You Keep Using That Word; I Do Not Think it Means What You Think it Means

I gave this sermon a number of years ago when I had my ill-fated internship at a United Methodist church in western VA.  This was my attempt to fix my minor mistakes while delivering that one (which I had done from notecards, an admittedly foolish move for my first sermon ever).  The church held a summer program where they would host visiting youth groups, giving them a place to sleep, eat, and worship while going out into the city to repair homes for people who couldn't afford professional help.

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Luke 10:25-37

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered, “‘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, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.  A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.  So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.  But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.  He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.  The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

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The Bible can be… tricky sometimes.  It’s a common theme you’ll hear sometimes: ever since we decided it was time to translate the Good Book into something other than Latin, and people were free to pick it up and read it in their own language – anyone can do it, it’s so easy!  We get tricked into thinking that passages are straightforward, and with this one, that certainly seems to be the case.  If you see a dude laying half-dead on the street, help him out.  Easy.

But, nothing is ever that easy.  Life isn’t that easy.  So I want to take some time to break down this story and help you all see that there’s much more to it than simply “being nice”.

So, we start off with a rather common scene in the Gospels where a bunch of people are gathered around Jesus, throwing out questions, some of them trying to trip him up and prove that he’s not as great as he says.  This tends to blow up in their faces, and this poor schlub is no exception.  “What must we do to inherit eternal life?” he asks, wanting to see if Jesus is at all familiar with the Scriptures.  Already, Jesus can see where this is going, and flips it back on him.  Like any good public speaker, he answers with a question, “What do you think it is?”  And, like any good scholar, he knows that one backwards and forwards.  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, et cetera, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Cool, good job, A-plus.  But the scholar isn’t satisfied yet, and presses for more.  He isn’t going to let Jesus get away with it just yet.  What is a “neighbor” exactly?  Well, that’s fair.  It’s a pretty vague term.

True to form, Jesus replies with a parable, one of his most favorite rhetorical devices.  Everyone loves a story!

So, we’ve got a nameless, faceless guy (possibly a Jew) walking the long road from Jerusalem to Jericho, a treacherous stretch of land that is fraught with danger.  It’s twisty and full of places to set up ambushes for travelers who don’t know what they’re doing.  Sure enough, before we even get a chance to learn much about this guy, he gets jumped and loses all his possessions – clothing included – plus a good deal of blood, and consciousness to boot.

He’s half-dead and ready for just about anyone to come to his aid.  Lucky for him, a priest is passing nearby, only to snub him and pass on the other side of the road!  The same thing happens with a Levite, who also proceeds to walk the long way around him.  Like the priest, the Levite is a kind of religious figure, someone who has connections to incredibly important figures like Moses, Samuel, and Ezekiel.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is harsh.  It’s bad enough to be ignored by regular people, but here we have two upstanding members of society leaving this guy to die on the road.  This is nothing new to us, I’m sure.  The Church doesn’t always have the best reputation, and I’d be willing to bet a fair few of you have friends who don’t really care for the fact that you’re a Christian.  An unsettling number of famous pastors have made some awful choices in the past.  They ended up in the public spotlight to remind people that even religious folks are human, even broken.  And this has been true for millennia.  Nobody’s perfect.

But let’s be honest, what they did was fairly smart.  That road was notorious for how dangerous it was, and I have no doubt that a few robberies started just like this.  These guys were looking out for number one.

In fact, only one person was willing to stop and help our poor nameless protagonist.  Unfortunately for him, and the audience listening to Jesus’ story, it was a Samaritan.  Without going too deeply into Jewish history, let me simply say that the Isrealites didn’t exactly get along well with the Samaritans.  One can imagine the cry of disapproval that ran throughout the gathered crowd as Jesus announced the savior of the story was to be the most despicable person any of them could imagine. 

This is the dramatic plot twist that Jesus has been building to, and I think it’s helpful to stop here for a moment so that I can ask you all an important question.  It may sound silly, but bear with me here:  How many of you have an arch-nemesis?

As you can see, my hand is raised.  I don’t want you to feel bad if you do, so let me tell you about mine.  You see, Batman has The Joker; Superman has Lex Luthor; Dr. Horrible has Captain Hammer.  Me?  Well, let’s just call him Tim.

The sad part is Tim and I were once amazingly close friends.  We met on a mission trip, and bonded almost immediately.  We had a core group composed of us and two others on the trip, and pretty much every second of down time was spent together.

However, by the second trip the next summer, things were… different.  He had broken up with a mutual friend of ours and she’d told us some of the things he’d done and said – nothing too awful, but certainly sketchy and weird.  Tim and I pretty much parted ways, until I decided to go to the same college where he was already a student.  From there, things, unfortunately, only got worse.

See, I call Tim my arch-nemesis because “we are not so different, he and I”.  We’re both choir and theatre nerds with plans to go into the ministry.  But where I tend to reserve my judgments, he told a Jewish friend of ours that she was going to Hell.  Where I tend to be a pretty humble singer, he’s eager to be front and center.  Where I tend to be pretty laid back as an actor, he’s a hard-core method actor.  Me and my friends made a habit of sitting around and telling Tim Stories.  I’ll spare you any further gory details.

