In today’s Gospel reading, in an interaction between Jesus and a lawyer, Jesus illustrates what loving our neighbor as ourselves means. Jesus tells the story of a man beaten half to death on a dangerous road leading from Jerusalem to Jericho. The first prospective rescuer is a priest. The second is a Levite. When they notice the stricken traveler, not only do they not help, they move to the other side of the road. Many different reasons have been given by scholars for why they pass by. Some suggest that Jesus was trying to show that they were more concerned with ritual cleanliness than helping the stranger. If the man were dead, they would be ritually unclean, and they would be unable to perform their temple duties. Others have suggested that because the road was dangerous, they were concerned that the same fate might befall them, and thus hurried on their way.
The surprising part of the parable is what happens next. Jesus audience would most likely be expecting an ordinary Israelite to pass next, and to help the man. Instead, Jesus has a Samaritan rescue the traveler. In Jesus time, in Israel, Samaritans were regarded with a good degree of contempt. Jesus breaks this stereotype by making the Samaritan the hero of the story. Even on a dangerous road, where it would have been faster to stay on his animal and pass by quickly, the Samaritan has compassion and places the wounded man onto his own animal to take him to safety.
By making the Samaritan the hero, someone his audience wouldn’t have liked, Jesus shows that everyone, even those we detest, are in truth, our neighbor. And that they fall under the command that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. And Jesus shows us the way to love others as well. In this parable, Jesus tells us that we are to love even those who we dislike.
We see in the compassion of an outcast the path that Christ intends for us to walk. In order to understand why, we need to see whose face is on the face of the man beaten and left for dead. It is our face, and the face of Jesus Christ. The victim is all of us, as we fall to the perils and dangers of a world broken by sin and death. The bruises suffered by the victim are our pain, our grief, our sin, and our death. The victim is all of us, and it is Jesus Christ.
I have said that the compassion of the Samaritan outcast is what saved the man on the roadside. It is the compassion of Jesus Christ that saves us. When we had cast ourselves away from the God who loves us, he let himself become an outcast to bring us back. His love was greeted with violence and retribution, because his message was one that this world does not understand. The way of this world is to make others the victim, so that we can feel above danger, in control, and safe from harm. We create outcasts to keep ourselves from being cast out. So it is that we were saved by Christ, stripped, beaten, and nailed to a cross; left to die. It is his love that saved us, and brings us new life. It is his love we are called to follow as we love our neighbor as ourselves, treating no one as outcast.
If loving our neighbor was primarily a matter of our feelings, this would be an almost impossible commandment. I don’t even “like” everyone. How can I come to love them? C.S. Lewis shed some light on the nature of loving one’s neighbor in Mere Christianity:
It would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are ‘cold’ by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin than having a bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse them from the duty of learning charity. The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you behave as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
For Jesus in the parable, love is an action, it is what one does. As Jesus followers, we are called to act in a loving manner towards others. This means finding concrete ways to help those who are in need. The manner in which we can show love for our neighbor can take many forms, from kind words, to volunteering our time, to feeding the hungry, or holding the hand of one in grief are just a few of the ways we can show the love of Christ. We are not necessarily called to feats of heroism. We are called to do only what we are able to do, but we are called to do no less.
In order to love others, we have to be aware of those around us. We have to look to the “roadside” and see others around us. And not just the roadside we want to look at. We have to look beyond those who we typically see as our neighbors. We must look beyond those we see as “our kind of people.” We must look for the abandoned, the ridiculed, and the friendless as well. Think of what people or groups of people you would most like to cast out. These are the people who Christ commands that we love as we love ourselves. When we begin to see others as beneath us, or as outcasts, we lose site of the fact that Christ was made an outcast in order to save us when we were outcasts, separated from God. We love because he has loved us.
The priest and the Levite had concerns, but in focusing on those, they focused on themselves and lost sight of the world around them. Jesus said that all the law springs from the commands to love God and to love our neighbor. In worrying about smaller points of the law, in giving in to fear that they themselves might fall victims to robbers, they missed the full intent and purpose of God’s law.
The parable of the Good Samaritan shows that we are to love even the outcast in the name of Christ. It calls for love in action, seeking to help others. It calls us to be alert to the needs of those who surround us. It calls us to love, because we have been loved. In the words of today’s collect, let us call upon God, “to grant that we may know and understand what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them” loving our neighbors as ourselves. Amen.
