Meeting the Good Samaritan in our Own Hearts
When we read the well-known story of the Good Samaritan, it is easy to begin categorizing people based on the characters we encounter. What a Levite! What a priest!
But, have we ever thought about how we are all actually on the same road, and how all the characters the story presents to us may actually represent aspects of ourselves?
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Transcript
In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Good morning. If you will open up your program to page five. I’d like to look at the gospel text this morning a little bit. If we can. This is one of those so familiar stories. I was sitting at the first service and thinking over in the Smith family, gave the Good Samaritan window here at Grace, which is tucked right over there.
And so many of these pivotal stories, no matter what church that you find yourself in, if they have some stained glass, they have several of these pivotal moments and you can see different versions of them. And I was thinking, this is one of those, you know, that you will find where you go and travel in different parts of the world.
And it’s also one of those that’s a very popular Sunday school lesson for children. It’s one of those pivotal, found foundational stories that we use to teach children how to treat other people. So if you look at it, there are several characters, if you will, that it would help to kind of go through and just point out there is the man who was attacked by the robbers left on the side of the road, and then the first person to come on the scene is the priest.
Always makes us feel a little self-conscious and, you know, self, conscious. The priest walks by and he’s the first one to fail. So the priest walks by, does not do what the priest should do per the story. So the priest keeps on going, and then the Levite comes by. And the Levite, you can think of them as the establishment, if you will, someone who is holding that place in the society walks by, keeps on going, and then the Samaritan comes and finally, and you say, who’s who made the right choice?
The Samaritan, you know, the kids all say, and that’s held up as the moral of the story. Be like the Samaritan. Well, the problem here’s my struggle with the story. We all identify with certain characters in this story. And if I were to do a straw poll and ask who we each identified with, we probably would most likely identify with, actually, the narrator, the narrator of the story, the person telling the story, who in this case is actually Jesus.
Jesus is actually telling the story to those gathered, trying to teach them how to treat others. What does it mean? Who is my neighbor? What does it mean to be a good neighbor? And so when we read the story already in our mind, we are assuming certain things, right? So we have in our mind, at least I do, a category of people who are the priests, a category of people who are the Levites and a category of people, myself included, who are the Samaritans?
Those who have made the good choices. We never really identify ourselves with the robbers, but they have a very critical role in the story. So when we read this story, it’s very easy to overly moralize it and start compartmentalizing and put different people into different categories. I had 11 hours one way and 11 hours back to think about this story, and different things come to you when you’re on your way to Arkansas to visit family and when you’re on your way back.
And one of the things that dawned on me about this story that I had never noticed was that they were all on the same road, and that had never dawn on me. I had never paid any mind to that. That every single person in this story found themselves on the same road. You see a lot of different people when you’re on a road for that long.
You see people who drive as fast as they can drive, and you see people who drive as slowly as they can drive, and your road rage starts to kick in. Some people who shall not be named, get behind the nearest 18 Wheeler and just go as fast as the 18 Wheeler will go. Other people who shall not be named yet in front of every 18 Wheeler, and try to blazed a trail for others to follow.
Others who shall not be named, keeps saying, “let me drive, dad, let me drive.”
One of the people who we saw, Lisa knows me well. Of course, she didn’t tell me this until we had gone about 30 minutes later. But at one point on our drive, she looked over to her left and there was an entire car of people, and every person in that car was dressed as a clown. And she didn’t tell me because she knows I’m terrified of clowns.
And I would have hidden under the blanket that all of this was going through my mind. There was a wreck. We had to detour. We had to go way off course. We found our way back to the road. We would see certain cars and you and we all do this. We pass a certain car, and then we get a little farther up the road.
And somehow that car is now in front of us, and we have no idea how they passed us, but we feel like we have to pass them again. So all of this came swirling into me as I just sat with this story and realized every single person in this story was on the same road. They were all traveling, going somewhere in their life, and we made a lot of assumptions, and we make a lot of assumptions about where the priest was going.
We don’t know where the priest was going. We make a lot of assumptions about where the Levite was going. We don’t know where the Levite was going, but it makes a good story and it teaches a lesson, which is the point of it. But there’s also a way that you can imagine it in a different way. And to see what does it mean?
How does it open up a different way to actually understand this, to envision and ask, what does it mean that we’re all on the same road, that we all find ourselves traveling on the same road? How do we make sense of that? How does that change the way that the characters in the story make sense to us? So you may not know this, but before Christianity was an institution of faith, it was known as the way.
There was a point in time where people weren’t known as Christians in that institutional framework that hadn’t really set in yet, that organized part of it that humans do so well so early, early on, people understood themselves as followers of Christ, and they would see themselves as people of the way. That makes a lot of sense to me, and it challenges me to ask myself, how do I get caught up in how do we get caught up in those institutional frameworks, all of that baggage that gets accrued on it?
And underneath all of that, right underneath all of that, when you track it back, is this image of being on the way and the way being the way that Jesus taught us to live underneath all of the doctrines and the baggage and all of that, that we impose that structural piece on there. But underneath all of that, there’s this call at a challenge to ask ourselves, what road are we on?
What path are we on? How are we all on this path? How are we sharing in this life? And what does it mean to follow and live the way that Jesus tells us to live? What do we need to say yes to? What do we need to say no to? All of that opens up, and it’s less easy to moralize it right?
It makes it a little more complex when we ask ourselves, and we start seeing people as the complex souls that they are to ask ourselves, why? Why are they doing that? Why are we doing that? How are we struggling? How are we all trying to make meaning? So where I was left after about 30 hours on the road, was this what makes sense to me with this story right now is not to see all of these characters as people who I can compartmentalize and categorize and put different people into, because I know there’s a whole lot of people, it’s very clear to me who they’re the bad ones, and I’m going to put them in that box. But what if what if we read this story where every person in this story is actually a piece of ourselves, and we can ask ourselves, at what point in my mind have I been the priest? At what point in my mind have I kept walking? At what point in my life have I been the Levite? I had somewhere else to go, didn’t see what I was supposed to see.
At what point in my life have I been the man in the side of the road at what point in my life have I been the robber a lot point in my life? Have I been the innkeeper who someone brings something to me and says, can you help me with this? And yes, at what point in our lives have we been the Samaritan who found ourselves in a certain space, able to offer help?
And by the grace of God, we did it? That, to me, opens up this story, and I can learn a lot more about myself and what motivates me and how I wrestle and how I strive to live a transformed life. Let us pray. Thee, God, we give you thanks for this day. We give you thanks for stories, these foundational texts that have held us and carried us.
And we give you thanks for new perspectives. For those moments when we find ourselves in a situation where a familiar story cracks open and we learn something more about ourselves and something more about you. Be with us in these days, these days of stress, of tension, of confusion. May we also see them as days of hope and promise, as potential.
Give us strength and courage always to listen to your spirit, to that voice within us and around us that calls us to live a transformed life and for the blessings of our lives. We give you thanks. It’s through Christ we pray. Amen.