Home > Sermons > July 15, 2007

Good Samaritan

Everyone knows the parable of the Good Samaritan.  We even use the word ‘Samaritan’ to mean someone who goes out of his/her way to help another. Of course that word is based on this scripture passage.  

Jesus used the parable of the Good Samaritan as a case study of what it means to love your neighbor – in other words it is an example of one branch of the two-part summary of all Jewish law.  Love God is first.  Love neighbor is second.  

Clarence Jordan

Let me tell you a story to get us into the meaning of the parable: 

Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Farm, the interracial commune outside Americus, Georgia, grew up in a prosperous family, received a traditional theological education (a Ph.D. in Greek New Testament from Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, Kentucky), and, known for his brilliance as a writer, was en route to becoming a professor. 

Instead, he left seminary to establish an interracial community in segregated Georgia in the mid-1950s. Opposition was not unexpected, but it was led by his own people, the Southern Baptist congregation that eventually excommunicated the whole Koinonia Community. The charges leveled against them read: "Said members. . . have persisted in holding services where both white and colored attend together."  

The excommunication was followed by vandalism, cross burning, legal pressures, beatings, bombings, a comprehensive economic boycott, and shootings by snipers who aimed at any available target on the commune. 

Clarence turned to his brother, attorney Robert Jordan, for legal counsel and asked him to become legal representative of the Koinonia Community. Robert, who later served as a Georgia state senator and a justice of the Georgia State Supreme Court, declined. 

"Clarence, I can't do that. You know my political aspirations. Why if I represented you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I've got." 

"We might lose everything too, Bob." 

"It's different for you." 

"Why is it different? I remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the church the same Sunday as boys. I expect when we came forward the preacher asked me about the same question he did you. He asked me, 'Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?' 

"And I said, 'Yes.' What did you say?" 

"I follow Jesus, Clarence, up to a point." 

"Could that point by any chance be - the cross?" 

"That's right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I'm not getting myself crucified." 

"Then I don't believe you're a disciple. You're an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you're an admirer not a disciple." 

"Well now, if everyone who felt like I do did, then we wouldn't have a church, would we?" 

"The question," Clarence said, "is do you have a church?" (From www.logosproductions.com quoting: David Augsburger, Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor, Brazos Press, 2005.) 

Loving Neighbor

What does it take to be a disciple of Jesus?  How do we love God?  And how do we follow Jesus?  What does it take to love our neighbor?   

Clarence Jordan had a vision of what was required. And his vision was in conflict with his own kind – his church, his family, the neighbors of his own race and class – because Clarence Jordan’s vision of neighbor went beyond his own race and class.  It was a vision true to the spirit of the story Jesus told which specifically tackles race and class issues.

Preaching Class 

I was taking a preaching class in my last semester of seminary 38 years ago.  I was assigned to do a sermon on this passage.  We were to pick a hypothetical  congregation to which it would be addressed.  So I decided to address mine to my class at the seminary.  I suppose that took a little bit of hubris to do that! 

But, I spent good energy trying to help my classmates consider being neighbors to one another.  I may have missed one of the most important points of the parable – the point of the difference of race and class between the one in need and the one who demonstrates neighborliness, and I surely missed something even more important.  

When I had finished, the professor asked me if I had considered identifying myself with the guy who was in the ditch.  I hadn’t.  As a young person with an emerging liberal theological and political point of view, I certainly had not considered myself as one in need.   I identified myself with the one who did good to another poor human being – the Good Samaritan would define how we in our beneficence should care for others.  We would abhor the actions of the Priest and the Levite – knowing that we would never do that!  But identifying myself with the one in need still seems novel to me.  Although I have now learned I have to rely more totally on both God and on other people now than I did then.

Identifying with the Needy

But in my reading this week, I found that what seems so novel to me probably isn’t that novel.  The Jews who heard this story from Jesus for the first time would have identified with the person who was robbed, beaten and left half dead. Jews from Jerusalem or from Galilee normally traveled in groups over that road, unless they had a horse or a donkey so they could outrun thieves.  The road between Jerusalem and Jericho went through the mountains and was notoriously dangerous.   

But Jews who had to travel between Galilee in the North and Jerusalem in the South would walk many extra miles and go through the dangerous territory to avoid having to go through the Samaria.  The land of Samaritans was to be avoided because they were not considered racially pure nor theologically orthodox by the Jews.   Samaritans were hated and avoided.  They were second class people. 

So, when Jesus tells this story, the people who hear him are surely tuned into the story.  Everything is going as expected – at least at first. The robbers on the road are as expected. Even the behavior of the Priest and Levite are expected.  They would  probably be going home to Jericho for their week off.  They worked 2 weeks on at the temple and had 1week off to go home to Jericho. They would be carrying their pay which consisted of meat from the sacrifices they were bringing home for their families.

