Sermon on Luke 10:25-37

First Presbyterian Church of Metuchen 

July 10, 2022 

Written and delivered by: Rev. Ashley Bair 
 

Scripture Passage: Luke 10:25-37 
 

Prayer - God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be suitable to you. Stir within us, let us rest in the knowledge of your love for us and your call for our lives. Amen.  

Today we encounter the beloved parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable is one of the most popular parables, a favorite of adults and Sunday school classes alike. I probably could have come up here and said, Today is the story of the Good Samaritan, and most of you could have filled in the blanks of the story yourselves: A guy goes down the road, gets robbed and beaten, left on the side of the road, the people we think would help him don’t and the one we least expect to help him, does.  

It’s a story that has been shared to teach us to treat strangers with kindness and to be helpful when others need it, to help when we see someone left on the side of the road.  

We have taken the term “Good Samaritan” far beyond the story to mean a general do-good person. The term shows up in non-profits, hospitals, in global aid charities, and even in US law. All 50 states and the District of Columbia have “Good Samaritan” laws that protect, in legal terms, an individual who intervenes to assist another individual without prior notion or responsibility or promise of compensation, anyone who renders aid in an emergency to an injured or ill person.1  

Whether it's in the name of a law or an organization or in our own church storytelling, the Good Samaritan has come to mean whatever goodness people want it to mean. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Jewish scholar Dr. Amy-Jill Levine says, “The Bible must have multiple meanings and interpretations if it is going to speak to people in different places and times in history, “(Otherwise) there wouldn’t be any room for human creativity, or what I consider to be the spark of the divine…”2 

As we approach this passage today with that knowledge, I can’t help but recognize that many of the interpretations and celebrations of the Good Samaritan lie within the parable, the story that Jesus tells, and not with the context of why he tells that story. So today, I read what is written and wonder about the lawyer, the one who started this whole discourse by asking Jesus, “What do I do to inherit eternal life?” 

This lawyer was a religious lawyer, someone who knew the holy text, and even though this is a huge question, it is a question that Jewish leaders and keepers of the law knew the answer to. And this lawyer, as he displayed in his reply, also knew what the answer to the question was - and yet he still asked it of Jesus, in what I assume was a provoking way. A test, scripture says.  

What would lead the lawyer to do that? 

I ask this today of myself and of us, because perhaps, today, we need to locate ourselves in the lawyer. We seem to be in a time where the use of questions, like the lawyers, is ripe and frequent. And we, too, know enough about our call in this world as followers of Christ. We know what the call is: to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. And still, how often do we find ourselves in the position of resisting the call to act on that, to “do” as Jesus says, and delay our action by asking questions we really already know the answers to?  

We tend to ask defensive questions when we feel insecure and want to gauge what someone else knows in comparison to what we know, we tend to ask defensive questions when we want someone else to take responsibility for a choice, we know we should make, we tend to ask defensive questions when we are afraid of what lies before us in the answer, and what it might mean for us. 

We experience this both personally and corporately. 

Personally, I can remember times I leaned into questions as a defense mechanism, testing others' knowledge around me, simply because I didn’t trust myself and what I knew to be true. As a child this looked like me asking questions about tomorrow's plans and what was happening for Christmas to avoid bedtime. As an adult I do this when I am afraid of my own knowledge. I took a Spanish class a couple of years ago and asked every question I could to avoid answering the prompt in Spanish because I was afraid, I was wrong. I have also used questions to avoid apologizing for hurting someone else’s feelings. I have used questions to mask my embarrassment, to delay responding to a message I do not want to respond to.  

Questions are meant to be a movement of our curiosity and learning, but they can be a tool of destruction and avoidance of action.  

Corporately, as a church, we do this, too. Often when we engage in a moment of change or conflict. In the Presbyterian church we have grappled with the racism and sexism that really founded our church history here in the US. And on both a national and a local level it has taken a really long time for us to acknowledge it, take responsibility for it, and make any change or resolution that is due. Often, we do lean into more study or more questions, even when we know what the answer is, even when we know what to do, or people have told us what to do. We still fear the change and defend ourselves with questions, delaying and avoiding the action.  

