The Bad Samaritan

Chapter ten, beginning at verse twenty-three.

Then turning to the disciples, Jesus said privately, Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.

For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said to him, What is written in the law?

How do you read it?

And he answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

And he said to him, You have answered correctly, do this and you will live.

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor?

Jesus replied, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.

Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion.

He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.

Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.

Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?

He said, The one who showed him mercy.

And Jesus said to him, You go and do likewise.

The gospel of the Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Sometimes a movie will cut from scene to scene in order to show you what all of the characters are up to individually by themselves before they come together and their worlds collide and the main drama of the film unfolds.

And this is the approach I would like to take as we begin to look at the parable Jesus told about the man who took a trip down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.

Consider what all of the characters, these various individuals and people, were up to before their worlds by chance collided.

We might begin with the robbers in their hideout.

And as we pan in on them, cut in to hear a vigorous debate going on about where they should set up shop for the day.

Their talk is of where they've seen cops recently on patrol, which roads have the richest and most lucrative travelers on them.

And eventually their plans coalesce.

That today the target is going to be that road from Jerusalem to Jericho, because they know a place where they can waylay a man, make quick work of him, and make an even quicker and unseen getaway.

That's what the robbers are up to, but but if we took a look at our victim on that morning, he was, of course, completely unaware that such a plot was being hatched.

For all our victim knew, it was just a typical Tuesday morning, and we might see him brushing his teeth and packing his bags and getting ready to take a trip that perhaps he had taken a thousand times already.

It was business as usual.

And he was blissfully unaware that in a few hours he would wind up lying half dead in a ditch.

But where do you suppose we would find the priest?

Fulfilling his temple duties, perhaps, cleaning up after the morning sacrifices?

I wonder if we might have followed him afterwards to his superior's office for a sit-down meeting, in which that priest would have said something like this You know, I've been putting in a lot of hours and I'm tired.

But every time I try to get some time off, somebody needs something from me.

It seems that I can't escape my duties.

Can you imagine that priest's superior saying to him, Work life balance is very important to us here at the temple.

We want our employees to have plenty of time off.

So you know what?

I give you permission to ignore anyone who asks you for something.

In fact, why don't you take a vacation?

Go down to that resort, that inn in Jericho, where you'll be far away from the temple where people won't be able to find you and ask you for things where you can just, you know, chill and enjoy some me time.

Or where would we have found the Levite?

Perhaps sitting down with his therapist and our camera coming on the scene just in time to hear that Levite pouring out his heart.

I mean, first of all, there's my family, my parents, my mom.

She expects me to call every day, and that's an hour of the day that I don't have.

And then I have this friend who's texting me and gets upset if I don't reply quickly enough.

My wife and my kids resent the hours I'm putting in, and it seems like everybody everywhere is asking me for something.

Nobody asks me what I want.

You know, of course, what the therapist will say in reply.

It's what therapists tell people.

It sounds to me like you need to set some healthy boundaries in your life.

You see, the problem you have is that you're a people pleaser, and that people pleasing is making it so that others can take advantage of you and impose upon your time.

So you've just got to be strong and tell them, I'm not gonna do that.

Look, I love you, but I don't have time to attend to that need right now.

Now, you know, of course, that what I just described is very much in 21st century terms, but surely you get the point.

I'm I'm trying to get us inside the heads of that priest and that Levite.

When those worlds and all of these individuals came together, when the robbers executed their plan and the traveler was beaten up, stripped, and left for dead in the ditch.

And when first the priest and then the Levite traveled down that road and there saw him bloodied and beaten in the ditch, surely they had to be thinking something along these lines.

I am just too important to be bothered by this man's need.

My time is just too valuable, so well, I'd like to help today.

I've got to keep going.

My schedule won't allow it.

It's time that I think about me and care for myself and get a break and relax and rest and get refreshed.

I mean, it's bad that it happened to him, but let's be honest, he probably had it coming.

And if I were to help him, for all I know, he'd probably go right back to a life of doing drugs, anyways.

Surely they were thinking thoughts like these.

And the challenging thing is that you and I think those thoughts as well.

You and I behave in this way too.

And this priest and this Levite, they are not arch villains.

In fact, if anyone in this parable deserved the title of being good, I think you could make a compelling case that both the priest and the Levite were the kind of good examples that we would set forth to our children.

I mean, we know this, we know they went to church, right?

They were probably the kind of men who held down a job, mowed their lawns, brushed their teeth, paid their bills on time, donated to charities.

They were dependable and reliable individuals.

And what they did on that road was prudent, reasonable, and safe.

The very conclusion that we have drawn in our own lives, and the very reason why we too can excuse ourselves from the needs of others.

So let's be clear that this priest and this Levite were operating according to every worldly standard of good behavior.

And yet somehow it's the Samaritan in this parable that has called good, as in the good Samaritan.

And how does that work?

I mean, if you think about what this Samaritan does, I'm not sure that we can call this good behavior.

First of all, he is willing to fling his money away without any concern about what's going to happen to it.

I mean, for all he knows, this guy's gonna wake up the next morning in that inn, discover he's got an open tab, and order a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of cheap vodka, the kind that comes in plastic, and empty it all the way to the bottom.

And then there's the difficulty he's gonna have in explaining to his wife why he's late in getting home and broke to boot.

Uh, you see, honey, I I met this guy in the road, and well, you're gonna see some charges on the credit card.

And then, of course, there is the way that he seems to let others ride roughshod all over him.