Also, they were ritually clean.  But if they touched a dead body – as they presumed this person to be – they would have to turn around and go back to Jerusalem for ritual cleaning.  Their family would go hungry in Jericho.  So there may have been good reasons why these kind of religious leaders would seem so uncaring. 

So the story went along as expected. Until Jesus got to the part about the Samaritan.  There is no detail in the story to explain why that Samaritan would have been willing to take on the responsibility of care for a Jew.  But there is biblical precedent to Jesus’ story, and Jesus was surely calling it to mind.   

In 2 Chronicles 28:8-15 there is a story about Samaritans freeing Judean prisoners – men, women and children, who had been captured by their northern Israelite kinsman and by Syrian soldiers. But the prophet Obed in Samaria and some of the leading men there refused to let the Isralite soldiers continue through their territory.  Instead they performed acts of mercy for the captives and brought them down to Jericho.  Some of the details of their mercy are too similar to Jesus’ parable to ignore.  

Hear the words from 2 Chronicles 28:15: They “took the captives, and ... clothed all that were naked among them; they clothed them and gave them sandals, provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys, they brought them to their kindred at Jericho, the city of Palm trees...” 

The Parable Challenges Exclusivity

Jesus’ story about a single Jew almost killed by robbers, but rescued by a decent Samaritan neighbor, is a challenge to the Jews to stop being so exclusive and prejudiced toward the Samaritan people.  Even though they could cite religious and cultural reasons why the Samaritans were inferior to them, there was an 800 year-old story in their scriptures of how Samaritans had rescued Jews out of the hands of enemies – actually the enemies were kinfolks from different tribes. 

Although we might think of the story as an indictment of the religious people who refused to help – and well it might be such an indictment; and we might think of the story as a challenge to action whenever we see someone in need – and well it might be such a challenge; what Jesus seems to have been doing primarily, was to help observant Jews expand their own vision of who God sees as their neighbor.   

Jesus refuses to answer the question which the lawyer posed – and it was a live question for the day: “Who is my neighbor?”  Instead, Jesus makes the righteous Jew think about how a neighbor acts – about how one becomes a real neighbor to another. 

Jesus’ case study involves a Samaritan showing that he is a neighbor to a Jew – the very type of Samaritan the righteous Jews wanted to write out of the list of their neighbors.  They thought that the Samaritan’s religion and race was not acceptable to God. But Jesus is proclaiming that a Samaritan is God’s person when he/she acts as a neighbor should act.      

Our Time

We live in a time and place where the issues of neighbor are much different from Jesus’ time, and yet strangely similar.   For many people in our nation questions of race and class are hot as we consider immigration problems.  The economics of the free trade – where the jobs are and where the unemployment is – requires new thinking of how people cross national borders and what people’s rights and privileges really are.  Who is my neighbor? 

George Megan 

When we lived in Barrow, Alaska, we ran into some of the world’s most interesting characters.  One was a man by the name of George Megan.   George was an Englishman married to a Japanese woman, and making his home in Japan.  He taught in a university there.  But his most important life work was setting a world record of walking thousands of miles from Puerto del Fuego at the very southern tip of South America, to Point Barrow, Alaska at the very northern tip of North America.

George’s stories of  his walk – mostly true I think – are fascinating.  He started his odyssey with some money and some good shoes.  But all that ran out and he was at the mercy of people he met along the way.  George recounted how as he traveled through South and Central America, and into Mexico, on his seven year trek, he was greeted and taken in by fellow poor people who would feed him and give him a place to sleep.  They would help him repair his boots or mend his clothing. They were neighbors to him. 

But when he got into the more affluent United States and continued into Canada, he found it very difficult to get assistance.  People didn’t trust him and didn’t care about him. It seems like the people who live in the most modest surroundings are more ready and able to be neighborly to fellow travelers along the way. 

It’s almost as if George’s story is a modern version of the Good Samaritan. United States citizens are often apt to think of our neighbors to the south as free-loaders who are trying to take what we have, and what we are entitled to.  But George found them as people who would give the shirt off their backs for a person in need. 

Our Call

How is God calling us to be neighbor?    

Clarence Jordan and his work in Americus, Georgia demonstrated, to people who were not quite ready to hear, that White and Black are neighbors and even brothers and sisters.   

Jesus’ story attempted to clarify for the Jews that they weren’t exclusive and favorite people of God, but that God expects all to be neighbors to one another. 

George Megan reminds us of the debate about immigration, and might remind us that God looks across borders.    

Who is my neighbor?   

Who is yours? 

How will we be neighbors? 

Amen.