This sermon, based on the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, was preached at Luther Memorial Church in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 14, 2019.
My friend Steve Paulson once began a
sermon by saying, “There are some places the gospel is more true than others.” I
didn’t stand up in the pew and call BS on him, but in my head I thought, “That
can’t be so. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The gospel
can’t shift and change according to our earthly circumstances.” Yet, if our
gospel reading today has anything to say about the matter, as usual it turns
out that I was wrong. Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan shows the gospel as
being less true in some places – especially among lawyers and religious people.
This familiar parable gets its
set-up with an encounter Jesus had with a lawyer. This was a particular kind of
lawyer – maybe the worst kind – a religious lawyer. This fella was a Pharisee.
These were people trained in the ins and outs of the 613 laws given by God that
appear in the Old Testament. It was easier to be a Sadducee than a Pharisee
when it can to the law. For Sadducees, if a situation didn’t appear in the
scriptures, that was that. You didn’t have to do any more thinking about it.
But the Pharisees thought that those 613 laws needed interpretation, so they
went to school to learn all about how to deal with the law. Both groups were
equally strict when it came to a person’s religious life and what made them
holy or unholy, clean or unclean, righteous or unrighteous, justified or
unjustified. But the Pharisees had to have the nimblest of minds to see every
facet of an issue. And they loved to debate.
That’s what’s going on at the
beginning of our gospel reading. A Pharisee proposed a debate topic: what a
person has to do to inherit eternal
life. And Jesus took on the role of Socrates answering questions with his own
questions in order to draw out what was behind the lawyer’s query. He pointed
the Pharisee back to those 613 laws and asked what he could find in there that
would answer his own question. The Pharisee knew those laws inside and out and
immediately rattled off the two big ones that summarize the two tables of the Ten
Commandments: the ones dealing with God and those dealing with our relationship
with other people. “You shall 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
your neighbor as yourself.”
That should have done it right
there, and the encounter wouldn’t have needed to progress any further. But the
Pharisee understood something important. Those two commandments to love God and
your neighbor are a cruel taskmaster. They demand everything of you: all your heart rather than a part of it,
all your soul not a portion of it, all your strength rather than your left
bicep, and all your mind, that is,
every single thought of every waking moment. God requires every single part of
you without reserve. The Pharisee knew it and did what any self-respecting
sinner would do: he looked for a work-around. It’s because the lawyer knew God
isn’t interested in leaving a piece of you to your own devices. If a little bit
of you gets left for you to maintain autonomy over, then you’ll always stake
out the territory with religion, piety, and morality – trying to show how, even
if the rest of you can’t perform up to par for God, at least this last little
bit is good, even if it’s just good intentions.
Luke tells us the lawyer wanted to
justify himself. The Pharisee wanted to find some small place where he could
stand before the divine judge with even an iota of evidence that on the Last
Day he should be waved through St. Peter’s version of the TSA security line.
Knowing the impossibility of fulfilling all those alls in the commandment, the Pharisee deflected and asked about the
easiest part. He thought, “If God is so stringent and impossible to please,
maybe I’ll have a better shot at success by focusing on other people who are
just as fallible as I am.” So, he asked, “Who is my neighbor?”
The Lord Jesus in Luke’s story was
no fool. He knew exactly how things work. He knew the weaselly ways we
unctuously try to slide through the law’s grasp. He knew that the gospel he
came to give – that the kingdom of heaven was at hand in his very person – was
simply not true for the lawyer. So, he told a story that shredded every last
vestige of the Pharisee’s hopes for self-justification. In Jesus’ parable you
have a cast of characters that includes two seemingly fine upstanding religious
people who act like jerks, some robbers who belong in the penitentiary over in
Anamosa, the nearly dead guy the thieves had beaten up and tossed in the ditch
and who would have made anyone who helped him unclean, and a Samaritan.
