Jesus Parables the Scholar
See Luke 10:25-37 for the events being chewed over below…
Certainly, in the Jesus Parables Hit Parade, The Parable of the Good Samaritan has a secure spot in the top ten. Good Samaritan is a well-known term in legalese, has been liberally slapped onto the front of hospitals and other care centers, and is synonymous with a person or entity which helps those in most need.
Christians, non-Christians, and anti-Christians are familiar with the tale about the persona non grata from Samaria who tends to a man beaten, robbed and left for dead. Let me not forget to mention the contrasting characters in the story, a couple of religious types who previously crossed over to the other side of the road, letting the suffering victim lie.
Being one who loves that adrenalin rush from a good dose of righteous indignation, this parable spiritually sends me to the same dizzying heights as the accounts of Lazarus and the Rich Man and the Tax Collector and the Pharisee. There’s something very appealing about seeing secular or ecclesiastical heavyweights get exposed as self-righteous, egocentric hypocrites.
My problem is that I have to watch out for an overdose of this spiritual stimulant. All too often my righteous indignation has a lot of indignation and very little righteousness. Then there’s that annoying thing about loving one’s enemies, which I fear also includes folks who ignore beggars and the suffering, and those who look down, put down, and nose up to folks who don’t score high on their statusometer.
Reluctantly, I must admit that I too often could be identified with the street crossers, and not the Good Sam. Not that I with any great frequency pass by those laying in the gutter having been whipped and stripped. More often I find myself edging away from unpleasant folks who may need some recognition that someone cares in the midst of the waves of humanity fleeing from them.
And what is my justification for this avoidance? At least the priest and the Levite could offer up the not-so-palatable excuse that the wounded person might be dead or die while being helped, so that they would be ritually unclean and unable to perform their duties for the people relying on them. Lame? Undoubtedly. Especially for the professional religious. However, as an amateur believer, my motivating unease seems an even feebler pretext than our two ecclesiastical avoiders had.
The more obvious parabolic lessons having been worked over, let’s peer more deeply into the context of Our Lord’s morality play. He was spinning this yarn in response to an inquiry from a scholar. And what about this brainy boy—the one asking JC to ID his neighbor in order “to justify himself?” I suspect that like me, he desired to serve without disturbance. Maybe he wanted Jesus to identify the boundaries of “neighborliness” so that he could stay simultaneously on the fringes and in his comfort zone. Or perhaps he was looking to trip up this Nazarene upstart whose words had already perturbed, perplexed, and provoked him.
So, our divine champion, with a clever little vignette forced the legal scholar to acknowledge this anathematic outcast as a good neighbor, holding our hero Sammy up as an example to follow when applying the Golden Rule. I suppose Christ could have just slapped the wise guy across the chops and told him to help those who cannot or will not help you back; love those who cannot or will not love you back; reach out to those who you don’t want to even get close to. But by using the parable, Jesus was practicing what He was preaching in the story: He was lovingly ministering to someone who likely would not do the same for Him, and who was probably hollering “Crucify him!” sometime later.
I find that the most striking feature of the story. Jesus told him, and by telling him, showed him. Maybe with the help of the Holy Spirit, I, too, can teach those who annoy me, attack me, ignore me, provoke, me etc.—displaying to them how to love as the Lord did, by loving as the Lord did.
