Sermon by the Rev. Bernadette Hartsough
July 10, 2022
Today we have the too familiar story of the Good Samaritan. It is one of those biblical stories that we hear and think-I have heard this before. I think if we look closer at the story and where Jesus is in his ministry, we can see new insights into this story.
The whole middle section of the Gospel of Luke is Jesus teaching his disciples while they are traveling to Jerusalem. The Gospel of Luke was written for second and third generation Christians around 70-80cE. Much of the material in Luke is written to instruct disciples, Jews, and others to follow Jesus.
The scene opens with a lawyer testing Jesus. The word testing here also means to temp. It is the same word used in the next chapter when Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray, “Do not bring us to the time of trial.” Lawyers question to get facts and to check if there are any discrepancies in testimonies. It is their job to find and expose the discrepancies. The lawyer in today’s gospel is trying to discredit Jesus.
Jesus asked the lawyer what was written in the law. The lawyer recites part of the torah in Duet. 6:5, “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jews in Jesus’s time and today recite this. It is the law that supersedes all other laws and commandments.
The lawyer asks Jesus the question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus recites the story of the Good Samaritan using groups of Jews namely a priest and a Levite. Jews in first century Palestine could be categorized into three groups. Priests descended from Aaron, Levites from Levi, and Israelites descended from the other children of Jacob. Jesus mentioning the first two groups in the story would have the listeners anticipate that the one to help the beaten man would have been another Israelite. Jesus names a Samaritan. Jews in Jesus’s time did not consider Samaritans a part of the Israelite heritage even though Samaritans too were descended from Abraham.
Samaritans were descended from the original Israelites. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew bible, identifies mount Gerizim as the site where Abraham offered his son Isaac and where Joshua took the Israelites to make their first sacrifices after they crossed the Jordan river into the promised land. According to Jews these events took place at Mount Moriah, the future site of Jerusalem and on Mount Ebal. Instead of building a temple, Samaritans say they were instructed by God to worship God on Mount Gerizim.
The issue is not who is my neighbor, but can we see that our neighbor may be someone we categorized as an enemy
Jesus was challenging his fellow Jews. Can your neighbor be your enemy? How does our fellow human, one from the same ancestor become our enemy?
The story of the Good Samaritan is about how we see ourselves in relation to others. I am going to bring a bit of educational psychology into my sermon. Our brain learns by categorizing things. It is how we store memory and how we learn language. Young children learn that a dog is an animal. It is not a person. As a child grows older, he/she learns that a dog is a mammal, a canine. My point is that our physiology requires that we put things into categories.
Jesus’s life and examples push against keeping people in fixed categories.
Jesus broke down the categories. He healed Jews and gentiles, preached to all, traveled with women and men, single and married, he spoke to those that were unclean and untouchable.
In the Good Samaritan, Jesus is making a statement that human categories are harmful. They cause us to see the category and NOT the person.
When we consider ourselves only part of one category it shuts us off to seeing the needs of others in other categories. When we fail to see the human and we fail to see just the category, we tell ourselves that it’s ok to let others suffer, to own slaves, to discriminate and to kill.
We see this in war. Two soldiers from opposite sides- both human both young -both want to live- both have a job to do- both have been told that the other will take away their lifestyle, their home, their freedom
This way of thinking convinces each soldier that the other is not human, they are enemies. So, it is okay to kill them. When one soldier sees the humanity in the other soldier their life could be in danger because then they see that he/she is a human being just like them. They each have dreams, families, and people that they love. To be a soldier they must learn not to see the humanity in the other.
For soldiers this distancing is survival. We are starting to see this distance, this lack of empathy in the world around us. It is an us versus them, Republican verses democrat, Black verses white, immigrant verses citizen, conservative Christian verses liberal Christian, Muslim verses Jew. We are right. You are wrong. If you need to be right, would you harm another human being for it? Kill for it? Would your ideas and your need to be right cause you to see another as an object? This is happening in our world.
Who do you say is your enemy? Or what ideas or categories separate you from others? Jesus told this story to remind us that our enemies, those we disagree with are still our neighbors. That is the challenge of following Jesus. We must fight against the urge to dehumanize others. We must treat all as our neighbor.