The parable is not for Christian minimalists who want to limit their Jesus experience to Facebook memes and simpleminded hymns. It is comforting to croon,
Every day with Jesus ... Is sweeter than the day before ... Every day with Jesus ... I love Him more and more ...But the parable of the Good Samaritan is anything but comforting. It’s like having cold water splashed in our faces as we try to sleep in on Sunday morning. It forces us to encounter a more demanding Savior than the understanding sweetheart who dotingly rocks our cradle and never asks us to get up to do something.
The lawyer who first posed the question to Jesus was jolted awake by the answer. He was probably expecting a more technical analysis of the theoretical question, “Who is my neighbor?”
Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian pastor, theologian, and writer, put it this way:
When Jesus said love your neighbor, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbor. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something of the order of “A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one’s own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as the neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort of kind whatsoever.” Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbor is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you.- Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), pp. 65-66.For the lawyer who first posed the question, the rest of the day would not be as sweet as it started.
As everyone knows, Jesus deliberately made a Samaritan the good guy because Samaritans represented everything his listeners feared and despised. The enmity between Judeans and Samaritans can be traced back to two of Jacob’s sons who sold their brother Joseph into slavery (Genesis 37:3-4) but hostilities intensified over the years because of racial, ethnic, and political animosities.
When Jesus used a Samaritan as an avatar of neighborliness, it must have driven his audience crazy. It was also fair warning that the Christian life could make some distasteful demands on the faithful.
Father David Kirk, founder of Emmaus House, collected dozens of parables, sermons and declarations of Jesus and put them together in a wonderful but now nearly out of print book called, Quotations from Chairman Jesus.
It was a brilliant conceit fifty years ago, but there aren’t many people who hate and fear Black Panthers now. Many of us remember the Panthers as social justice heroes.
Today, it takes a little more imagination to contextualize the Samaritan. Today, it could be the Good Tort Attorney, the Good Jihadist, the Good Wastrel of Nonrenewable Resources. Or, perhaps:
The Good Republican
A certain white dude from Ottumwa, Iowa, was heading home from a late-night party on 178th Street when he was set upon by a gang of thieves. The thieves beat him, ripped his seersucker suit to shreds, shook the cash and cards from his wallet, grabbed his iPhoneX, tore the $95 knock-off Rolex watch from his wrist and snatched the imitation Testoni shoes from his feet. The thieves rolled their bleeding, unconscious victim down some alley steps and disappeared down Cabrini Boulevard into the darkness.
As dawn came, a middle-aged day worker passed by the alley on his way to the bus stop. He heard the man groaning and jumped back in fear. Not wishing to get involved, he quickened his pace. “If it wasn’t so hard to get a license to carry a gun,” the day worker mumbled to himself, “that guy could have taken care of whoever did that to him.”
A while later, a woman in a white uniform walked by on her way to her employer’s house. She, too, saw the man groaning at the bottom of the steps and grabbed her cellphone to call 911. But she was already late so she put the phone back in her purse and walked quickly away. “It was probably illegals,” she said, spitting on the sidewalk. “This country lets in every lazy scumbag who wants a free ride.”
Soon a Seminary student passed by and looked sadly at the man in the alley. “This is what happens when we cut programs for the poor so we can give tax breaks to the rich,” the seminarian grumbled. But he was late for a class in situation ethics so he whispered a brief prayer as he sped off. “God, forgive those who did that to this poor man,” he said. As an afterthought he added, “And forgive Trump and McConnell for unjustly blocking programs that help the unfortunate and deprived.”
Finally, as the sun rose over the horizon, a Republican capitalist hurrying to his desk at Goldman Sachs saw the man lying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the steps. The Republican set his mug of Starbuck’s latte on the curb and jumped down to touch the man’s neck. He felt a weak pulse. He whipped out his cellphone and called 911. “Need an ambulance immediately,” he told the dispatcher. “There’s a badly hurt man here.”
When the ambulance came, the EMTs asked the Republican if he knew the man. “I just found him,” the Republican said. The EMT’s inserted an IV in the man’s arm and the Republican volunteered to hold the drip bag as the man was loaded onto a stretcher. Still holding the drip bag, the Republican jumped into the back of the ambulance.
At the Emergency Room, attendants again asked the Republican if he knew who the man was. “No,” he said. “I found him on the street. But if there is any question about how he’s going to pay for his treatment, let me know.” The Republican handed the nurse his business card.
“I’ll be back later to see how he is,” the Republican said. “Now if you excuse me, I have rush to my computer to see what Bloomberg is saying.” The Republican was thinking that if did get hit with the poor guy’s hospital bills, he needed a good day on the market. But the Republican was as good as his word.
For many, the parable of the Good Samaritan is an unpleasant reminder that every day with Jesus is is not always sweeter than the day before. Every day with Jesus may also include a sour aftertaste if we have to mingle our human weaknesses and prejudices with the purity of God’s unconditional love for all God’s creatures. Whenever someone we don’t even know is in need, it can be damned inconvenient to stop to see if we can help. If the person in need turns out to be someone we will never see again, it becomes all too easy to walk on by.
But good neighbors do not walk on by, and in many cases these good neighbors may be people we despise.
The Christian life is sometimes too complicated to face when we wander from our feel-good hymns and cocoonish happy places.
So who is my neighbor anyway?
The problem is, if we have to ask, we probably won’t like the answer.
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