We usually kept our distance.  We were never at war with one another, but we had our passive-aggressive moments.  Needless to say, if I were bleeding on the side of the road, he’s about the last person I’d want to see coming to my aid, and I’m not too sure he would be all that happy if I were helping him out.

This is the tension brewing as the Samaritan enters the picture.  The Jewish people gathered to listen to Jesus’ story don’t want to hear about the gentle and courageous Samaritan, they want to see themselves in the part of the rescuer.  This is not that kind of story.

And worse, he’s not just getting the guy up on his feet and leaving him to his devices.  He does everything in his power to make sure that the man is nursed back to health.  He bandages his wounds.  He puts him up on his donkey.  He pays to put him up in an inn out of his own pocket, and promises to come back and check up on him, willing to pay more money if that’s what it takes.

Any one of these would be impressive, but look at all the things he’s done in those few short sentences.  First, the dressing of the wounds.  He’s not just putting a few ACE bandages on his cuts and bruises, he’s tending to them almost lovingly.  Oil and wine are not cheap things, and for all we know, the only way he could bandage up those wounds was to tear up his own clothing!  And to put the poor guy on his donkey meant that he would now have to walk the rest of the way along the road.  To put it in context, Martin Luther King Jr. talks about driving this road, and says it takes about 15 to 20 minutes from end to end by car.  Walking that same stretch of road could take anywhere from 4 to 5 hours.  This is not a gesture made lightly. 

And then, of course, there’s the payment he makes for the man to stay at the inn.  Ignoring the extra cost on his return trip, he’s paying the innkeeper 2 denarii.  A denarii equals roughly a day’s worth of work.  Even by today’s standards, at minimum wage, he’s dropping over a hundred bucks to make sure that he stays safe.  This guy isn’t the Good Samaritan, he’s not even the Great Samaritan, he’s the Most Amazing Samaritan Known to Humankind!

So, after that rather long-winded answer, Jesus once again throws a question back at the scholar.  “Which one acted like a neighbor?”

You can hear the hesitation in his voice as he responds in the most roundabout way possible:  the “one who had mercy on him.”  He can barely bring himself to admit that the Samaritan was the one who showed love for his neighbor, but he knows it’s true.  It can be a tough pill to swallow.

And that’s the real problem with having an arch-nemesis.  This isn’t a funny book, and I’m not Batman – no matter how much I might want to be.  And the world isn’t composed of characters, it’s made up of people, just like you and me. 

And at the end of the day… Tim’s a good dude.  When my school held an event to raise money and awareness for the homeless, he and a group of other students spent 24 hours on the central plaza, sleeping in cardboard boxes as an act of solidarity.  He directed a play his senior year about a group of mentally handicapped and psychologically disturbed men living in a halfway house in honor of his sister, who has Down Syndrome.  He was always quick to offer a word of encouragement or a helping hand during choir rehearsal when someone couldn’t get a particular part down. 

We were friends once for a reason, and no matter how far apart we drifted or how much I might disagree with or dislike him, I know he’s got a good heart.

And so when I knew he needed it, I prayed for him, even if he wasn’t always willing to ask me directly.  On occasion, I was the one he talked to when things got hard.  I never dropped a hundred dollars so he had a place to stay or let him ride on my donkey – er… car…  But I realized at some point that what I was doing was downright idiotic.  It wasn’t about who he was or what he’d done or even what he was going to do.  Tim was a fellow human being.  Tim was my neighbor.

You all are here to do a great service to this city.  You’re out there in the sun sweating bullets and working really hard.  And that’s awesome, and it’s a really great feeling.  It’s even better when you’re working to build a ramp so that a sweet old lady in a wheelchair can get into her house easier, some nice woman who sits around and chats with you while you work and tells you stories from when she was your age.  But you should never let that be good enough.  In many ways, it’s easy to do something nice for someone like that.

But what about the other one?  What about the guy who says nothing?  The bitter old vet with the cane who critiques every nail and board you place?  The woman who refuses to let you come inside to use the bathroom because she doesn’t want her floor to get dirty?  Being a missionary – and that’s what you are, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – is far easier when the rewards are so glimmering and wonderful.  But to love your neighbor, you’ve got to wade in deep, and deal with all kinds of people out there, people who may think nothing of you even after you’ve worked your fingers to the bone.  When Jesus tells you to love your neighbor, he’s not giving you the shiny, happy command we like to think of.  It’s hard work, plain and simple. 

When we talk about being a Christian, part of what we’re talking about is being just like Christ.  And Jesus put up with a lot of people for the sake of real, true, honest love.  It won’t always make sense, and it won’t always be easy.  You may not see the rewards in the way you’re used to.  But just like every dad ever has said when you complain about chores, “it builds character”.  Learning to love the “unloveable” is what makes you a better Christian.  More to the point, it makes you a better human.

“Go and do likewise.”  That’s all you really need to say.  Jew or Samaritan.  Male or female.  Nice or mean.  Even your arch-nemesis.  Go and do likewise.  Bandage those wounds.