We have to be careful when we attach
the word “good” to any Samaritan. Samaritans were the people whom good
God-fearing Jews loved to hate. You may not think you know much about the
status of first-century Samaritans in Judea, but here at Luther Memorial we’re
mighty familiar with a particular Samaritan, because that’s who the woman in
our altar painting is. The picture is of the moment Jesus tells her the words
beneath the painting: “Hver som drikke af det Vant, som jeg vil give ham, skal
til evig Tid ikke tΓΈrste. (Whoever drinks of the
water that I shall give him shall not thirst for eternity.)” I know that our
painting is more folk art than a professional study, and I know the artist
didn’t intend for me to do this, but I have an inner twelve-year-old boy inside
me, and every Sunday I look at the woman at the well and wonder why she’s an
amputee. It looks like she only has one leg. On the other hand, I also know
that faithful Jews in Jesus’ day looked down on Samaritans as not having a leg
to stand on, so maybe it’s appropriate.
The point, though, is that, if a
Samaritan is the hero of the story, Jesus had raised up a person of no account
as someone to be admired. The Samaritans claimed that they were the true descendants
of the Israelites after Moses, because they worshiped God at Mt. Gerizim rather
down in Jerusalem. And for their part the Jews regarded the Samaritans as
heretics and blasphemers for worshiping the wrong way. For them, even with the
best intentions a Samaritan could never, ever be called good.
So, what are we to make of this
parable? If the Pharisee grilling him was going to zero in on the easiest part
of the commandments, then Jesus would turn that into the point of the wedge
that he would drive between the lawyer and his hopes of justifying himself.
Jesus’ aim was to get the Pharisee to despair of his own ability to achieve
acceptability before God. His goal was to get the religious professional to
turn to him for life by showing him
the kind of mercy he had to bestow. He wanted to turn him from religion to
faith, from the rigor of law and rule-keeping to a relationship with him, from
captivity to freedom.
Who in this curve ball of a story
was a neighbor? Who had mercy? It certainly wasn’t the bad guys. They were the
people St. Paul talked about in Galatians who were all about the works of the
flesh: “fornication, impurity,
licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger,
quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and
things like these.” The robbers were a law unto themselves. Their boundary was
whatever their dark hearts desired. If that meant beating up a traveler and
leaving him to do, so be it.
Then there are the priest and the
Levite. These were the people religious folks looked up to. Seeing the guy by
the side of the road must have forced a dilemma on them. They had important
religious stuff to do. If they even touched the bloody road kill they
encountered, that would make them unclean, that is, unfit for their holy and
sacred Temple duty in the work God had appointed them to. Their own calling
took precedence over helping a fellow human being in need. Someone else was
going to have to mess with the mess in the ditch.
As for the man who was beaten and
left for dead, the Pharisee grilling Jesus would have had the same questions as
those who quizzed him about the blind man he had healed: “Whose sin caused this
to blindness to happen?” He would have regarded the violence perpetrated on the
man as someone’s fault – most likely his own. You get what you deserve, you
know, and this man failed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.
That leaves us with the Samaritan.
He applied what first aid he could. He tore strips of cloth from the fabric he
wore and used his oil and wine as the first century equivalent of an
antiseptic. Then he lay him over the back of his pack mule and continued
further down the road. That was no easy matter. Jerusalem sits over three
thousand feet in altitude above Jericho, and the 16-mile road has about a 4%
grade. That’s steep. No RAGBRAI rider wants to bike for sixteen miles on that
grade. When he got to the closest inn, he paid around 350 bucks in advance and
promised to pay even more for the guy’s care and feeding. That means the Samaritan
not only took care of the immediate need, he also committed himself to an
ongoing relationship with a stranger who would wake from his wounded state and
regard him with hatred.
The real telling quality of the
Samaritan in not his willingness to lay out cold hard cash for the man he
spotted along the road. It’s that when he saw the man he was moved with pity. Those
three words – moved with pity – in the original Greek are a single word: splanchnizomai. Try that word on your
tongue. Repeat after me: splanchnizomai.
The root of the word is “splanchna,”
or guts. Maybe a better translation than “moved with pity” would be that the
Samaritan was simply gutted. Chad Bird, who spoke at our Christ Hold Fast event
this spring, says it was “a gut-wrenching, stomach-twisting mercy.” The
Samaritan wasn’t a “good” Samaritan; he was a splanchnizomai Samaritan, one who was moved to his core at his
fellow human being’s plight.