Take advantage of his soft, squishy heart, use him and his feeling that he always needs to jump in and help.

He's not a man who is very much concerned about his own needs at all.

So I don't think that we really should call him the good Samaritan.

I think we should perhaps call him the bad Samaritan.

The guy who wastes his money, is taken advantage of, wastes his time, and doesn't seem to have any sort of real drive or ambition in life that would show him that what he's doing is foolish.

I have even heard him called stupid, as in, and this is a quote, the stupid example of a Samaritan who spends his livelihood on a loser.

If this parable then is called the parable of the good Samaritan, there must be something going on here.

And you know this.

You know that the message of the gospel is not a message that says, hey, here's an example for you to follow, a good example.

So why don't you just do like this, try your best, do your hardest, put in the time, put in the effort, and then you'll be saved.

Everything will be good.

You know that that is not the message of the gospel.

Likewise, you know that the work of the church is to preach the reconciliation of all things in Christ, to bring people to the cross of Jesus, to bring them through death into everlasting life.

It's not merely to be a social agency that seeks to do good in a neighborhood.

And for those reasons, you must understand that this parable is more than just a moralizing scolding, a finger wagging at you saying, you better be more benevolent in seeing what you can do to help the homeless poor here in Madison.

Now you see, this parable lays hold of the radical gospel by flipping the script, by making the fool into the hero, and by taking the outcast and setting him as the one who truly understands and lives the kingdom of God.

It flips everything, changes it all, turns life inside out.

And this, in fact, is the secret to our bad Samaritan's quote unquote bad behavior.

You see, he's operating by different rules and different standards.

If you caught sight of him on the morning before he went down that road, what would you see?

You would see a man whose home was elsewhere, not where he presently was, where he was journeying, making his pilgrimage.

No, his home was far away.

And there in his home, you would see that this man had his true treasures stored up.

And you see what a difference that makes?

When your treasure is elsewhere, when you are away from home, when you know that that treasure is safe and cannot be touched, well then it's really not that big of a deal to empty out your purse and to let the dollars slip through your fingers, even if the hand that takes them might use them for ill ends.

And you would see a man who was already despised and scorned by those around him.

You see how that changes things, right?

It freed him from feeling the need, the pressure to conform to the world's ideas of a successful and good life.

And more than that, because he himself was so often unseen, it gave him eyes to see the suffering of neighbors in need.

Because he was journeying and he wasn't in so much of a rush to get ahead in life.

The Samaritan was freed to realize that life is mostly about building that web of relationships that God places us in.

And so he wasn't concerned if his journey took a little bit longer than he would have expected, if it meant that he could spend time with a fellow person.

The radical nature of the gospel frees us because it's not a call to just try harder and follow a good example.

It is a call to do nothing less than die.

Die to yourself and die to the world.

And having died to self and died to world, you are brought by Christ into such glorious freedom.

You see, so often we do all of these things in life because we're searching for some sort of self-staked out claim, some sort of self-created freedom or independence or autonomy.

The problem with that is that we can never really get hold of it.

It slips through our fingers and we wind up frustrated once more.

But the gospel delivers us through death into a life of freedom.

The freedom, for example, to live for others without fear or worry of losing yourself along the way because you have already been found by your Lord Jesus.

And so you are freed.

You're freed from obsessing over whether others are trying to take advantage of you or your people-pleasing nature is getting in the way.

You're freed of thinking of yourself at all because you've been set free by dying to self to live for another.

It is the freedom to not worry so much about where your money goes, and maybe even the freedom to stick a$20 bill out the window at an intersection without worry about what the hand that takes it will do with that cash.

It is the freedom to live like you've got nothing to lose because you don't.

Your treasures are stored up safe and secure in your true home, and you are just a pilgrim on a journey here, living according to different rules and standards, but not concerned if this world can't make sense of you.

Because you know where you're headed and you know where you belong, and you know the treasures that are yours in Christ, and you know why He's put you here.

You know what you are going for.

You're not rushing through life with a hurried pace and an averted gaze.

Your eyes are open to see the neighbors around you because you know that God put them there in front of you in the first place.

So you know how I was saying that in movies?

Sometimes they give you these scenes where you see the characters before the action.

Ponder this.

You are in just such a moment right now.

Jesus has drawn you here.

This is the preparatory moment.

This is the scene where drawn to Christ, you and your life, you're being recalibrated by the gospel.

You have come here so that once again you could return to your baptism where you died to self and rose to life in Christ.

And Jesus has brought you close so that you could hear his word and he could set down for you his good, though counter-cultural paths for you to follow and walk.

Soon you will be fed by his very body and blood, treasure of treasures, so rich that it fills you to overflowing, so that you know that your entire life can be poured out and you will have lost nothing at all because all things are yours in Jesus who gave his blood for you.

This is the preparatory moment.

Because when you leave here, you will be out on your own down to Jericho Road.

And sooner or later, by chance, there will be a neighbor in front of you in need.

And you know that it won't take long because the needs are many and great.

Maybe it will be the needy voice of your child, or the lonely voice of your spouse, or the hurting voice of a friend, or whatever voice it might be, but there will be a voice calling to you.

And you, in that moment, what will you do?

Well, you, by God's grace, you know just what you will do.

You will be bold enough to live at the quote unquote bad example of the Samaritan.

For you know that the gospel has made you a neighbor, a neighbor to whoever might be on the path in front of you.

Amen.