Even when we know what the loving thing to do is, we may not trust it or ourselves to know how to do it, because it is different from what we’ve done before.  

In this scripture passage, Jesus says the kind of love and compassion, the kind of love and compassion that makes us a neighbor is the kind that is intuitive. The kind that sees someone hurt and without question, intervenes. This love happens when we get to a place beyond the fear, where we trust ourselves and what we know, where our questions are curiosities and not barriers to act on our call to love God and ourselves and our neighbors in the “doing.” “It’s that sort of compassion, that sort of love that doesn’t require thought,” Dr. Levine said. “It bypasses the intellect, and it gets us in the gut. That’s really what love of God and love of neighbor means. You don’t even have to think about it. Your body, your visceral system, forces you to act.” 

And, as Jesus shared with the lawyer, anything that inhibits us from acting on our call is intimately connected to our relationship with our neighbors. When we keep hiding behind questions because we don’t know if we are right, it hurts our neighbors who are looking for us to help. As the most famous Presbyterian neighbor, Fred Rogers, also offered us, we should “Always look for the helpers.” Who are the people who are stepping in intuitively?  

One model of this for me is the Nuns on the Bus. Nuns on the Bus are literally what their name suggests: a group of nuns who travel around the country on a bus advocating for social justice issues. They are Catholic women who value women’s leadership, accept and appreciate people from religious as well as secular backgrounds, welcome and affirm members of the LGBTQ+ community and engage in the ongoing work to become a multicultural anti-racist organization.3  

Led by Sister Simone Campbell, they place emphasis on the Church's long-standing commitment to social justice. In different years, the nuns have tackled different themes on their bus tours. In 2012, the nuns aimed to draw attention to issues affecting the poor and to protest planned cuts to food stamps and Medicaid. In 2013, the theme was immigration reform. I got to know them in 2012 when they drove through some southern states speaking out against the death penalty.  

During their tours, they received many criticisms from Catholics and non-Catholics. The same year I met some of them, they were criticized and under investigation by the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI (16)'s leadership for having "serious doctrinal problems" and "radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith." And yet, they stood strong in their resolve to help the people around them without question. They got on the bus and kept riding. God bless the nuns on the bus. I still think of them often. Because when I met them, they knew that even though some disagreed with them, they were still in a privileged position to offer a kind of help. They never sought to accomplish everything they could not, but to do something with what they had. Even with the risks it brought.  

They offered support for people on welfare without interrogating them about why they needed it, they offered support to people on death row without asking what got them there, they included people around them who were often oppressed by religious systems even though their own religious leaders chastised them for it. And in one of her blog posts, Sister Campbell said the transformation to action came in prayer groups where people listened to each other and offered to help their neighbors not worried about what was behind the who, but acting because of the need. 

As Dr. Levine wrote, “The lawyer asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus reframes the question, asking the right question is of utmost importance. The issue for Jesus is not the “who,” but the “what,” not the identity but the action. The divine is manifested only through our actions. And his rephrasing the issue is apt: true compassion can be felt in the gut…4  

Jesus responds to the lawyer’s observation not with a question and not with a parable, but with an imperative: “You know what to do, you know your call from God. “Go,” he says, “and you do likewise.” In this passage we are challenged and encouraged not only to be an active part of the earthly community and respond to the pain of the world, but also to dig within ourselves and find what inside us is inhibiting us from doing it. From taking that step of action. 

We do not know what the lawyer did following this parable. All we can know is what we, upon hearing this story, will do. What shall we do to inherit eternal life? Do this. Do this and you will live. 

Amen. 

Footnotes:

1. Good Samaritan Laws by Brian West and Matthew Varacallo. September 20, 2021.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542176/  

2. “Go and Do Likewise: Lessons from the Parable of the Good Samaritan” by Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, 2014.  

3. https://networklobby.org/about/  

4. “Go and Do Likewise: Lessons from the Parable of the Good Samaritan” by Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, 2014.