"The One Who Showed Mercy"

First Presbyterian Church
Peter S. Buehler
July 15, 2007
Luke 10:25-37

…and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.

So often, when we encounter Jesus in the Gospels, he is on the road, he is headed somewhere. We're struck by the fact that he is always ready to stop for people he meets, people who reach out to him, those others are willing to pass by -- nevertheless, he is moving forward. It strikes us over and over as a statement about the life of faith. Our faith is a journey; we ourselves are on a road, moving toward a destination. Along the way we allow ourselves to be stopped as well as to be moved. Today's Gospel encourages us to do that, we encounter the Good Samaritan doing that. It would seem that the story is solely about him, yet to better understand ourselves and the impediments to the journey of faith, we need to spend time with the others, to walk in their shoes.

The first traveler we come upon is the priest, he is the first to see the wounded man. If we give him a moment, we realize that he is not a one-dimensional person -- and not a hypocrite -- in fact, it's likely, as scholar Kenneth Bailey puts it, that "the priest (was) struggling with trying to be a good man." We assume he was doing the opposite, that he was avoiding being a good person, but in fact he was observing as best he could the religious law, the commandments of Moses and the teachings of generations of God's people. As he came upon the wounded man -- no doubt he saw him from a distance as he was approaching on his donkey -- he had no idea if he was a neighbor, by definition one of his own kin or nationality. After all, the wounded man was unconscious and couldn't identify himself; he was stripped bare, so there was no distinctive clothing to identify him. If the priest got close enough to assess the man's condition, technically closer than four cubits, he would be ritually defiled -- six feet was the defilement boundary. Getting close to a blood-stained, wounded man -- perhaps mortally wounded -- was extremely serious.

Judging by the fact that the priest was headed from Jerusalem to Jericho meant that he had just completed his two-weeks' service at the temple and was headed home to his family. Being ritually defiled meant that having sinned in this serious way, neglecting his responsibility to protect his holiness, he would have to turn around, return to the temple, and have his ritual purity restored, which was time consuming and costly. Specifically, he would have to find a red heifer, buy it, sacrifice it and reduce it to ashes -- a ritual that took a full week. This was only after being made to stand at the east gate of the temple with all the other unclean priests -- a humiliating thing, especially for a leader in the religious community like himself -- and enduring public shame for his dereliction of duty in contracting uncleanness.

What's more, if he had found out that the wounded man was dead, he would have been bound to rend his garments, to tear then in two, garments that for priests were costly. Not only would his wife have been irked, but faithful believers were taught never to destroy valuable things. According to the do's and don'ts of his time, the priest was entitled to pass by. He made a judgment call, one that few of his peers would have disagreed with.

Do we know this man? There are always good reasons not to get involved with people by the side of the road. Time, just needing to get where we're going, being in a rush, is one reason. Author Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, tells ofan experiment done at Princeton Seminary involving the Good Samaritan parable. Seminary students were asked to share about their calling to ministry and to speak about the parable. They were then told to go to another building for further instructions. On the way, however, an actor played the role of a victim crying out for mercy to see how many would stop by to help. In the end, what really determined whether they stopped or not was how much time they had. If they were told that they were already late, then only 10 percent helped.
If they were told they had a few minutes to spare, 63 percent helped. As Gladwell puts it, compassion was curtailed by the need to be on time.

I get anxious when I need to be somewhere and don't have a lot of time; it's as though I have blinders on, not only on my eyes but also on my heart. Would you be in the 10 percent group if you were late, or the 90 percent group?

What other things might curtail our involvement with someone in need? Fear? Not knowing what we might be getting into? The person could be seriously ill and infectious; that would mean putting at risk our family and others we're in contact with. And the medical expenses would be huge. What's more, if we stopped to help, we ourselves could be victimized; Good Samaritans get preyed upon all the time. Just the fear of the unknown is a deterrent to compassion.

But then there is the second man who comes along, the Levite, the assistant to the priest. A lower status person in the ancient world, he may have been on foot, but riding. He would have known there was a priest traveling ahead of him; the 17-mile road from Jerusalem to Jericho afforded long views ahead. No doubt he saw the priest cross over to the other side of the road and pass by the wounded man. But why didn't he stop? Maybe he was afraid; maybe the wounded man was a set-up. Being on foot he was an easy target himself for bandits.

