I was on the look out this week for good “Good Samaritans” stories in the news and I found plenty: An immigrant rescues a family from a fire by climbing on the window of their apartment, a young man saves a baby from a flood, a mom finds a kitten under a truck on a parking lot, and even an older man ran towards a mom in a downpour to share his umbrella with her. But I guess we all know “Good Samaritans” stories, and we love them, don’t we? Strangers willing to take risks for other strangers, becoming instant heroes. The immigrant interviewed by a journalist said: There is something magnificent about being able to save someone’s life. Yes, we love these stories and I guess we may also secretly wonder if, was something similar to happen to us, meeting endangered people in a scary situation, would we rise to the occasion and have our fifteen minutes of fame, or would we run away, and feel bad about ourselves for the rest of our lives? Because we’ve also heard stories about that, haven’t we? Something bad happens and it’s that the shy, unassuming teenager who saves the day, when the athletic, muscular Dad freezes in fear or faints at the sight of blood. The fact is, not everybody is cut for this. I suspect I am not. I actually remember quite vividly how, as a seminarian, I started my mandatory chaplaincy internships in a hospital in Virgina. After a few busy days in the trauma ward, my supervisor found me hyperventilating in the Prayer room as I confessed being so overwhelmed, I started to seriously question my call. She was wise enough to tell me: Well, it’s possible you’re not going to be the new Florence Nightingale, but you know it’s okay because there are already plenty of nurses here, what you can do is to be a caring and loving Christian. Perfect, forgiving words that gave me the strength to push through two months of riding the elevator between the Emergency Room and the ICU.
So maybe it’s the reason I don’t think the story we have heard today is about being a rescuer. My supervisor was right: Not everybody is an urgent care physician or a fire fighter and thank God for them. I also experienced in my life that, unless indeed we find somebody half dead on the side of the road and yes we need to stop and call an ambulance, it’s just not a good idea in general to believe we can save people. If you’re like me, you may have spent some time in your lives trying to release relatives or friends from bad relationships, toxic work places, or alcoholism and such, only to realize that giving too much advice is annoying and counterproductive, and giving too much affirmation and understanding enables the bad behavior, and also drains the soul of the wannabe savior. At some point, the difficult truth that people can only rescue themselves from themselves dawns on us. They change on their own agenda, when they hit rock bottom or when they see the light, when they decide that enough is enough or that they deserve better, when they are willing to face the truth and to take responsibility for themselves. In this sense, we cannot always be, and probably shouldn’t strive to be, a knight in shinning armor. The problem for us Christians is that it’s generally how the parable of the Good Samaritan has been interpreted, we have come to believe God expects us to save the world, and we all fail at this. All this to say, I am thankful for this occasion to re-read the story today. How are we to understand it, and what are we to do about it? How are we to apply Jesus’s teaching not only in our heroic moments, that may never happen based on the lives we live or based on the persons we are, but how are we to live out this teaching on a daily basis, as “caring, loving Christians”, to quote my former supervisor?
1 – Before he starts telling his parable, we see that Jesus is a having a conversation with a Lawyer (not an attorney, but a specialist of God’s Law, a theologian if you prefer) and Jesus invents this story to make him understand the kind of love God expects us to show to our neighbor. This kind of love is qualified as compassion, tenderheartedness in opposition to coldness and indifference. The priest and the Levite (who can be described as an “assisting priest”) see the man who is wounded and then, Jesus says, they “pass by on the other side”. Not only the don’t become a neighbor to the man who is hurt, but they even pull away from him as far as they can. Now you’d think, who wouldn’t feel compassion for a man who has been robbed and beaten and left half dead in a ditch? Well, you may be surprised. It’s actually quite extraordinary, in a bad way, to hear so many people who, when they go through something really hard, like a miscarriage, a divorce, a cancer diagnostics, say that a lot of their close ones pulled away. For some, this silence or perceived indifference is actually more distressing than the bad situation in itself. We also know people who, when they hear about tragic news, quickly start blaming the victim.
