Who is my neighbour?

Colossians 1.1-14, Luke 10.25-37

The Good Samaritan Window
St Mary, West Malling

A lawyer – a religious expert – comes to Jesus, full of questions.  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  he begins. I’ll come back to that opening question later, so tuck it away in your mind somewhere. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

Jesus answers his question with another question “What does the law say?” “Love God and love your neighbour” says the lawyer. Perhaps he’s a little insulted – everyone knew that summary of the law – so he goes on quickly, trying to regain the upper hand in this discussion. “But who is my neighbour?” 

In response, Jesus tells a story, one of the most famous stories in the New Testament. It’s even featured in one of our stained-glass windows here at St Mary’s. It’s so familiar, though that the danger is it goes in one ear and out of the other. We know what it’s telling us, don’t we. Be kind and helpful, even to those who are different from you…  That’s obvious, isn’t it?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that message, of course, but I’m not so sure it’s the message of this particular story. To explain what I mean, let me ask a question. Whose perspective is this story told from? Through whose eyes are we seeing what happens? 

The answer is that it’s told from the perspective of the unfortunate man who has been beaten up and left for dead. We’re not told anything except what he could have seen and experienced and known as the events unfold. 

The story doesn’t tell us, for example, why the priest and the Levite pass him by without helping - because the injured man had no way of knowing that either as he lay there watching them disappear into the distance. 

Their behaviour is often explained by saying that they were going to the Temple to serve there. They were in a hurry to get to their important jobs or didn’t want to make themselves ritually unclean and unable to serve because they’d touched a dead body. Actually, that’s very unlikely, because the story says they were coming “down” the road, and that means they must have been travelling away from Jerusalem, not towards it, because Jerusalem is up in the hills, and Jericho below sea level. I’ve been on that road, and it’s one long descent.

But now I’m doing it, aren’t I, centring the priest and the Levite through my speculations. It is so easy to do. We want to give them a back story, to understand, maybe excuse them, perhaps because we know we pass people by on the other side too. But I am sure it’s deliberate that we aren’t told their back stories, because the injured man wouldn’t have known those back stories either. All he knows is that he sees someone coming who could help, who should help – not least because he is a fellow Jew - but doesn’t. And then he sees another man who could and should help, but he doesn’t either. 

But then, when all hope seems to be lost, along comes a Samaritan.  Again, we are tempted to put him centre-stage. We even call this story “The Good Samaritan” though Jesus doesn’t give it a title and neither does Luke. But actually, we’re told very little about him, and again, nothing the injured man couldn’t have known, simply the fact that he is from the despised nation of Samaria, whose people the Jews saw as heretics and enemies. We don’t know why he stops, any more than we knew why the priest and Levite don’t. We don’t know what his motivation is, because the injured man doesn’t know it either. All he knows is that this very unlikely person has given him the help he needed. 

Why does this story work so hard to keep bringing us back to the injured man, despite our desire to wander off with the other characters?  It’s because he is the one we are supposed to identify with. We might want to identify with the Samaritan. We might hope we’d act like him. We might fear that often we’re more like the priest or the Levite, and identify with them through guilt. But they aren’t supposed to be the centre of this story.  

Its central question isn’t “who do we help? It’s “who are we be willing to be helped by?” We’re meant to be asking ourselves what we would feel like if we were vulnerable, helpless, hurting.

Most people, in my experience, find it a great deal easier to give help than to receive it. It can feel humiliating to need help, especially if the helper is someone you don’t get on with. If we have to fall flat on our faces, I’m sure there are people we’d rather weren’t around to see it. But like this injured man, we may not have a choice. 

And that brings me back to that opening question, which I asked you to tuck away and remember. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the lawyer asked Jesus. “What must I do?” This is a man who is used to being in control, having power and using it – doing things. He’s used to providing for himself through his own efforts. Eternal life, to him, seems to be just another thing that he can and should get for himself, if he does the right things, prays the right prayers, performs the right rituals, lives in the right way. 

Jesus turns his thinking upside down, though, by inviting him to identify with the helpless, injured man who is really at the centre of this story. This could be you, he is saying. It could be any of us. Frailty, pain, loss are part of being human. Whether it’s a mugging on the Jericho Road or some other disaster that befalls us, none of us gets through life without needing help at some point ; it’s not our fault, nothing to reproach ourselves about. That can be hard to acknowledge, because we like to feel that we are in control, but it’s true. This lawyer strikes me as someone who might struggle accept help, and who might especially not want to accept help from Jesus. A carpenter from Nazareth? Who does he think he is to be claiming to speak with the authority of God? 

In John’s Gospel Jesus is actually accused of being a Samaritan – either that or that he is demon-possessed, the crowd says – the one is as bad as the other to them. Either way, it shows how hard it was for many people to accept that he might have something to say that was worth hearing, and it casts this story in an interesting light. 

This is not a story about how we should help others, though of course we should. It is, primarily, a story about our need of help, and the importance of being open to it, however it comes to us. That might be in the small acts of kindness which we are tempted to rebuff because we want to go it alone and are too proud to accept help. But ultimately, it is surely also a story about the grace of God, that unearned and unearnable, gift which “rescues us from the power of darkness” and brings us to a safe lodging where all our hurts can be healed. Amen