First Sunday in Lent, February 14, 2016 | 8:00 a.m.

Not Who but How

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 91:1–2, 9–16
Micah 6:6–8
Luke 10:25–37

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

Francis of Assisi

Do you ever play games in the car to pass the time on a long road trip? I have a good one to suggest. It is called “Questions.” The way you play is that one person starts by asking a question. The next person tries to respond not by answering the question but by asking another question. It may or may not be related to what was previously asked. You keep going, question after question. If you fall into answering a question you’re out.

I was reminded of this game by Jesus’ encounter with the lawyer that we just read about in the Gospel of Luke. The lawyer asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus knew the lawyer was not genuinely seeking an answer but rather was testing him. So he responds to this question with two of his own questions: “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”

The lawyer rightly responded with what he already knew: love God with your all and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus said he got it right; do that and you shall live. But for some reason the lawyer asks another question. He felt a need to justify himself. Maybe he wanted to look good in Jesus’ eyes. Or maybe he was still testing Jesus by playing with technical details, as his profession was want to do. For whatever reason, the lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?”

I am guessing he expected Jesus to answer in such a way that he could also say, “I have done that.” If Jesus had said, “Your neighbor is your fellow Jew” or “Your neighbor is the person who lives next door” or “Your neighbor is one of your kin,” then he could say, “I have done that.”

But Jesus doesn’t do that. Instead Jesus responds with a story followed by a new question. The story is the parable about the Good Samaritan. This parable is so familiar to many of us that we may miss how radical it is, because with the story, Jesus doesn’t really answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” He asks another question: “Who acted like a neighbor?”

It is as if asking “Who is my neighbor?” is the wrong question. That question suggests that there are people who are not our neighbors. It implies that there are categories or types of people whom we are not called to love. “Who is my neighbor?” begs the question “Who is not my neighbor?”

We do act as though there are people who are not our neighbors, people we are not called to love as we love ourselves. We may define neighbor only as someone who lives in our neighborhood or city. Then we would protect our neighborhood from including people whom we think would bring down property values or would make us uncomfortable. “Not in my backyard” is too often the response to establishing a transitional residence for homeless people nearby. Or if we define neighbor as people nearby, we may argue that any money our church gives for mission should be for local outreach, even though the vast majority of people who live on less than $2 a day reside outside our country.

We may define our neighbors as only those who are citizens of our country with legal documents or just the refugees who made it past the border before a certain quota is hit. We certainly prefer that our neighbors don’t include our enemies—anyone who has hurt us or whom we have a hard time forgiving.

“Who is my neighbor?” No, Jesus did not answer that question. There is no one who is not your neighbor. Jesus responds with another question, the right question. He asks, “Who acted like a neighbor?”

I bet the lawyer answered that question in a quiet tone. He probably felt both cornered and humbled. He had to say what was obvious or he would look like a fool. Of course, the one who acted like a neighbor was neither of the two who avoided the man who had been beaten, robbed, and left for half dead on the side of the road. Of course passing by someone hurting was not being a neighbor. That left the one who did come to the aid of the suffering person. The one who was not afraid to be contaminated by touching a wounded man. The one who was moved to compassion rather than to bristle in disgust. The one who took time, who interrupted his own travel plans, to do whatever was required for this person to recover. Of course that is the one who loved like a neighbor.

But to acknowledge that must have stuck in the Jewish lawyer’s throat, for Jesus had chosen as the model of neighborly love a category of person who was hated by the Jews. Samaritans were viewed as unrighteous, the enemy, heretics who broke ceremonial law, whom all good orthodox people despised. Jews and Samaritans had nothing to do with each other. The lawyer couldn’t even say the word Samaritan in his response, just “the one who showed mercy.”

Do you see what Jesus was doing here? Surely he was teaching that anyone in need is our neighbor. And he was teaching that the one who acted like a neighbor could be anyone who showed mercy. The neighbor is the wounded man on the side of the road. The neighbor is the Samaritan. Love your neighbor includes love Samaritans. Love those you avoid. Love those you despise.

Clarence Jordan wrote a more contemporary version of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Clarence Jordan was a Christian farmer and New Testament Greek scholar who helped found Koinonia Farm in Georgia in 1942. Koinonia Farm is an interracial, Christian farming community that lives out the values of the equality of all persons, ecological stewardship, common ownership of possessions, and rejection of violence. For several years the residents of Koinonia lived in relative peace. But as the civil rights movement progressed, white citizens of the area increasingly perceived Koinonia as a threat. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Koinonia became the target of a stifling economic boycott and repeated violence, including several bombings.

