July 21st

When Jesus told the story about the first two travelers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, his audience must have settled back in anticipation of the happy ending.  Surely the third traveler would be a lay person like themselves who would tend to the wounds of the victim.  Had this been the ending, Jesus’ audience would have walked away content, confirmed in their sense of themselves as good people.  But that is not the story Jesus told.  The third traveler was a Samaritan—a religious apostate, a national enemy, a dangerous outsider.  If Jesus were telling the parable to us, I wonder if the three people on the road wouldn’t be a bishop, a priest, and a jihadist.
 
     On one level, the parable of the Good Samaritan is about helping a neighbor.  But it is critical to remember that Jesus told this story when he was asked, “Who is my neighbor?”  Jesus’ answer includes the person sitting next to you in Church or the person living in the house next door—and it also includes the person kneeling on a prayer mat in a mosque in Iran.  According to Jesus, our neighbors are not just the people we like and trust.  No, the term neighbor covers even those people we do not see eye-to-eye with, people we cannot like or trust.  Our neighbor is anyone we encounter in life who is in need.
 
     This parable brings to my mind some advice I was told was given to the students who had volunteered to sit in at various Nashville lunch counters in the 1960s.  They knew beforehand that they would be beaten and taunted with slurs.  One of the students asked if they were supposed to love the people who would be calling them all kinds of names, putting out cigarettes on their backs.  The response was, “You do not have to like those people, no one can expect that from you.  You just have to love them.”