Yet when Jesus commands us to love “as a neighbor”, he commands us to come closer to those in pain, he asks us that, before we even try to fix them, we allow ourselves to feel their suffering, the painfulness of the situation. Most people don’t start pulling away from difficult situations out of hardness of heart, they pull away because it’s too painful, or because it seems too unfair. The thing is when we do that, and the more we do that, it may protect us a little bit, but we actually take the risk to end up being cold and unloving people. Jesus says the Samaritan “was moved with pity”, a term we find several time to qualify what Jesus himself felt when encountering people in need. We know that Jesus also cried at Lazarus’ tomb. So to me the message of the Gospel is that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed by the pain of others, it does not mean we are weak. Quite the opposite, we can be strong when we are still willing to open our hearts in spite of the heart break that may result. In our world, the problem is that we often carry too much because we know everything that’s going on, everywhere, and all the time. Our nervous system cannot cope with so much information. But I am comforted to realize that Jesus is not asking his disciples to feel devastated by all the evil of the Roman Empire, rather Jesus asks us to let the suffering of the one we find on our way touch us. Just this one person. I think we can all do that.
2 – The second thing I notice and that is directly connected to the first, is that love is about taking action. Interesting right? Love is first about feeling, not butterflies but empathy, compassion, and then it’s about taking action or rather it is that compassion that, as our text literally puts it, move us into action. And it’s true that when you start feeling people’s pain, you have to do something about it. If you don’t feel their pain, you just move on. It’s also true that we’re often afraid we are going to be inefficient if we let ourselves be emotional, and a lot of medical and social workers may seem to have this robotic way of dealing with people, to protect themselves and to actually be able function and to do their job, but the truth is that you really help people when you show that you understand their pain, it’s sometimes as healing as the “technical part” of the job. You may have in the back of your mind this doctor who “saved your life” and she wasn’t the one with the more diplomas, she was the one who listened and was attentive to you.
In our story, this man who had been so ill treated by the robbers probably found much comfort, and maybe the will to live, knowing that someone saw him as a human being in need of care and dignity. I don’t know if oil and wine are really efficient to heal wounds, but I can feel the soothing effect it may have. When we are wounded, we need someone to acknowledge our wounds. We can go through much when we know we’re not alone. Jesus shows us that true religion isn’t about words, it’s about showing that we’re here, even if it feels like not much. And it’s not that hard. To send a card, to bring a casserole. Xavier and I have just been to a play, based on a true story, about a woman undergoing radiotherapy. Everyday her son drives her to the hospital for her treatment, a 45 minutes ride through the country, and each day she has one of her friends sitting next to her, riding along, talking about chicken salad recipes, the pursesthey sell at TJ Maxx, this cousin’s nephew who was in fact a half brother. Friends didn’t need to come to her rescue, they just needed to be there. In the same way, when Jesus tells this story I can hear him say: By all means, just show up.
3 – The last thing we need to notice is that the Samaritans were the Jews’ enemies, although they shared a common border. So when Jesus said one had to love their neighbor, he took the word “neighbor” very literally. The Samaritans lived in the northern territory. They didn’t like the Jews and the Jews didn’t like them either. To make a very long story short, they had been fighting each other since the Kingdom of Israel had been split between King Solomon’s heirs, almost a thousand years ago at Jesus’s time. But we find an odd story in the Second Book of Chronicles (Ch 28). At the time of King Ahaz, the Samaritans (referred to as Israel) attacked the Jews of Judah and took 200 000 people in captivity. That’s when the prophet Oded rose up and said: “You have slaughtered them in a rage that reaches to heaven… Now you intend to enslave them? But aren’t you also guilty before the LORD?” The story says that the Samaritans repented and clothed the prisoners, fed them, anointed them with oil, and finally placed on donkeys and returned them to Jericho. One can only observes that this story shares too many similarities with Jesus’s parable to be a coincidence. I think Jesus with this parable wanted to remind the people of the conversion of the Samaritans to show them that they could also turn away from hate and indifference, break the cycle of violence, respond to all kind of suffering and injustices with goodness, and defeat evil. It’s not so much about rescuing others from their pain, rather it’s about saving ourselves from our own violence. We all have this call, and, if we turn to God, this power to put goodness out there rather than robbery and murder. The story of the good Samaritan is a story of a Resurrection: Their own conversion.