But more likely he didn't stop because he saw that the priest didn't stop. Even though Levites were not subject to the same purity regulations as priests, nevertheless, who was he to go against a man so highly respected, one who knew what was right? And if he did help the man, and treat him as a neighbor -- which he wasn't convinced he was -- might that not cause embarrassment for the priest, his superior? There would be repercussions, not a good thing. Better to pass by, keep quiet, and not get involved.

Do we know this man? He's not a bad person at all; he lives a good and respectable life, he's a great neighbor. But if he doesn't see other people taking initiative, other people going out of their way, other people showing compassion to strangers, then who is he to say they're wrong? He doesn't see himself as better than other people; he is not morally superior. Better not to make anyone feel bad, better to keep the status quo. Anyway, true neighbors are one's family and friends, one's next-door neighbors, and the people at church. If any of them were by the side of the road and hurt, of course he'd stop and help.

Then along came the Samaritan. Samaritans also followed the teachings of Moses. His Torah was the same, his neighbor was defined as his fellow countryman and family member. Yet he had compassion and acted. He stopped at nothing in order to see the stranger back to health. Kenneth Bailey points out that he showed not only great kindness but great courage, that if the family of the wounded man happened to see them together they would assume, rationally or irrationally, that he was involved in the crime, and their anger would be unleashed on him, especially as he was a Samaritan and despised. He could have dropped the wounded man at the inn and taken off, avoiding a possible confrontation, instead he put himself in harm's way, even staying with the man overnight. He gave the innkeeper two Denarii, the equivalent of two months' room and board, and said he'd pick up any additional costs. He treated the wounded man like a brother. Why?

Maybe the question is When, when do we feel compassion? When do we show mercy? Perhaps especially in those instances when we ourselves have experienced the same plight, the same heartache, the same fear, the same uncertainty, the same desperation, the same wounds. True compassion makes us all the same; compassion converts us back to our humanity. Prejudices, long-held divisions, suspicions -- those things that commonly separate us become suddenly irrelevant. Ernest Gordon, former dean of the chapel at Princeton University, was a prisoner of war during World War II. He recalled a time when he and his companions were being transported by the Japanese across Thailand on a train. At one point they came across several truckloads of wounded Japanese soldiers. Without a word, most of Gordon's group went over to the wounded soldiers and offered them rations, water, and rags to bind their injuries.
When they were chastened by the ranking Allied officer in their midst, Gordon reminded him of the Good Samaritan, as well as Jesus' commandment to show love to your enemies (quoted in Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion, p. 175).

Really it's life that teaches us compassion, suffering teaches us compassion.
We learn from our own times of pain, and rather than merely getting over them, or putting them behind us, we remember them inasmuch as they open us to other people, building bridges of understanding, friendship, kindness, and love.

The Samaritan says hardly a word, his actions speak for themselves. He himself is quiet, yet his message is clear: the question is not Who is my neighbor? The question is not about others, who we are obliged to help and who is outside our neighborhood. The question is about us, how shall we show compassion and mercy.

Which brings us to the fourth, and perhaps the most overlooked, person in the story: not the priest, not the Levite, not even the Samaritan, but the lawyer, the teacher of the law, the one who asked Jesus, testing his knowledge of the law, What must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus turned his question around: You know what's written. What do you read in the law? The lawyer said the right answer. Quoting the scriptures he said, Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus commended him; do this and you will live.

The lawyer thought he already had. He knew it was all about definitions, who one's neighbor was, and since he loved God and loved the category of people the law said were his neighbors, a follow-up question to Jesus, he thought, would show that he was ready to inherit eternal life, God's blessing forever. And who is my neighbor? he asked.

He got an answer he didn't expect, and a story he wouldn't forget. He also received a new question: Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? Once again, the lawyer got it right. The one who showed him mercy, he said. In our Bibles, Jesus' final words to him are Go and do likewise. A better translation is Go and you, you do likewise. Because compassion is personal; it begins with us.

We wonder, did the lawyer realize whom he was speaking with, the one he was testing? The one he secretly hated but did not hate him back? The one who told a story about an outcast who loved his neighbor as himself? We wonder, did the lawyer recognize who was standing before him, perhaps an arm's-length away, telling him that eternal life, the promise of God's love and blessing, is not something a person earns, it's the other way around: if a person has God's life within him, within her -- the life of compassion and joy freely given by the one who suffers, dies, and lives -- that person has the power and the humility to be a true neighbor?

I believe that the church today is the lawyer after he heard the story of the Good Samaritan and answered the question Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? From our hearts, we say, The one who showed him mercy. Jesus says to us, Go and you, you do likewise.

Amen.