That word splanchnizomai is a strange one. Chad Bird reminds us that it’s a
Jesus verb. It only appears in the New Testament connected to Jesus. Our Lord
has splanchnizomai when he sees the
people of Jerusalem as sheep without a shepherd. He has splanchnizomai for the sick. He has splanchnizomai for the widow of Nain whose son – her only source of
support – has died. And in Jesus’ parables, the characters who represent him,
both the father of the prodigal son and the Samaritan here, feel splanchnizomai.
By telling a parable about patently
offensive characters, Jesus sought to remove the moral, ethical, and religious
categories that the Pharisee judged the world by. In their place he gave the
lawyer the same thing he gave the woman at the well: living water that would
remove both his thirst and his need for self-justification. If Jesus’ aim was
to undercut the lawyer’s world view, he also wanted to give the world back to
him by giving the Pharisee new vision. That would only begin by being the splanchnizomai Lord, the Lord
gut-wrenchingly moved by him.
Surely we understand who the good
guys and the bad guys in the parable are. The good guys are the religious
leaders in Jerusalem: the priests in the temple, the Sadducees, and the
Pharisees. The bad guys are those in this world tending to their own lusts and
wreaking violence on others. Of course, Jesus is the Samaritan in the story.
But who is the man beaten up and left by the side of the road? That’s our
Pharisee – and you. Jesus knows what the world does to you. He knows exactly
how beaten and bruised you are. And he knows that the world expects you to take
matters of fixing your situation into your own hands. The world says,
“Physician, heal thyself. God helps those who help themselves.”
But it’s the great good news of this
parable that Jesus’ deep splanchnizomai
is aimed at the least righteous, least actively good, and least able person in
the whole story. When the world comes crashing down on our lawyer friend, as it
does on all of us, Jesus wants this crazy story to linger and finally come to
life. When I was growing up my little brother had a toy demolition derby car.
You could wind it up and let it race across the floor. But when it hit
something – and it never failed to hit something – the car exploded into pieces
that would have to be picked up. If we’re holding ourselves together, our hold
is tenuous. There are very real evils around us that prowl around us waiting to
pounce. Many of us aren’t more than one big medical bill away from financial
insolvency. We know that even though we may be fit and healthy today we don’t
have a clue about cancer cells that might be exploding in our own splanchna or
an aneurysm waiting to burst even as we speak. You understand that our security
and safety are illusions at best, because there isn’t one among us that won’t
in the end face a final breath and a last heartbeat. And there’s nothing you
can do about it.
But Jesus, our good Samaritan, every
last splanchnizomai-ed cell of him is
the one who regards the helpless one as most deserving of his benefits. That’s
why we see him in the gospels hanging out with sinners, tax collectors, and
prostitutes. It’s why he has no fear of being made unclean by lepers or the
blood of the woman with a twelve-year hemorrhage. And it’s why his mercy
extends to the thief on the cross next to him in his own hour of agony. We should turn to the man by the side of the
road to see that what we have to do to gain eternal life is utterly passive:
You just need to lie there and take what Jesus has for you. That means that, if
you’re in the midst of a situation that feels like it’s killing you, Jesus is splanchnizomai for you. If you’re beaten
down, it’s total splanchnizomai. If
you’re powerless over alcohol and your life has become unmanageable, splanchnizomai. And when you’re finally
embalmed and dressed and laid in your casket in a hole that a cemetery back-hoe
has dug, Jesus will be even more moved with pity. Splanchnizomai, compassion, and mercy over and over and over again.
And that’s where the gospel is most
true. It’s among the beat-up, the dragged-down, the least, the last, the lost,
the little. It’s for you and your black-and-blue tender spots, your tumors,
your failures, your junk that Christ’s mercy, his compassion, his pity, and splanchnizomai can finally be seen in
their fullness. Where you’ve got nothing to bring to the table, Jesus can bring
everything. And if he’s brought everything for you, then you, too, can start
looking for your fellow dead and dying souls along the side of the road and
become yourself all splanchnizomai.
Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” Keep your eyes open for the road kill and be
prepared for a gut-wrenching experience. Amen.
