-the ones we did expect to see but who are not there. The third surprise, of course, will be that we are there.”

Who were the Samaritans? They were descendants of Jews who intermarried with non-Jews—a mixed population occupying land north of Jerusalem since the conquest by Assyria in 722 BCE. Samaritans opposed rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, and constructed their own place of worship on Mount Gerizim. The Jews from Jerusalem considered them ceremonially unclean, social outcasts, religious heretics.

The priest and the Levite in this story were OK, normal guys torn between duty and duty. The dead body could have been a plant by robbers. Contact with it would disqualify them from performing their religious duty.

The Samaritan was the outsider taking a risk in a hostile world, a hostile world that says, “I’m one up if I can keep you one down.”

b. To be right with God is to be a disciple who is radical in self-giving

The Lawyer who was a Biblical expert wanted to define the limits of his service: What is the least I can get by with? Where are the loopholes? How can I prove that I am worthy, justify myself? Who is it that I must love? Can I be selective? Is it the letter of the law or the spirit of the law that takes precedence?

Jesus answered, “There are no limits to whom you are to love, and no limits to how much. Everyone is your neighbor. Their needs are your needs.”

(Robert Farrar Capon) “The Samaritan goes to the man on the ground and binds up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine—all acts of kindness to be sure, but also acts that any normal person would find inconveniencing, distasteful, and depriving, not to mention expensive of both time and resources. Moreover, he puts the man on his own animal, thus effectively dying to his own comfort and to whatever prospects he may have had of accomplishing his journey in good time. Next, he brings him into an inn and takes care of him for the whole night, further interrupting his own progress and frustrating this traveling man’s dearest wish, namely, a peaceful Scotch in the motel bar and an early, quiet bed after a hard day on the road. And as if that weren’t enough, he gets up in the morning, goes down to the front desk, and books the mugging victim in for an indefinite stay, all expenses paid—room, meals, doctors, nurses, medicines, health club, and limo if needed—and no questions asked. Then, if he manages to stay out of court and not be sued by the victim, he goes home to his wife who will be furious because he put some deadbeat’s expenses on their MasterCard.”

The story could be much simpler and closer to home. Consider the story of the lawyer who lived 500 miles away from her elderly father. They had not seen each other in a number of months. The father calls her up and asks, “When are you going to visit?” His daughter proceeds to tell him all about the demands on her time, her court schedule, and various other meetings which prevent her from visiting. So the father says, “You must tell me something I’ve been wondering about for some time now. When I die, do you intend to come to my funeral?” The lawyer responds, “Dad, I can’t believe you’d even think to ask such a question! Of course I’d come to the funeral.” “The father replies, “Good. Let’s make a deal. Forget the funeral. I need you more now than I will then.”

c. To be right with God, to be a true disciple, requires follow-through.

The Samaritan also gave the beaten man freedom—he paid the bills so the man would not be enslaved to the innkeeper.

A new employee at a nursing home asked about one woman who never spoke. She was very depressed and just sat alone all day, rocking in her chair. “You’ll never get through to her,” the nurses said. But the new nurse entered the woman’s room, pulled up another rocking chair, and rocked beside her for one hour every day. After a month had passed, the woman one day spoke to the nurse, saying “You are very kind.” Before a year was up, the woman had come out of her deep depression and returned to her home.

2. How are we made right with God?

There’s one character in the story we haven’t said much about. Who is my neighbor? Jesus didn’t answer that question. He didn’t have to. Who is the man beaten and robbed? It is Jesus Christ himself.

How are we right with God? (Robert Farrar Capon) “Not by imitating good works, not through love and goodness and niceness, not even by random acts of kindness. It is not by anything we do or think. We are made right only by God’s grace, God’s unconditional love for us. When we accept that, then we follow up by seeing the victim as Jesus and identifying with his suffering.

“Jesus’ whole parable, especially with its piling up of detail after detail of extreme, even irrational, behavior on the part of the Samaritan, points not to meritorious exercises of good will but to the sharing of the (suffering) as the main thrust of the story.”

We can be saved only by bad examples: By the stupid example of a Samaritan who spends his livelihood on a loser, and by the horrible example of a Savior who, in an excruciating death, lays down his life for his friends.

“The lawyer is told by Jesus, in effect, to stop trying to live and to be willing to die, to be willing to be lost rather than to be found—to be, in short, a neighbor to the One who, in the least of his people, is already neighbor to the whole world of losers.”

You see, don’t you, that Neighborhood does not create Love. It is only self-sacrificing Love that creates Neighborhood.

There is a man named Sundar, born in India, a member of the Sikh religion, who became a convert to Christianity and decided to stay in India to be a missionary. One late afternoon Sundar was traveling on foot high in the Himalayan mountains with a Buddhist monk. It was bitter cold and the night was coming on. The monk warned that they were in danger of freezing to death if they did not reach the monastery before darkness fell. As they crossed over a narrow path above a steep cliff, they heard a cry for help. Deep down in the ravine a man had fallen and he lay wounded. His leg was broken and he couldn’t walk. The monk warned Sundar, “Do not stop. God has brought this man to his fate. He must work it out by himself. That is the tradition. Let us hurry on before we perish.” But Sundar replied, “It is my tradition now that God has brought me here to help my brother. I cannot abandon him.” So the monk set off through the snow, which had begun to fall heavily. Sundar climbed down to where the wounded man was, and since the man’s leg was broken, Sundar took a blanket from his knapsack and made a sling out of it. He got the man into it and hoisted him on his back and began the painful and arduous climb back up to the path. After a long time he finally made the path and persevered through the falling snow, until at last, exhausted, he could faintly make out the lights of the monastery. Then he nearly stumbled and fell. Not from weakness. He stumbled over an object lying in the snow-covered path. He bent down on one knee and brushed the snow from the frozen body of the monk, who had died within sight of the monastery. Years later, when Sundar had his own disciples, they asked him this question: “Master, what is life’s most difficult task?” And he answered them, “To have no burden to carry.” (-Bausch, More Telling, p.95)

The question to ask is not “Who is my neighbor?” The question to ask yourself is “Am I a neighbor like Christ?”

AMEN.