That did not deter Jordan and his Christian community from courageously living and preaching the gospel. Here is how he told the parable of the Good Samaritan:

In the course of the story Jesus talked first about a priest. But down South we don’t have many priests. Everybody down there is either a Methodist or a Baptist unless somebody’s been tinkering with him. So we’ll call him a preacher. As he whizzed by the beaten man by the side of the road, his homiletical mind probably made the following outline: (1) I do not know the man. (2) I do not wish to get involved in any court proceedings. (3) I don’t want to get blood on my new [car’s] upholstering. (4) The man’s lack of proper clothing would embarrass me upon my arrival in town. (5) And finally . . . a minister must never be late for a revival meeting. (And he was going to preach that evening on “God is Love.”)

Next Jesus mentioned the Levite . . . [Levites] became assistant ministers. Then when they filled up all those slots, they became ministers of music. . . . He was going to help in the revival songfest. He saw the injured man, but he had told the junior choir to meet him half an hour early. He wanted to teach ’em a . . . song, “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Besides, you can start a meetin’ without a preacher, but you got to have someone there to start the singing.

If the preacher and the minister of music aren’t going to stop, who is going to help this poor fellow? . . . And Jesus said it was a black man. He got out of his car and saw the man lying there. And he might have said something along this line: “Somebody’s robbed you. Yeah, I know about that; I’ve been robbed too. And they beat you up bad; I know, I’ve been beat up, too. And everybody just went right on by and left you here hurting; yeah, I know, they pass me by, too.”

He drove him into town, passed the revival meeting where they were singing, “Love lifted me,” and took him into the hospital. He paid as much as he could toward the man’s bill, then he promised to pay whatever was necessary upon his return.

Jesus turned to the lawyer and said to him, “Would you tell me, please, who was the neighbor?”

And this lawyer, unwilling even to say the word, drew his robes of righteousness about him and said, “Well, I, I suppose, I suppose it was that guy who showed mercy.”

Jesus said, “You got it right. Now you go and start living that way yourself.” (Clarence Jordan and Bill Lane Coulos, Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation, pp. 134–137)

It’s sad that fifty years after Clarence Jordan’s rendition of this story, after the civil rights movement, after desegregation, after electing a black man as the president of the United States, portraying the Samaritan as an African American still fits. It is also sad that there are other categories of people in our society who are disdained. In our day it could be a Muslim or a homeless person or an undocumented immigrant or a person who is gay or a refugee or a member of the opposite political party who acts as the Samaritan. Whoever it may be for us, we need to love that neighbor. And we need to realize that it is only what one does, not who one is, that defines whether you are acting as a loving neighbor.

Love is not a feeling. Love is action. Love requires doing. Go and do likewise. And when we do love, it is not in order to make ourselves feel better or less guilty. True love is defined by what benefits our neighbor. True love must honor the dignity of those we seek to serve. Love must respect and draw forth others’ abilities, resources, and gifts that empower them to thrive. Love may mean sacrificing some of our financial resources, both as individuals and through our church budget, to benefit others with less. Love may mean standing alongside others in mutual solidarity, sharing their suffering and working for change.

Clarence Jordan said, “To be merciful means to do whatever the situation demands. We like to figure out in advance what we have to give up. What is mercy going to cost us? But true mercy doesn’t ask for limits; it only asks for opportunity. There are no outer limits on discipleship.” When we decided to become disciples of Christ, we already crossed the bridge of total dispossession. It only remains for us now to flesh out our servanthood.

“Mercy is the creative risk of unlimited involvement. Mercy seldom gets off the ground when we approach it from the standpoint of a hypothetical question. It begins when we see our world as a world of neighbors. And it culminates when we act toward the person in need as if that person were actually Christ himself” (Clarence Jordan, p. 137).

Loving our neighbor doesn’t stop with mercy. It also involves working for justice. What if the black man in the parable had taken his unconscious friend to the hospital only to find the doors locked and the attendant asleep? What if, because the injured man had neither an ID nor money, he was refused health care? What if the road on which he had been beaten was the same road on which many others had gotten beaten up? Then love calls us to change the system, to address the root of the problems, to seek justice, until our neighbors no longer suffer but flourish.

The question is not “Who is your neighbor?” The question is “How are you going to love your neighbor?” Do this and you will live. Amen.